#25. SWARM SEASON

I'm not sure if it's because of something I did, or something I didn't do, or if it has nothing to do with me at all, but there is major swarm activity at the hives.  About a week ago, a huge swarm issued from the yellow hive.  If they had flown off, I was prepared to say "good riddance", as the Wicked Queen would most likely have flown off with the swarm.  Instead, the bees gathered all over the base of the hive stand.  Within an hour, they had re-entered the yellow hive.  This same routine was repeated several more times early that week, but Wednesday afternoon the swarm finally took to the air - and landed in the very same red cedar tree as did both swarms from this same hive last summer.  (See blog post #17  for those swarm details.)  I started to collect the swarm in a nuc box, but thought better of it after speaking to my friend Peter.


When he heard the size of the swarm - roughly  that of a large leg of Parma ham - he suggested I put them straight into a full-sized hive box filled with frames that included one frame of brood from the 'mother' yellow hive.  He said the frame of brood would help anchor them to their new hive.  I placed an empty super on top of theframes to act as a sort of funnel, and shook the bees in.  By that evening Team Orange, as they are now known, were on a make-shift hive stand just five feet from the original Team Yellow, and with a feeder filled with sugar syrup to give them a head start on  building wax comb on the new frames.  Whereas most animals convert excess sugar to fat, bees convert sugar into wax.  They actually 'sweat' flakes of wax which they then harvest from their own bodies, chew, and then sculpt into those perfect, intricate hexagonal cells.

That same afternoon, I don't know what made me go back and examine the yellow hive, but when I did, something caught my eye on the ground just in front of the hive.  It was a blonde queen bee, climbing over and around a small cluster of bees who appeared to be ignoring her.  She seemed all alone, without any entourage, and she was soliciting.  She must have been newly-hatched, and I knew there were probably more of her kind around since I saw a number of queen cells when I opened the yellow hive to steal a frame of brood to put in with the swarm.  Well, I had the nuc box, which was teeming with bees from the swarm - I hadn't yet shaken them into the swarm hive.  So I took another frame of brood from the yellow hive, placed it in the nuc, and dumped the baby queen in.  Now, some 5 days later, bees are still in the nuc box, and taking down lots of sugar syrup - they will have gone through 1/2 gallon by tomorrow.

Back to the yellow hive.  The one swarm wasn't enough.  On Saturday, Team Yellow threw another swarm.  And again on Sunday.  And they both landed five feet away, right on the face of the new orange swarm hive, and within an hour they had entered the hive.  There were so many bees in this new hive that they couldn't all fit, and many were 'bearding', i.e. clustering, on the face of the hive.  Yesterday evening I filled the second story box with frames and refilled the feeder.  The curious thing is three swarms - and presumably 3 queens - in the same hive.  Are they fighting to the death in there?  I wonder which queen will prevail, because a colony with more than one queen is a very rare thing indeed.  I can only imagine that the pheromones exuded by the original wicked Yellow Queen are so powerful that they drew her daughters to her, even after she'd left them and was in another hive.

After the swarm events yesterday I went to Noyac to visit Bea and her bees.  Our friend Pat, who has bees in Riverhead, was also there.  Bea wanted help examining her hive from last year, and they were such a delight to work with:  gentle and cooperative.  I was excited to find the large, dark queen, who is laying up a storm and seems to have perfect control over her orderly subjects.  It made me realize just how delinquent my vicious Team Yellow really is.  Well, I am determined to change all that.  I will give my hives about a month to settle in and raise the next generation of workers.  At that point I will reassess for temperament and any queen who is making my life miserable will not be long for this world.  

