#29. SPRING LOSSES IN THE APIARY

Meager signs of spring:  glory-of-the-snow

In reviewing my post of just over a year ago (#27) I approached the vernal equinox 2013 with 5 hives.  However, March was, as I say in the post, the cruelest month.  By April I was down to just 2 colonies.  Included in those spring losses was my favorite Red Hive.
I went into this past winter with 5 hives.  Two were established hives that survived last winter (one 2 and the other 3 years old), one was a very small 'split' made from an extra queen cell I had kicking around from one of those 2 hives.  The other 2 colonies contained the new queens I had grafted in our new Long Island queen rearing program last spring (see post #28).  I didn't think the little split would make it through the winter and I was right.  Unfortunately, one of my grafted queen colonies has also died, and very recently.  Particularly sad since this was the first queen I ever grafted, and they were alive up until a couple of weeks ago.
This winter has been brutal.  We had an unusual amount of snow, and some really cold temperatures.  But from a bee's perspective those are not the biggest problems.  It is a winter warming trend followed by a cold snap that is often death to bees:  the warm weather stimulates the queen to lay, then the cold comes and the nurse bees die trying to keep the brood warm.  My grafted queen colony did exactly that.  As soon as we got a warm day or two, they were active and flying more than the other hives.  I worried that they were being imprudent, and my concerns were apparently well-founded.
It was looking like it would be a late spring this year - about a week ago the temperature dropped from upper 50's down to the low 20's.  There is little food around for the bees.  There are a few crocus around the neighborhood, and snow drops, but even my super-early glory-of-the-snow has only just begun to emerge.  So I decided to try something I haven't done before now, and that is to feed my bees pollen patties to supplement this early dearth of natural pollen.  A pollen patty is a thin slab of thick brown paste that comes sandwiched between wax paper.  You peel off the paper and press the patty down onto the frames and let the bees have at it.  I had already begun feeding the bees sugar syrup, but they are not taking a lot of it yet.
Today was warm enough - just barely - for me to crack open the hives and slide in the pollen patties.  I watched the bees that were flying to see if they were bringing pollen in themselves yet.  I did see some, but it was meager.  Nevertheless, bees bringing in pollen means that there is a laying queen in the hive, so I'm cautiously optimistic that my three remaining hives have now made it into a new year.
My friend Richard, whose 2 hives I had moved to my property in autumn 2012, neither of which survived that winter, got 2 replacement packages that I installed last May when I moved the hives back to his nearby summer house.  I didn't like one of the packages, and I had suspected that the queen died shortly after the installation.  Because his bees hadn't survive the move to my place the year before, I talked him into leaving the hives in place and that I'd go over and check them from time to time.  I've just come back from  Richard's, and whoa! does he have a huge colony in the one hive that survived.  Plenty of honey, possibly partly because they 'robbed out' the dead hive and sucked it dry of all its stores of honey.  And I just put in a slab of pollen.  I have to say, though, that they seem pretty mean, so we'll see how easy it is to manage them when I start working them later this spring.  This was a package that came from the deep South and may be Africanized.  If so, the hive will be a candidate for 're-queening' with one of our Long Island queens later in the season.  

#28. Breeding Long Island Honey Bees - a New Queen Rearing Program

Snow-covered hives, February 2014

Hard to believe, but the day before this photo was taken the bees were flying.  The air temperature got up to 46˚F, but with the sun hitting the boxes, the area around the hives may have climbed to around 50˚.  There was quite a lot of activity at 3 of my 5 colonies, and the other 2 were iffy.  Of course bees alive in February is absolutely no guarantee of survival, which can only be assessed after the Spring solstice at the earliest (see my last post).  Still, it was very exciting to see some hive activity.

I had a different sort of beekeeping season last year with almost no honey harvest and no swarming.  Most of my energy went into aggressive, early swarm prevention, by splitting colonies and moving  and rearranging hive bodies.  The goal was to prep my hives to accept new queens that I would be breeding with a group of Long Island beekeepers.  My beekeeping teacher Ray Lackey offered a challenge to members of the Long Island Beekeepers (LIBC) to start a group dedicated to breeding better bees on Long Island.  We had the first meeting at Ray's house in Bohemia and decided to start with 3 queens from which we would breed many - how many? - like possibly 300! - queens to share among local beekeepers.  The goal was to incorporate the ideal qualities of disease resistance, good temperament, climate hardiness, and good honey production in one or more strains of bees that will ultimately improve the DNA of all our Long Island bees.  'Imported bees', that is, those brought in from other regions, can carry diseases and pests that can infect our local populations.  The theory is that by developing desirable genetic traits in local bees through selection, we would not have to rely as much on 'foreign' bees and our own local stock would be improved.

Breeding queens from selected genetic material is geeky, exacting work.  It requires that we graft bee larvae - produced by the selected queens  - into specially manufactured queen cups, mounted on modified frames - in order to cajole armies of workers to transform these generic worker larvae into queens.  I love the science-project nature of this endeavor.  Each one of us who committed to the project had to dedicate one or two of our hives to exclusively producing bees that would raise the queens.  No excess honey production was possible, as we continually 'stole' the bee power it takes to make honey and channelled it into the nursery.

Keeping in mind that any fertilized bee egg can turn into a queen if the conditions are right - i.e. larger cell and an exclusive diet of royal jelly - all we had to do was to transfer young (1 - 3 day-old) larvae from the bottom of worker cells and graft them into the bottom of larger queen cups.  These cups, plastic bases, actually, are mounted on special frames and presented to a queenless colony.  If everything is right, the worker bees, sensing the lack of a queen and desperate to produce a new one, will adopt properly-grafted eggs, build the characteristic long, wax cells atop the plastic bases and raise queens.  

Queen-rearing frame with plastic queen cups in place.

Great in theory, but tough to do in practice.  First, the larvae are tiny and difficult to handle, using dental-type tools.  They need to be lifted out of the original cells - without squishing them, of course - and then deposited into the bottom of the new cups in the same position that they were in the original cells; if they are mal-positioned, the larval feeding tube will be obscured and the tiny creature will be unable to feed.   Then, they need to be transported as quickly as possible, preferably keeping them moist and warm, to the awaiting colony.  This was where I was at a distinct disadvantage compared to the others who participated in this experiment.  There was no way I could get the eggs grafted in Bohemia and get back to Montauk to install the frames in less than 2 hours.  Nevertheless, I had some success.  My first frame yielded one queen, my second attempt yielded nothing, my third try produced 2 queens.  The net result was that I sold one queen to a beekeeper in Sag Harbor, and the other 2 went to build up my own hives.  So right now, 2 of my 5 colonies are headed by Long Island-bred 'engineered' queens.  Some of the other queen rearers had phenomenal success.  I think a few folks harvested 20 queens per frame.  

Capped queen cell from my first attempt at queen rearing.  May 2013.

I'm anxious to try my hand again this year.  Whether I do or not depends on whether my bees survive the winter.  Fingers crossed.   

Ultimately, if the project is successful enough over time, we will look into applying for a grant to fund a scientific assessment of representative colonies throughout Long Island.