#27. DEATH OF A BEEHIVE. Team Yellow R.I.P.

Glory-of-the-snow 

In beekeeping, they say that March is the cruelest month.  And it has proven so for my bees.  When I left Long Island for a trip to California on February 28, all 6 of my hives were alive.  On the occasional warmish day, bees would be flying, and I'd crack open the outer cover to look for movement within, and found it every time.

Besides my 6 hives, I have a client's 2 hives in my yard for the winter.  Shortly after moving Richard's hives to my place around October, I cleaned up his old hive bodies, a task that included adding newly-painted bottom boards.  The bright white boards allowed me to observe that these visiting bees were suffering from nosema apis, or bee dysentery.  It is easily diagnosed by the small, yellow speckles of bee diarrhea that the animals drop outside the hive.   Needless to say, I was alarmed and concerned.  It is difficult to say whether the bees had been afflicted for awhile or whether I was just able to diagnose the problem because the new bottom boards offered such a good color contrast.  (It would not be unusual for bees to begin exhibiting symptoms of a heretofore dormant illness as a result of stress - in this case, the stress of moving them from one property to another.)

Nosema will not necessarily kill off a colony unless the bees are already compromised by other factors.  (And who can know if those factors existed in this case?)  Still, I didn't want to take any chances, so I treated both Richard's and my hives, in case the nosema also spread into my colonies.  A drug called Fumagillin B is the standard treatment, and is administered by mixing the powder with sugar syrup.  Of course the treatment is only effective if the bees actually take the food, which Richard's bees did not want to do.  My 6 hives, however, were gulping the stuff like mad.

I had applied two doses to my colonies by the time I went to CA.  Yesterday, a lovely warmish day, with plenty of bees flying, I decided to apply a further dose of the treated syrup.  When I lifted the cover on the yellow hive, however, all I saw were dead bees.  I lifted the inner cover and saw more dead bees, most still clustered in the center of the frames.  Same thing in the box underneath.

    
The outer frames, like the one pictured here, were full of syrup (seen glistening in the comb), some of it capped, and attendant bees looked alive and as though they were working the frames - until I got close.  They were dead for sure, but appeared frozen in mid-motion.  I found a few cells of capped brood with healthy-looking - but dead - larvae inside.

My first thought is that the bees were stimulated into too much activity by the availability of food, in the form of the medicated syrup, and were done in by a cold snap.  This will, apparently, often happen at this time of the year.  As the weather warms, bees become active, the queen starts laying, the bees 'break cluster', and then a cold snap can come along and kill a colony.  The safest thing for bees to do during the early Spring is to stay in a tight cluster to conserve warmth.  Bees are, as one blogger recently put it, tropical insects that have adapted to temperate climates by clustering and choosing protective habitats.  Colder climates can really prove challenging to them:  they are easily chilled - and killed - by the vagary of our Spring.

Today is brutally cold - in the 20's.  Yesterday it was close to 50 and I watched a bee from the white hive bring in the season's first pollen.  I've spied a few dandelions blooming and this is a local harbinger of the laying season for bees.  The queen will have started laying in earnest when the protein source - flower pollen - started to enter the hive.  I will be anguishing over the fate of my other hives until the weather becomes more predictable.  As for Richard's hives, I have seen no activity and naturally fear the worst.

Team Yellow, the 'bad boy' of my hives; the colony that chased me around my yard all last Spring; the 'hottest' of my hives, is no more.  Despite their vile disposition, I am sorry to have lost them, and just hope that no other colonies suffer their fate.

#26. A beekeeper's New Year's resolutions.

New Year has come and gone, and 2 of my resolutions for 2013 involve bees.  I resolve to be a better beekeeper, and to be a better bee blogger.  I can't believe I have not posted since last May!

One of my goals in writing this blog was to use it as a sort of diary so that I could track my successes and failures and learn from them.  I had hoped that this would be of some value not just to me, but to other beekeepers.  I also wanted to have enough material of general interest to keep non-beekeepers entertained.  Well, I've pretty well screwed up the diary aspect since there's no way I can succinctly reconstruct an entire summer and fall of my beekeeper's year.  What I can do, however, is summarize where I am now and try to reinstate my old blogging schedule.

