MamaStories

This video poem was created on 25 August 2011 and sent off – digitally, exceptionally – on the same day. Also exceptionally, the recipient sent me his poem first. That was a wonderful surprise! Thank you!

I also got back several beautiful, original poems from both the first and the second addressees. The first actually sent me three. That way we’ll make it to 350 much faster.

I was battening down the hatches when I saw the bees streaming in and ran inside to get the camera. What a treat to have witnessed that.

On 15 July the Apiguard treatment was finished (the bees cleaned out the tray) and my friend, neighbor and fellow Transitioner Andrea helped me put the first honey super onto the hive.

These are the bees in the top box: great numbers and all looking healthy. Frames and frames heavy with honey. Eggs too!

Andrea felt very brave, but once she saw how docile the bees are she breathed more easily. It was very helpful having help on this one. I had treated the honey super frames – not drawn out, so no comb on it yet – with Honey Bee Healthy, a mix of volatile oils that they like, diluted in sugar water. This is to entice to come into “the upstairs food pantry”. This meant, however, that I couldn’t bring that box along and leave it there in the open while I did the inspection and scraped away the excess comb. It would have attracted the bees, my own and others, and other unwanted insects. So once I was ready Andrea went to get it from our screened porch for me.  Thank you!

When we were done and came back to the house Andrea, who was wearing the vest with attached veil, heard something buzzing inside her suit! It certainly sounded like a bee. I quickly helped her remove the vest.  I have had that “bee in my clothes”  experience: it’s quite enervating! But she was very calm. It turned out to be a giant drone – drones don’t sting. Strange, how it got there, that vest seems hermetically sealed…

It was certainly an unforgettable first bee experience for Andrea!

Harvest honey comb

Two weeks ago I put a tray of Apiguard in the hive. The tray was close to empty today, so I’m leaving it in for a couple more days. The usual Spring treatment is two trays for a maximum of 6 weeks (altogether). But I was late starting the treatment as my bees took a long time building up their population. I don’t want to do the second treatment because it’s time for the honey supers to go on, and it’s not desirable to have all that thymol in the honey.

The colony has obviously grown and I’m happy with their size now. They’ve been building all these comb “towers” to fill up the extra space created by the rim board. I took all those off with my hive tool, because once I put on the supers the rim board needs to go. What a wonderful haul of clean wax. The bees were very mellow, didn’t mind me scraping off all that hard work or even shaking them off before I threw the comb into a jar.

I’ll go back in a few days to take out the Apiguard and put on the first honey super, with the queen excluder in between (don’t want bee grubs int he honey either).

Amie and the comfrey

Today Amie helped me harvest the comfrey and feverfew. She helped me string up those big, fat comfrey leaves. “It’s like stringing fish!” she said. I asked her where she got that idea? She couldn’t remember, but she was right. She loved the smell of the feverfew flowers – they look and smell like chamomile, but the plants are not related. I was amazed at her patience, taking them from me, standing around in the hot sun.

As we were harvesting, she suddenly said how she loves it that I am a beekeeper, and that she asked her friends at school and it turned out that no one else’s mom was a beekeeper. (I did a little beekeeper talk for her class recently).  We also talked about how not many people make medicine out of plants, and about the difference between pharmaceuticals and plant medicine (and that each has its place). And about the generosity of the plants, how important it is to take from them only what we need, only what is ready, and leave most of the plant to to thrive.  ”Like when we rob from the bees,” she says.

Yes, dear child. How I love doing this with you.

Amie garbling dried mint

I didn’t see any mites during my last inspection, not even on the grubs that were accidentally exposed.  Still, the Apiguard treatment will arrive in a few days and before I apply it I’d like to do a mite count. Mite counts with sticky boards are not easy to interpret. Thresholds vary according to the amount of bees in the hive  (and I’m not good yet at estimating), the time of year, and the hygienic (grooming) behavior of the bees. But I’m thinking I could count, then treat, and then count again. That should give me some idea.

This time I made a “sticky board” myself, on the cheap. I found an old poster  made of strong, shiny paper. I fitted it to the board, then marked and numbered areas on it, which makes the  counting easier.

Then I swallowed twice  and entered a CVS (I can no longer enter places like CVS without shivering – and not just because in Summer their themostat is set at 55F) to buy some petroleum jelly (I know, that’s not quite post-carbon beekeeping). Slathering that stuff on is kind of fun.

I slid the board under the hive , which has a permanently open (screened) bottom, on Saturday at 2:15pm. I’ll have to pull it around the same time on Tuesday.

