Emergency Hive

So I put one of my super-dooper flowerpot bait hive/swarm traps out last spring and promptly forgot about it. (Which is so like me!) When I finally remembered to check it in mid-summer, the hive was full of bees and thriving. It weighed about 20 pounds, hanging on a branch near my tiny apiary. I thought that maybe I ought to leave well enough alone rather than attempt to disassemble the bait hive and put the bees in a regular TBH or a Warré hive. I mean what would you do? Try to move 30 pounds of honeycombs and a buncha bees out of a couple of screwed-together paper maché flowerpots and risk damaging the whole colony?

Anyway, things were going pretty good until one morning in November when the thin rope holding the bait hive broke out of the top of it due to how heavy it had gotten, plus a little rain. The whole shebang dropped about six feet to the ground, but remained upright. Now the bees didn't seem to mind this at all, and they seemed to like the larger hole in the top of the flowerpot, it was a nicer entrance. But the weather here in Oregon was getting cold and rainy, puddles were forming on the ground around the crashed hive. I was in the middle of several other dire emergencies, but I knew I had better find them some better place to live -- immediately. I had no empty wooden equipment for them, and no time to use the table saw to build another Warré. I couldn't get to Glorybee to even buy a Lang box or two.

The next day I headed for my local big-box hardware store and got a large plastic bin big enough to cover the bait hive so that it would be protected from the weather until I could do justice to the colony with new digs. Well, in the middle of trying to fit the bin over the top of the hive, I had this flash of inspiration: If I just laid the bait hive on its side inside the bin and put the cover on it would be a very secure box for them to live in. (I remembered that beek wisdom: "It doesn't matter what kind of box you choose, it's what you put inside it.") Wallah, I had an instant bee hive!

It's been about 2 1/2 months now, the bees seem to like living in their bait hive/swarm trap on its side, The plastic bin is waterproof, snowproof, and protects them; and they are wintering over very healthily. The bees have a nice little entrance at the top of the bin where I made a nice big hole in the depression for the handle of the bin. (It's like the entrance is all roofed-over and has a little interior walkway for takeoffs.) I cut drain holes and ventilation holes in the bottom of the bin which seem to be working out very well. Sure, there's not a top bar or a frame/foundation or anything at all inside but the two flowerpots and a mess of natural-born combs. They are starting to build new combs outside between the flowerpots and the inside of the bin walls. They seem not to mind the haphazard nature of the whole set up. In a few weeks as it turns from winter to spring, I'll ask them if they want a regular hive. I can fix them a Biodynamic Lang or a new Warré by then. Maybe I'll rig it up on top of the plastic bin? Maybe I'll do some kind of fancy Frankenhive idea or combine them with another hive? Who knows?

Anyway, just for now, just during the rest of winter the emergency is over. The emergency hive is successful. I might even patent the idea.

P.S. The bees seem to like to land on the paper label on the bin before they climb into the entrance, or they land on the lid and then crawl down into the entrance gap. I'm considering building them a landing board. The bucket on top is the apiary's rain bucket (filled with corks that float in the water so they have a place to stand and drink.) It secures the bin lid so that storm winds don't blow it off. Yeah, it's a little messy around the hives. I know! I gotta rake up the debris from winter and generally police the area. It's still the middle of winter, this is the first day it hasn't been totally raining, and I'm totally into remodeling the kitchen.
 I religiously tend the Boardman feeders though, rain or shine. The bee gals are bringing in lots of Alder pollen right now; and with fair arriving earlier and earlier each year, we can look forward to lots more nectar soon.

 

We're Baa-ack!

Just took this picture of my home "bee yard". It's booming, the bees are extremely active. The state of the bee yard kinda sums up my life at the moment. It's a little fuzzy, overgrown in spots, cluttered and junk spread around the edges. But the tree is pretty, n'est-ce pas?

Now that it is May and the flow is in full swing, here's a bit of a report:
The winter was hard. a bit colder than last year. Not that it was a terrible awful winter, but it was very wet, had snow and cold snaps at exactly the worst times. A couple of days in mid winter were sunny warm, fooling the bees onto making some hygienic runs and scouting forays. I'm afraid the cold and rain and wet caught them outside a couple of times. I started feeding all of them in January, as they were getting very light in stores. Alas, we lost about half of the colonies. The two original horizontal (kTBH) hives at the Eagle's Rest garden died out or absconded. When I opened the hives they showed traces of a massive wax moth invasion. I have removed them from the location and started cleaning them up and sterilizing them; melted down the empty combs - saving the wax for a future cosmetics project by my daughter Jenn.