To recap, from my original 3 hives, red, yellow and purple, the red seems to be behaving and is storing honey in the super I added last month.  Team Yellow presumably has a new queen, who will need to go on a mating flight, come back and start laying.  After about a month, there should be enough new bees for me to determine hive temperament.  Team Purple also swarmed on Saturday, but they settled in an area of bramble, cat brier, and poison ivy that is completely inaccessible, so I kissed that swarm goodbye.  As a result, I will now have a new queen in the purple hive too, so will have to assess temperament there as well in a month or so.  Then there's Team Orange, the triple swarm hive.  If the original Yellow Queen is still reigning supreme, she will have to be replaced, as she produces 'super-hot' bees.  If one of her daughters has already done her in, it will be another wait-and-see scenario.  Then there's that little blonde queen in the nuc box.  In about a week, I can open up the box to see if she had a successful mating flight.  If so, I should find eggs.  If that's the case, I will see how those bees develop.  Who knows, she may wind up being the replacement for a nasty queen, if she plays her cards right.

So why did my hives swarm and could I have prevented it?  I reversed hive boxes and added honey supers (see last post), even though some said that would slow down the bees.  That certainly wasn't the case.  I did the reversal around 4/20.  Did I reverse too late?  Had they already made plans to swarm by then?  Certainly it's possible.  I also have another theory, and that is that instead of adding a honey super, I should have added a fourth hive body.  I think that with large colonies, 3 medium 8-frame supers just don't give the queen enough room to maneuver.  Bea has 4 hive bodies on her very successful Noyac colony.  So when I came home yesterday I added a fourth box to the red hive's brood area.  Now the colony is 5 boxes high - 4 brood boxes and a honey super.

After a totally engrossing but exhausting week, I took it slow this morning, working on this post and enjoying a perfect Bloody Mary - made with fresh grated horseradish right from the garden.  And forget the celery garnish - instead, I used a crisp, just-picked spear of my Purple Passion asparagus.  So sweet and crunchy!

CHEERS!

#24. BEEKEEPING ANNIVERSARY

It was a just year ago this week that I picked up my two nucleus colonies of bees, and by last summer the two colonies expanded to three when I collected a swarm that had issued from the yellow hive.  So far it's been a tremendous learning experience on many fronts.  I have always thought of myself as an amateur naturalist, having spent many childhood summers thigh-deep in ponds and marshes, emerging covered in leeches and not a bit bothered.  My passion for the natural world continues to this day, but now I feel as though a confluence of events - living in the wilds of Montauk + keeping bees - has given me a keen, new, heightened sense of the natural world around me.

This week I had two newcomers to my garden, and if I hadn't been obsessively watching the hives I would have missed them both.  One day last week, near dusk, while gazing out over the bee yard I caught the movement of what I thought was the neighbor's dog just on the other side of the apiary fence.  Striding purposefully, gracefully, I thought it was odd that he appeared to be heading into the woods.  Then I saw the white tip at the end of his bushy tail and realized that it was not a dog at all, but a red fox; a very large one at that, and he just glided past the back of the hives and headed into a thicket of bramble and wild rose.  The last time I saw a fox at the house was over a year ago, and he was padding across my neighbor's snow-covered lawn in the pink dawn light.  Truly a National Geographic moment.  I wonder if the one I saw the other day was a relative.

Then yesterday an unfamiliar bird flew across my line of sight.  It's funny how one immediately picks out a stranger among the usual backyard denizens.  This brown bird had a long tail and a white underside.  At first I thought it was a small hawk,  but I noticed that none of the other birds had left the feeders, so I knew that it couldn't be a predator.  It flew low across the yard and landed on the wood chips in front of one of the bee hives.  It picked up a bee off the ground - whether a dead one or not I couldn't tell - and, working its beak like a pair of chopsticks, it tossed and rearranged the insect for a long time before it finally ate it.  Obviously the bird was well aware of the stinger issue and it either needed to get the bee in exactly the right position to avoid the venom, or perhaps it chomped and clamped until the stinger was amputated from the bee?  I went to my bird books to identify the attractive creature.  Thrasher came to mind, but they do not have a pure creamy white underside.  I found that it was a black-billed cuckoo.  Imagine, a bird as familiar as the cuckoo, and yet I don't think I've ever seen one.  I probably shouldn't have been so excited.  I know cuckoos are naughty birds, sometimes laying their eggs in another bird's nest for others to rear.  And she was, after all, eating my bees.  But I think I have upwards of 120,000 bees at the moment, so I don't mind sharing a few with the cuckoo.  To my surprise and delight she was back in the apiary this morning.  And she kept me company while I gardened nearby, flying just a few feet away only when Daphne the Norfolk Terrier mindlessly approached and startled both the cuckoo and herself.  This cuckoo is a brazen creature and I hope she spends a lot of time in the garden.  I understand that the their favorite food is caterpillars.  Just the kind of connoisseur a gardener needs!