Last Spring the bees hit me with challenge after challenge.  They swarmed, and swarmed again.  The property was lousy with swarms, stray queens, and chaos.  I tried to make sense of it, and I have some theories.  My feelings of inadequacy were mitigated by the fact that so many Long Island beekeepers were going through much of what I was.  The unusually warm winter last year certainly played a part, but I think there were some things I could have done to control the situation.  For starters, I didn't go into the hives early enough in the season to be able to affect swarm conditions.  I also didn't put supers on early enough to keep the bees sufficiently busy.  The upside is that I was able to capture enough swarms to double my beeyard.  The downside is that the bees were so busy colonizing that they produced far less honey than the previous year, when I only had 3 hives!  The original superstar of my yard, Team Red, remained the top honey producer, even though they threw at least one swarm last spring.  I think I extracted about 40 lbs. of honey from the red hive.  Team Purple, which started as a swarm in 2011 turned out to be a pretty nice hive, and they produced about 20+ lbs.  Team Yellow, the original bad-boy of my initial two hives, remained problematic, throwing swarm after swarm after swarm, and ultimately producing no honey.

2011's 3 hives are now joined by swarm hives Orange, Blue and White.  I now have 3 hive stands instead of two, with 2 hives on each raised wooden platform.  I am using a 4-brood-box model instead of the 3-box hives I had last year.  Having said that, only 3 hives - the original 3 - were populous enough to warrant the 4th brood box I'd planned on.  The other 3 hives have between 2 and 3 brood boxes apiece.  So far this winter, there are live bees in all 6 hives.  This is more of a coup than I had realized:  at a bee meeting last week I found that most of the beekeepers in attendance had lost colonies already this winter.  

Some of the season's highlights are worth noting:

• I had the pleasure of having a queen bee hatch in my hand - by pure happenstance, I must add:  I was inspecting a hive and decided to remove a capped queen cell to see if I could reduce swarming.  I removed the wax cell and placed it in the palm of my hand, when the top popped open and a beautiful queen emerged.  I set her up with a few subjects, along with a frame each of honey and capped brood, and she thrived.   
• My life was changed for the better last summer when I broke down and bought an actual bee suit.  Until then I had been using a veil plus an army surplus flight suit one-sy.  Now I know that some of my beekeeping brethren use no protective clothing whatsoever.  My bees, however, are just not that warm and fuzzy.  And now that I don't have to worry about getting stung, my concentration can be directed 100% towards the bees instead of being distracted by wondering when - and where - I will be stung.
• I have taken on a beekeeping client.  It turns out that a summer resident who lives less than a mile from me has 2 hives.  He loves his bees but cannot devote any time to them since he lives in Manhattan and his business demands are such that he can never really know when he will be here - or for how long.  In November my buddy Woody and I moved Richard's hives to my yard for the winter.  So for now, at least, I'm up to 8 hives.  I expect that I'll be moving those colonies back to Richard's sometime this Spring.  Working with Richard's bees has broadened my experience immensely:  each of his colonies is in 10-frame double-deep brood boxes, compared to my puny 8-frame brood boxes .  Richard's are very well established, muscular hives, and each takes 2 honey supers, which I had to extract more than once during the season.  I think I extracted a total of about 120 lbs. of honey for him this past year, and I still had enough honey to leave both hives with a full super of honey for the winter.  The experience with Richard's bee has made me realize the importance of drawn comb; the bees can spend all their time making and storing honey instead of spending a lot of resources making wax and building comb.  My young bee colonies are all still in the build-up stage, with me constantly adding new, undrawn frames for them to work.  Next season I will help them out by using wax foundation on wooden frames in the honey supers.  The bees really do not seem to like drawing out the plastic Pierco frames that I have been using exclusively up until now.
• I made a few entries at the Long Island Fair again this year, and did much better than last year.  My honey - in 2 classes - won first prizes.  And I entered a block of beeswax this year as well, and also took a first.  All of my vegetable entries took prizes, a few of them firsts.
• I also participated in the LIBC (Long Island Beekeeping Club)annual honey judging contest, and took a couple of ribbons, although a first place escaped me.  I did, though, take first prize for the second year for my 'gadget entry', this year's was a devise to capture swarms that I cobbled together from a one-gallon plastic pretzel jar mounted on a piece of PVC pipe.  It worked great for me during the last swarm season.

One of the highlights so far this winter has been using hive products to make soap.  My friend and fellow beekeeper Tricia hosted a workshop at her home and a group of us made several kinds of soap using natural ingredients.  My favorite was the goat milk soap that incorporated honey and beeswax.  It's creamy, dreamy stuff.

The new and improved, enormous vegetable garden did not disappoint.  It is definitely a work in progress, but the freezer is packed with delicacies, like pestos, soups, and tomato sauce.  And I'm still working my way through the garlic and potatoes.