Karen and Maria's 48" kTBH came through the winter just fine. (They fed them in January and February.) They have acquired another "mentor" who set them up with a Langstroth; so I am setting them free to do their own thing now with two diverse hives -- maybe more as the season wears on. (Of course, if anything exciting happens, I'll report it.)

OTOH, Jenny's biodynamic Lang on her property died out, despite trying to keep it fed. I retrieved the hive and cleaned it up along with the Eagle's Rest boxes. In a somewhat uncoordinated manner, I got the small blue kTBH transferred to the same spot in January. Those ladies are industrious and really active right now. Jenny's garden will be well pollinated. I'm hoping to catch a new swarm any minute now and restore her bio-Lang to its original location.

Here at the home apiary, everyone came through. They are all out and about and really active. The hives boxes are getting stuffed. The Hard Luck Warré is now four boxes tall and ready for another "nadir". (In a Warré operation one puts the new ... um ... 'supers' on the bottom as bees naturally want to build down, not up.) These guys are those pretty golden Italians. They're proving to be tough, prolific and not hard to work with.This year the bees are a little darker in this one hive -- I assume they are hybridizing because of some illicit mating flight that resulted in some feral DNA being added? (I really should pay more attention to our queens)

The same golden bees inhabit my original bio-dynamic Lang, and they are truly light yellow gold and so pretty. Now in its third season, the hive itself was at first struggling and slow to grow. I had trouble getting the bees to move up into the first super I put on. After many false attempts and several suggestions from the bee forums (unsuccessful), I simply took a page from the Warré book and put the super on the bottom, under the brood box. Wallah -- they moved right down and filled the box. I put another super on top in March and they have now proceeded to start inhabiting it too. No, I dunno why they decided it was now okay to move up.. Perhaps it's because I put those Pierco frames in this one super, rather than the starter-strip frames I usually use? Hmmmm.

Last, the Redwood Warré is growing rapidly.   It has the swarm of the Golden Italians that came from the bio-Lang. (remember the other one I let go away?). They were the first bees out and active as spring began, and they continue to be ahead of the rest of the hives. It's now three boxes tall and ready, I think, before long to have another box. I might even take some honey this year. I really like this little hive, all natural and unfinished. I  put a modified square roof on it, from an idea I got from David Heaf.

Okay, that's about all the bee news. I'm gonna clean up the junk and clear the weeds back from the home hives, don't worry. Ed has moved his main Eagle's Rest Garden operation to a new property over on Lost Creek. I don't think I will put the two kTBHs back, should my swarm traps catch more bees. I'm gonna re-roof them (stay tuned for a report on refurbishing these horizontal hives) and set them up here at home for awhile. I'll either move the Redwood Warré or the Biodynamic Lang over there very soon. He'll need the bees for pollination right away.

End o' report. How are your bees?

2012 -- Watch This Space

There's been a lot going on. I've been distracted. Things get in the way.  Stuff happens, not always for the best. But I haven't abandoned the blog. It's just  ... um .... "under construction".

Stay tuned.

Perfect Swarm Avoids Capture

One of the decisions I made with Ed when we set up the bees in the Eagle's Rest Garden was that we'd let most of the swarms go feral. After all, his garden sits in the middle of a wooden area, there are forest tracts over the fences in every direction. Lots of hollow trees and natural structure for colonies to inhabit. Here in the middle of the third year of those original hives, I think I've only captured one swarm from them; the rest have taken flight on their own terms. The idea is to repopulate and build up locally adapted honeybees in the surrounding woods who will then be there to pollinate. It's part of that 'save the bees' idea that got me started in the first place.

Now I know there is a lot of discussion pro and con about this, and frankly ... we don't care. You're either on the bus with restoring feral bee colonies, or you are not. A link to the feral bee projects is here, and I don't have a link to those who oppose it. [smile] There's currently a bit of a discussion about the idea on the Warré group, too. You can easily find all the talking points of the issues if you look on the net.