And speaking of gardening, my friend Andrew brought over all kinds of earthmoving and other heavy equipment and we cleared at least 2000 square feet of scrubland adjacent to the hives for a new vegetable plot.  A daunting project to be sure, but thrilling nonetheless.  V. cool learning how to use these machines.  What we did in a matter of days would have taken me a year to accomplish with hand tools alone.  Then we used the dump truck to bring in 6 tons each of compost and rotted manure and roto-tilled it all in.  

This will increase my vegetable gardening capacity by about fourfold.  We've already planted about 150 feet of mixed heirloom potatoes.  Squashes, peppers, tomatoes, eggplants and the like are still indoors in pots.  The old original 20' x 30' plot is about half-planted now with a variety of crops that don't take up a lot of room, like beets, carrots and radishes.  That's also where the purple asparagus lives, and I've been enjoying that treat for about the last two weeks.  I'll probably be able to pick stalks for another couple of weeks.  So yummy.  Another 12' x 12' plot is overflowing with garlic, onions and leeks, plus a couple of volunteer potatoes from last year that overwintered and are now over 12" high.  I think it's going to be a bumper year.

As for the bees, I finally did my first hive inspection about 10 days ago, and it was dramatic, to say the least.  The purple and red hives looked healthy, prosperous and unremarkable.  I saved the yellow hive for last, knowing that it might be a challenge.  Boy, was I ever right.  They were so savage that they stung my hands multiple times right through my heavy suede pruning gloves.  I actually had to retreat to the garage and put on a pair of nitrile gloves over the heavy work gloves.  That did the trick.  Once I felt secure that I wouldn't be stung, I could relax a bit and try to analyze the mayhem.  Strangely, the light smoking I employed seemed to rile rather than quiet them.  And once I finished taking the hive apart and rearranging things I hung back but stayed in the bee yard to see how long they would harass me.  The pounding of tiny bodies against my bee veil just didn't stop, so I moved to the picnic table about 60 feet away.  They followed me, but here's the amazing thing:  I had the hive smoker sitting on the table, still emitting wisps of smoke, and the bees seemed to be attacking not just me, but the metal smoker can.  Finally, one of them made a suicide assault and threw herself into the inferno, right down the molten mouth of the smoker.  I was astounded.  And even more so when a second bee pulled the same suicide stunt.

Given the extreme angst of the yellow hive, I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised when the occasional errant bee attacked Andrew and me as we worked in the garden the next day.  One of them pursued a neighbor as he walked his dog on the street later that afternoon.  My neighbor was cool about it, but I was not.  I can't have my bees going after people on the street, for heaven's sake.  Can it be that I am going to have to destroy Team Yellow?

I saw my beekeeping teacher Ray Lackey at a bee meeting last weekend and asked him about my experience.  He said that he has heard of some bees who, instead of being calmed by smoke are actually riled by it.  I asked him if he thought I should try spraying them with sugar water instead of smoke next time I inspect the hive.  He thinks that might work.  Of course he suggested going into the hive and finding the queen and 'replacing' (read 'murdering') her.  Team Yellow is so populous at this point that I don't have any confidence that I could find her.  I may be able to reduce the population, however, by manipulating the positions of the hives, tricking some of the members of Team Yellow to join the other colonies.  With a reduced population, it would be easier to find the yellow queen.