Karen, a friend I met through the Training for Transition, came for a visit and we talked homesteading, gardening and… bees. This was her first time at a hive opening.

The bees are doing better, but their population growth is still not what I would expect. There were grubs in there, as you can see in the photos, and many young worker bees (some still very pale), so there’s a mated queen in there laying fertilized eggs. Maybe she just needs a little more time to ramp it up. If not, if she’s weak, the bees will replace her.

Here’s me peering into the top box.  You don’t often see me doing this because there’s usually no one there to take a picture – thank you, Karen! I definitely prefer the hat and veil over the vest in Summer. Karen wore the vest and it’s like a sauna, but for her first time she felt safer in it.

The bees filled up about half of the top box with honey. When I lifted it, after wedging it off the bottom box,  it was pretty heavy.  I’m happy my honey supers are mediums, not deeps. The bees in the following photo are either disgorging fresh honey into the cells, or capping the filled cells. The white stuff is all honey cappings. It’s the newest and thus purest (and thus whitest) wax in the hive.

When I took off the top box I ripped off comb the bees had in built between the frames and exposed some grubs. The bees surrounded these grubs, trying  to do I don’t know what. The grubs are doomed, of course, so suddenly exposed to the light and heat. I’m very slow and probably overly cautious when inspecting the hive, but this still happens. Good news: no mites on the grubs!

Finding grubs at that spot means of course that the bees bringing the broodnest up into the second box instead of expanding it horizontally. Well, they know what they’re doing!

The comb in the next picture is browner: it’s brood comb. No brood in it yet. These bees were cleaning it out.

I had gone in with the intent of seeing how they’re doing. I ordered the Apiguard mite treatment – it will arrive early next week. By then I should have done a mite fall count. The Apiguard is natural but it might still interrupt the brood cycle, so I should only do it if necessary. Also, it will postpone the supering for a couple of weeks, because you don’t want the thymol essential oil that this treatment is based on getting into the harvest honey.

I got an email Sunday morning from a fellow beekeeper, letting me know his colony swarmed and would I like the swarm? Unfortunately I read the email too late, and by the time I called him someone else was already collecting the swarm. Bummer! But wow, was there ever excitement!

In any case, I called the collector to see if he wanter to sell it. A swarm like that is worth at least $50 – especially in a time when no more  packages are available. Again my call came too late: he had already installed it in his hive. But he did advise me to look again, and if it was clear there was a laying worker, I should still try to get a new queen  ($15) and see what happens.

So I went in again. Again I spotted the cells with several eggs, but also more capped brood, and not all of it drone brood! The cells for drones need to be larger, so the caps will bulge out more than the do for workers. The bees would not mistake a fertilized or female (worker) egg for a drone egg, so I was fairly certain there were fertilized eggs in there. And to confirm my hopeful suspicion, who comes crawling around the corner of the frame?

The old queen. The blue dot on her back is entirely faded, but I spotted her by her different color (she is browner, less hairy, shinier) and longer abdomen.

So… maybe there’s something wrong with her, but in that case the bees will take care of it. They’ll turn a female egg into a queen. I’ll keep an eye on queen cells, the old queen and her laying pattern. But for now… a big sigh of relief.

And in the meantime, more and more of our food is coming straight from the garden. Here are some raw materials: leeks and kale, and mache and claytonia for the salad.

I hope I’m wrong. I don’t think I am, but one can always hope. Really.

Yesterday I did a long hive inspection. It was warm and there was no wind, the bees were flying, and it was time to find out what’s happening inside. I did short inspections before, but this time I pulled out frames, broke the boxes apart (that took some wrenching: the bees had glued them together), and went all the way down to  the bottom board.

The idea was to clear the screened bottom board of dead bees so I can do a mite fall test and then to treat appropriately. This is what I found:

A carpet of dead bees, thousands of them, at certain points piled half an inch thick.

The bottom box was mostly empty of honey, pollen or brood, so I decided to take it away. There was one frame with some pollen and honey, and I exchanged that one for an empty frame in the top box.

The top box had very few bees in it, I’d guess less than 10,000. There was one frame with some eggs, pupae and capped brood, but in some cells I spotted two eggs. That is usually a sign of a laying worker – a bee who has not mated and who therefore lays only unfertilized eggs, which will turn into drones, which are pretty useless to a colony. I could not spot my blue-dotted queen, or any queen, for that matter.

And so my bees may be dead, only they don’t know it yet.