Anyway ... I harvested about 5 swarms in the last couple of weeks, including three that originated from my own hives here behind the house. One other swarm that issued forth was from my Biodynamic Lang, full of those pretty golden bees. Here's the swarm as it first began to settle in a tree just over the fence from the hive:

Well ... aside from the boat, there's a big dog over there, just outside of camera range ... and the fence is tall ... and at the time I didn't have an empty hive ready to put them in  ... and there was this little voice coming from somewhere close to being perched on my shoulder, "Hey, let 'em go." I was all set to pass up this swarm and let them become feral repopulator/pollinators. Yet it got harder when they eventually settled into this clump, about four feet off the ground, just beyond the fence:

Now who could resist such a nice cluster??? Imean, all ya gotta do is slip the bucket up under them, bang on the branch (or even just snip it off!) and .. wall - ah ... you got a swarm o' pretty golden bees.  The dog isn't mean, Molly and I feed him cookies all the time. The fence opens pretty easily. The bees could live in the bucket until I got another hive ready. What if they decided to settle in that guy's boat? Now the little voice was saying "GET THEM!!!"  I decided that if they were there in the morning, I would.  But that evening I began to question my 'save the bees' principles. Imean, if you've decided to increase the ferals in the local neighborhood, these are prime candidates. I should. I should let them go if I'm gonna be true to my values. [sigh]

Okay, they were there the next morning, even though the temp had drifted down to 34F just before dawn. But so was a swarm in a horse park over by the filbert groves. I went and collected those bees first, since the horse owners were panicked. Late that afternoon, the golden swarm was still on that branch. By now the little voice was ambivalent. Sometimes it was "Go", sometimes it was, "Get them."  Procrastination is our friend.

By the next morning, they were -- indeed -- gone.  I'm sure they found a nice oak somewhere between my fence and Parvin Butte , less than 1000 yards away. 

And hey .. I learned a lot just watching them for 48 hours.

Bumbling On The Edge ...

Looks like it's not just honeybees who are endangered.This article just came to me via the Pollinator Partnership. It's from January, 2011, but in light of the current findings about neonicotinoids, it makes sense to pay some attention.  Anyway, 'saving the bees' is not just a concern limited to honeybees any more. Now it's bumblers, and yeah, pretty soon Mason bees and other pollinators will exhibit the same sort of endangered status, I expect. Check it out: <http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2011/01/04/bumblebee-population-delines.html>.

Finally: A Place to Keep Records of Our Hives

I kept meaning to choose one of those on-line hive record-keeping sites, or download somebody's software or something. That way I could get out of those spiral notebooks and actually have something I could use quickly and easily with the computer. When I first got started logging in my experiences and records, I tried using a couple; but they either cost money (too much, in my humble opinion) or they were just plain too complicated. There were difficult log-ins, or the format was somebody's idea of something that just wasn't practical. Most are oriented just about exclusively toward commercial operations. I gave up pretty early in the attempts.

So now, I discover that some actual beekeepers who know how to design software have recently put up a free site that is simple, easily accessible and has just about every feature and record you could use to keep track of your hives, your apiary locations, and the weather (yep the weather pops up automagically!). Seems as if they have only started it in the last year, so it's prolly not very well known. It took me just a few minutes to load all my hives into the system. Pretty nice.

They're doing it as a "service to the beekeeping community" which I think is just absolutely great -- and needed. You can donate something to them, if you wish, there's a link for that at their site.

Anyway, check 'em out. (They're on Facebook too!) https://www.hivetracks.com/ >br>

Swarm Capture Redux

It's getting close to the time when early spring swarms will be issuing, so I thought I'd update a little of the methodology I have been hypeing.

Notices: I got my little flyers out and all tacked up on local bulletin boards; and gave a few to the volunteer fire departments (they were real happy to meet me, as they get a bunch of calls this time of the year and usually don't know what to do.) And remind the folks that you met last year when you captured their swarms, they may get more and they will tell their friends too.


Flowerpot Swarm Traps - I've noticed that the area where the two pots meet rim-to-rim is not always uniform enough to eliminate gaps along the centerline. This may irritate the bee gals enough to abandon the trap, or cause them to start spending too much time filling the gaps with propolis. Our old friend Duct Tape can come in handy to seal the rims.

Carol in the comments section was thinking of installing top bars so as to limit disruption when transferring the swarm into a permanent facility. I think that it would be hard to make top bars for a round space. Besides, I'm thinking that just monitoring the traps closely will allow you to move the swarms and shake them into your hive before they have built much comb. In my first flowerpot swarm foray - where my  mentor friend took the bees - I got to the trap within a day of their occupying the trap and there was only one saucer-sized comb inside. My friend shook the swarm onto a sheet and the bees just docilely marched in to their new home.