It took Team Yellow a good 3 or 4 days before they stopped chasing us around the yard.  Things are calm now, and I think I have several management strategies to try before I just throw a tarp over the hive and smother all its inhabitants.  Oh, that it has come to this.  I feel like I'm in a Shakespearean play.

I put honey supers on all three hives, hoping that with the early spring there might be an early honey flow.  We shall see.  Oh, and with the last of the honey, I'm planning to give mead making a try.  Perhaps I'll start a batch within the next week or two.              

#23. Bee Blogging Coast to Coast

Montauk Long Island hasn't always been my home.  Though my family and I have spent most summers here since the early 60's (and I've always known I would settle here eventually), up until a couple of years ago the S.F. Bay Area was my home of 30 years.

Of course, since moving to Montauk, I still keep in touch with a lot of my California crew.  My old friend Linda, who lives just south of San Francisco, in Belmont, CA, regularly sends me clippings from local papers about things she thinks I need to know.  Linda and I share a love of gardening, and she's been really interested in my beekeeping adventures.  Linda found out that a group of San Francisco Chronicle employees started keeping bees last year, around the same time I did.  They keep them on the rooftop of the Chronicle building, right in the middle of the City!  Through reading the Chronicle articles that have served as a diary of their project, I learned that Google, whose offices are located in Mountain View, CA (practically in my old backyard) also keeps bees.  They started their program about 2 years ago at the company's headquarters.  Eighty employees signed up to help tend the bees, and they extracted 400 lbs. of honey from 4 hives in their first year!  I freely admit to having felt somewhat envious.

Naturally, I started following the Google and Chronicle teams' exploits (for Google enter "hiveplex" in the search bar at http://googleblog.blogspot.com; the SF Chronicle is at http://www.sfgate.com/columns/honeybeechronicles/).  Recently, however, total admiration of what seemed to be runaway successes turned to consternation, empathy and fear.  It seems that one of the two hives on top of the Chronicle building has failed - the queen has absconded or died, leaving a few depressed, aimless bees to wander the empty combs; and 3 of the 4 Google hives have failed after the second year.

Interestingly, the one Google hive that survived had been prophylactically treated with antibiotics (to be used as a control group, I think).  Google wanted the hives to be managed in a natural way, without the aids (if 'aids' they are) of applied chemicals and medications.  The experienced beekeeper who is helping the Googlers has his own apiary, where he does feed antibiotics.  Google, understandably, didn't want to sign on to that protocol.  The suspected killer of the Google hives was varroa distructor.   My blog post #14 gives a full account of these horrible, death-dealing mites that have become the scourge of beekeepers globally.

This brings up the general question - perhaps the biggest one any beekeeper needs to face - about how to manage hives in the face of the myriad pests and pestilence that bees can fall prey to.  At the two extremes of the spectrum there is, at one end, those who believe that nothing should come in contact with the bees except hive parts: wood, wax, and maybe wire.  They do not believe in dietary supplements, plastic hive parts, feeding with sugar, or medications (whether preventative or curative), and many do not even wear protective clothing when they work the hives.  At the other end of the spectrum are beekeepers who throw everything available at their colonies - from artificial pollen patties, to prophylactic antibiotic treatments, to fumigants, to drugs illegally smuggled from foreign countries.

The impetus for the 'natural' end of the spectrum is often spiritually inspired, but it is probably just as often purely practical.  Master Beekeeper Ray Lackey, my instructor, has stopped all hive treatments in his 60 hives.  If I remember correctly, he said that the first year he lost 50% of his hives to pests and disease, but as survivor colonies replaced the lost populations his losses are now down to 5% annually.  That's pretty amazing anecdotal evidence suggesting that bees will breed for hardiness and hygiene (see my blog post #14 again) if given the chance.  In this scenario, by the way, bees are not brought in from other parts of the country - a universally common current practice - but are allowed to breed naturally from local stock.