What to do? I could hope that it’s a juvenile queen, who hasn’t got the hang of it yet. Or I could ordering a new package of bees, which will prove difficult, as most suppliers were sold out months ago. I could order just a new queen, but this little colony of mine may be too small and weakened by mites to be able to support her efforts.

I think I’ll wait and see.

It’s ironic that this is happening, because in the meantime Transition Wayland (I know, I owe you a long update about that) has started a BEEwareness project. This project will

1. educate about the necessity and predicament of the bees and other pollinators by movie showing and expert speakers
2. offer a workshop on building a Top Bar Hive and the basics of beekeeping
3. offer hive openings and tours of apiaries in Wayland
4. put together a Wayland beekeeping support group
5. which group will also be able to purchase supplies together

Ambitious, no? We’ll start small, and we’ll start with my hive, which…

Well, hopefully it’s a juvenile queen.

Honestly, I have no idea. But I do have a bad feeling about it. Grasping the small window between the bees flying (i.e., warm enough) and the imminent rain, I opened the hive to check on them. It seemed to me that there are even less now than last time I looked.

The bees were docile and didn’t seem put out by me opening the hive, so I went ahead and accomplished several things.

First of all, I could see they hadn’t taken much of the sugar fondant I put in last time, and almost none of the pollen patty. I pulled out some of the outer frames, those furthest away from the cluster, and just by their heft immediately know they are still loaded with honey. It has obviously been too cold for the bees to get to it. I exchanged these full frames for the ones right next to the cluster.

As I was pulling the empty frames next to the cluster I took a closer look at the dead bees. The sight is a sad one.

All these bees are dead. Bees head first in cells is a sign of starvation. I used my bee brush to remove these corpses.

The frames switched, I turned my attention to the living bees. We have just bought a new camera and the macro mode is amazing, and revealing.

Can you spot it? Let me blow it up for you:

It’s a mite!  The puplish-pinkish bump on the bee in the lower part of the image is varroa destructor. And it wasn’t just the one. In another image,

I can spot a bee grooming another bee, trying to get rid of a mite on her back:

Ugh, just looking at these images make me itch all over!

Mites survive on the bees over the winter,  but they can’t reproduce (they reproduce by laying eggs on brood, and during Winter there is no brood rearing).

So now, on top of the bitter cold, starvation, and dwindling numbers, my colony has to deal with varroa. I doubt I can treat them at this point. I would use Apiguard, like I did last year when I first installed them,  but I’ll have to wait until the outside temperatures are above 59 F, that is, until the bees are active again, breaking cluster and moving the fumigant all over the hive so it can get to most of the mites.  But is the colony strong enough? Might it might interfere too much with the queen’s egg laying (assuming the queen is still alive and well)?

Brood rearing should have begun by now. In a strong hive well-stocked with honey and pollen, the Queen should start laying by the end of December/beginning of January, even in the Northern States. The determinant is not the temperatures but the length of day (source). It was too cold, of course, to pull the frames with the cluster: it would have chilled and killed any brood if it was there.

So I don’t know what to think of this surviving population. I’ve scoured the internet looking for some idea of how many bees make it a viable cluster.

The last thing I did was  replace our improvised rim board (made out of an old landing board) with a new and proper rim board. The hive looks like a usual hive again.

Incredibly, it almost hit 60 today. After lunch I went out to the hive – appropriately dressed, this time – to check the bees’ stored honey and the pollen patty and sugar fondant I put in last time. There was no wind and the sun appeared sporadically. I took 10 minutes – my feet were frozen by the end of it, having sunk into over a foot of melting snow. I know, those boots, those boots…

I got a better chance at taking a closer look and pictures as they were less aggressive than last time. There was that nice sized cluster of active, healthy-looking bees.

I didn’t want to disturb it, it still being a bit chilly for them, so forget checking on the queen.  They were in the East corner of the hive.

Off to the South side there were many dead bees – all the bees in the above picture are dead, except for the ones on top of the bars. They were the edge of the cluster and possibly froze.

There are two frames full of honey off to the side, which some bees were harvesting. I wanted to move these closer to the cluster and get a better look at those dead bees, but a slight wind started up and by the agitated sound of the colony, I could tell that it was time to close up the hive.  They have access to a large block of fondant, so they should be fine for a week at least.

I’ts tough to estimate how many bees are alive in there without pulling the frames and seeing how deep the cluster extends. But certainly not the 50.000 or so that entered the Winter. It seems like such a waste to lose so many. I am very curious to see how they will build up over the Spring. They must have begun the brood rearing, but in the pictures I can’t spot any very young bees, yet.