Other Traps -  the guys over on the Warré Beekeeping Group have tended to talk in terms of more permanent wooden boxes strung up in trees and rooftops, etc. along with various methods for utilizing them. The UK  beekeeping locations are less prone to having feral swarms, I gather; not like my Willamette Valley location which has a lot more ferals and escapees. This means they have to put up a trap for a long time, I guess, and tune it to weather a much broader range of conditions. If I was going to go for top bars, I'd probably design something like a Warré box as a long-term swarm capture method. Put a flat board for a floor and one for a roof. Pretty bulky and not something you'd want to stand under for very long; but prolly worth it in some situations.


Bait - I'm still using my first bottle of Lemongrass Oil, along with a chunk of old comb sealed into the interiors of the traps. Even in my small apiary, the bees are always attracted to the small empty kTBH I have there, just because of those lures. I'm sure that as swarm time approaches the scouts will look there for a space to occupy. 


Stuff I learned from capturing the swarms - 
 1) Take your time. The swarm isn't going to go anywhere in the next 10 minutes; and even if it is, you can't do anything about that. Plan your moves, scope out the situation.

2) Wear those gloves. Even though most swarms are docile, there's always a couple of bee girls who didn't get the word. They want to sting you! Just because.


3) Yes, leave the trap there for the stragglers you din't catch at first and come back at sundown to get 'em. Don't be overly chagrined if some get away. All the old beeks I know say they will eventually go back to the original hive. This may or may not be true, but I'm going to believe that it is true. Just because.

4) The bees are not going to suffocate in the time it takes you to seal up the box, put it in the car and drive home. Don't worry about "air holes". Your basic cardboard box will have enough ventilation to allow them to breathe unless you are the seam-tape queen. If you have made yourself a fancy "Bee Bucket", you already made a screened ventilation system.


5) Speaking of being the seam-tape queen, tape the goddamn box edges! Really tape them good. The bees will definitely send out some angry scouts and they will find you when you are behind the steering wheel driving down I-5 at 66mph. Oh yes, they will.

6) This is a way cool idea. Way cool. Boom! Straight into a nuc!

7) I'm kinda on the cusp about using a spay bottle and water. I've captured swarms both with and without. If the swarm is densely packed, you can't get the interior bees wet enough. If it's spread out, sometimes spraying the little clusters will aid you in getting them all. You choose. Also - don't forget your bee brush. It helps a lot in persuading those same little clusters to get with the program.

8) After you put them in a hive, give the swarm some time to adjust to the new home. Don't be opening the hive every day to "check". They will abscond if they get too much attention from you. Oh, ... and wait a couple of days before you stick a feeder anywhere. They might need it, but then again if there are lotsa blooms they won't bother with a feeder and it may attract pyrates. Theoretically they gorged on honey before they left home, so they'll be okay. Here's where you gotta use your best judgment.

9) Take lots of pictures. And keep a little notebook so you can remember stuff you did.

10) It's prolly too early in the year yet for martinis after you get them into their new hive, so ... warm up with this.

Everbody's Prepping for Spring ....

The Bee Girls are awake. Although the temps dip below freezing on many nights, still, the daytime temps are reaching up into the 50's. Things are warming up! The rain is not so incessant, so there are more and longer sun-breaks.(strange for Jan in the Willamette Valley, but I am not gonna rant about Planetary Heating in this post.) Enough so that the forager ladies are out and about most late mornings, bringing in loads of pastel yellow pollen from plants unknown. (Aspen? Maple? Willow? ... Calendula???) I set up a couple of Boardman feeders just in case my two most at-risk colonies need some short-term nutritional assistance. The liquid is disappearing from both feeders at the rate of about a quart per week.

Today I took a trip to Glory Bee and got some stuff to make another Biodynamic Lang - this one for Jenny and Mitch. And I'm going to add another 'Western Super' to my own BDL. I got the garage cleared out enough to operate the table saw and set up my brand new compressor and brad gun. (Thanks, Santa Molly!!!) I'll make my wonderful patented Lang/Warré hive-stand-bottom-board, a telescoping top, and a set of top bars for the Redwood Warré's last new box. I've decided it's not making any difference whether the bottom boards are screened or solid. I'll do either style as the mood strikes me and the Goddess commands .... I'd make my own deeps and supers for more Biodynamc Lang hives, but I don't have the jig to do the fine rabbets (hint hint).