The other end of the spectrum is exemplified by some commercial beekeepers who feel they cannot afford to lose hives, so they feed antibiotics to try to stem the tide of disease (much like in factory farming).  Of course then there is the problem of strains of pathogens and pests becoming resistant.  And when these chemically-dependant beekeepers are migratory (as many are), moving their apiaries all over the country, the diseases they may have been successful in suppressing in their own hives nevertheless spread to unprotected colonies in parts of the country where their bees visit, mate with, and infect, local populations.

Not surprisingly, hive management has been a huge topic of conversation among our South Fork Beekeeping group, a dedicated band of enthusiasts many of whom met through Ray Lackey's class.  I have developed my own strategy and we'll see how well it works:  I treated 2 of my 3 hives with an application of formic acid pads to kill varroa mites this past Autumn, after I'd taken the honey off the hives and egg-laying had slowed to a trickle.  (In nature, formic acid is a miticide produced by ants.  It's a powerfully pungent volatile compound - think smelling salts.)  To be honest, I didn't actually want to do even that.  But I panicked:  in September, at one of the last classes of our course at Cornell Cooperative Extension, samples were taken from the 6 hives in the Riverhead bee yard, and varroa infestation was diagnosed as moderate to severe.  (In one of the hives, the bees had been 'treated' with an 'natural' option of powdered sugar applications, which many say controls varroa.  The sample that later came from that hive showed just as large a varroa infestation as the 'un-sugared' hives.)

The bees at the Riverhead bee yard came from the same Southern suppliers as my own bees, so I had to conclude that my bees were similarly infested.  I made the decision that I was not willing to risk losing my colonies to varroa in my first season.  The prospect seemed just too demoralizing.  The one edgy decision I made was to not treat Team Purple - the swarm hive I collected in June (I describe the 'taking of the swarm' in post #17).  I would use them as a control group.  Also, because they were a younger (and therefore smaller) colony, I was afraid of what a significant population drop would due to them - the formic acid will result in some bee deaths along with killing varroa mites.

Had the formic acid treatment endangered the bees or the environment needlessly?  The jury is out.  What I can say is that the white plastic tray under the screened board at the bottom of my hive was loaded with varroa corpses at the end of the treatment period.  Would they have killed my colonies?  I don't know, but I now have the satisfaction of knowing that at least I disrupted the varroa breeding cycle for this coming season.  Next Autumn my plan is to treat all three hives with formic acid.  This will give me some indication of how heavily infested the untreated Team Purple was, compared to the 2 originally-treated hives.  If, after the next formic acid treatment, the varroa body count is down significantly compared to the past Autumn, I will consider stopping treatments in the coming years, or treating every 2 to 3 years.

Adopting a strategy for managing an apiary is a complicated issue, and one that I'm sure will take me years to develop.  I think the thing is to keep experimenting, learning, and doing research; have realistic goals and expectations; and use common sense.  I can say that I do not envision ever again 'importing' bees from another part of the country.  That just doesn't make sense to me.  I think I can breed all the bees I'll ever need right here in my own backyard.  Hell, I went from 2 hives to 3 in my first year, without even trying!

I will keep monitoring the Googlers and Chroniclers.  It's a great way to keep up on beekeeping news, including techniques, successes and failures, across the country.  And it's a terrific way to stay in touch with my beloved Bay Area.

Finally, speaking of California, when I drove across country a few years ago I brought with me some of my containerized fruit trees.  (I have to say that the ability to grow citrus in my own backyard was one of the thrills of living in CA that just never got old.)  One of the trees I relocated is a navel orange that is now bowing under the weight of ripe fruit. I keep it in my screened porch which is semi-winterized, meaning that the temp. never goes down much below 50°.  In the Spring I move it outside and then haul it back in when frost threatens, generally around late October/November.  It's kind of a pain, but well worth it when I have a sweet, juicy reward waiting for me at the end.

My other favorite containerized citrus is the variegated pink Eureka-type lemon.  The fruit (and leaves) are striped and the flesh is pink.  What a wonder!  I first saw it at COPA, the amazing - and tragically now-closed - food/wine/lifestyle complex in downtown Napa, California.  The outdoor edible gardens that were arranged in a tidy grid of raised beds was an inspiration the likes of which I had never before seen.  I just had to track down the pink lemon (which was actually pretty easy to do).  So far it hasn't fruited heavily, producing only a few ripe lemons a year.  But this year promises to be a bumper crop, I think.  And even if there were no fruit to be had, the heavenly scent of citrus blossoms wafting through the house in the depths of winter is intoxicating.

#22. Winter at the Beach

Winter is here - finally.  The water in the rain barrel now sports a 2-inch-thick block of crystal ice.  There have been a few days of blustery - even howling - winds.  Nothing like winters past so far, though, where the incessant winds and single-digit temps made one want to put a gun to one's head and pull the trigger - just to stop the shrieking winds.

For me, it's the ideal time to pick oysters.  I have a favorite spot, and if I go at low tide, especially after a windy day, I'm likely to find plenty of fat, winter oysters right along the tide line.  I brought 50 of the salty gems to a New Year's Eve party at my friends' Wendy and Bert, and they were very well received.  Which was nice, since it took me forever, plus a couple of minor stab wounds, to open them.  To accompany the oysters, I developed an Asian-inspired mignonette with fresh ginger, green onion, shallots, a little hot sauce, Ponzu sauce, mirin, and rice wine vinegar.  Oh, yes, and a few good turns of fresh-ground pink salt and cracked mixed pepper (pink, white, black).

Tiki enjoying End-of-the-World beach

Mussels bubbling away

Today was glorious.  Cold, but clear blue skies and just a slight breeze.  I took the three dogs for a long walk on their favorite beach - the one we call End-of-the-World, and was repaid for my efforts by finding a lobster buoy, torn from its pot and resting on the rocky beach, and it was encrusted with mussels.  I tore off a few handfuls and brought them home.  After a good scrubbing and refreshing them in seawater, into the pan they went, with some white wine, garlic, parsley, and butter.  Within minutes, from beach to bowl, I had a real treat.

Of course, now that winter is truly here, I'm worried about the bees.  We've had such mild weather that they've been out and about, doing a lot of flying around.  On New Year's Day, which I think was our last warm day, I put jars of heavy sugar syrup, mixed with some honey, on each hive.  They sucked them dry.  This, after lifting the back ends of each hive to see how heavy, i.e. how much food, they still have.  No surprise, Team Red was the heaviest.  Not coincidentally, they are the ones who have been flying the least, and so I suppose they've been conserving their stores. Both other hives felt pretty light to me.  And the big danger sign is supposed to be how close to the top of the hive the bees are clustering.  They travel upwards as they move through their food source during the winter.  Last time I went into the hives I had made sure that the bee clusters were at the bottom of the hives, and all the food was above them.  Bad news:  the bees are at the top of all three hives.

I'm not alone in my concern.  The emails have been flying on our bee class' Yahoo group.  Many new students are worried about the same thing.  And the emergency food of choice during the winter is rolled fondant icing.  Yes, the same stuff that often coats wedding cakes.  I tried making some the other day, but I didn't like the way it turned out, so I've ordered some on line.  It should be here in a day or two.  I'll wait for a relatively mild day, then open the hives and place a sheet of fondant on top of the hive bars and push it down a bit between the frames.  It will be easily accessible to the bees, and I hope it will do the trick.  It will be at least 2 months - and probably longer - before there is anything for them to forage.  Two months sounds like an eternity to me.