Anyway, Glory Bee usually has the cheaper unassembled boxes on sale so that it's hardly worth the extra labor to build them from scratch. If I were a commercial guy instead of a newbeek "hobby" beekeeper, it would prolly make even more sense to buy the precut supers, no doubt.

This weekend I guess I better print out some more swarm-attracting flyers to hang up on the community bulletin boards. (Got Bees? ....) Wouldn't hurt to go by and remind the Fire Dept, the DOT Highway guys, and the hardware store that I'm here and ready to deal with swarms and maybe some cut-outs this year. I've got the local nursery guys ordering me some more of those cardboard fiber pots so I can continue to assemble more swarm trap/baithives and get them placed before too much longer. I'm going to try some smaller eight-inch pots as well as my twelve-inch beauties. (Yes, I'll let you know ...)

I guess I ought to go over to the Keeper of the Bee Tree Grove and remind him too, unless I can get Karen to do it. (hint hint) I wonder ... should I get some little business cards printed up offering to come get bees, mention my Warré/ Lang/TBH hive-building skills and my wise fool (sophomore) advice on setting up for beekeeping, etc?

Hmmmm ... yeah, you're right ... maybe not.

Oh, hey,  .... check out Adam Schreiber's Bee Blog - For the Time Beeing. He has lots of pictures, great words, and he's a city beek! Makes a nice contrast to our rural Cascade Foothills location. It's also linked over there <---- on the blog list.

Mason Bee Houses

There was this larger-than-ever growth in beekeeping starting in about 2006, when the first hubris over the Death Of All The Honeybees In The Universe began, along with subsequent publicity over CCD, Bayer pesticides and all of that. Well, now that all of us Newbeeks have kinda got our "feet on the ground" about the fundamentals of honey beekeeping, our attention has been expanding to include concern for all the pollinators in general -- from bats to birds, to other non-honeybee insects. I've noticed a growing interest in Mason Bees among all my fellow beeks here in the Willamette Valley. Lots of us are promoting their best interests here lately. It's not hard to raise and manage some. Look at our friend The Luddite's blog: her latest post has just a whole buncha really good stuff about Orchard Mason Bees. (You can also click on her blog over there to the left in our Bee Blog List to keep up with her thoughts.)

I actually started building Mason Bee houses before I began this odyssey into honey beekeeping. I give the bee blocks away whenever I can find any takers. This was because there was a year there when all of us noticed a distinct dearth of honeybees and seemed to observe a subsequent lack of blooms in our gardens. It seemed prudent to begin to do something about it. My oldest Mason Bee house is usually populated with several cocoons in the little holes. Here's a current picture of it, complete with bird-poop roof shingling:

 A close look reveals at least a half dozen full Orchard Mason Bee cocoons in the cylindrical holes I drilled. (There is a smaller set of holes below them for another variety of mason bee that I dunno the exact name of. The Leaf Cutter bees use 'em too. There are some full cocoons of theirs in this bee block as well.)

The Mason Bee nesting blocks or houses are really easy to build (don't worry I'm not gonna post another long set of instructions, just go here - or here -  if you wanna build some, or you can buy them in many garden stores and nurseries, or online).
The owner of the secretly-located feral bee grove puts me and most of the other bee house builders to shame. He has an absolutely amazing number of different shapes sizes and woods for Mason Bee houses, hung all over his garage, shed and behind his house. I'm hoping to get some good pictures this spring of all of them. It seems to work for us all, the Mason Bee population seems to be growing around here.

Seque: Since he asked very nicely, I promised Amy Leigh's boyfriend, Danny, that I would mention his article, 21 Things You Didn't Know About Honey Bees. The blog has been added to our Bee Blog List, as well. (I'm kinda hoping he'll link to us on their blog as well ....)

[May 2012 update: For a really informative, recent, discussion of solitary bee living quarters as well as a great tutorial on building nesting blocks go here to our friend The Luddite's blog.]

Year-end Update

I know I have been neglecting this blog! It's just that the Bee Girls have been so self-sufficient that I have had no real news to report. Anyway, I decided I ought to get one more post in before the new year, so here's a kind of status report:

City bees and Country bees - both doing fine. They venture out on a few flights on the sunny winter days, there's always a little ivy flowering, plus the abundance of roadside flowers and plants the neighbors have cultivated. With all the doug fir and other evergreens there's always some pine resin to be had for propolis.

The City bees are in the 36" kTBH, with about 2/3 of the bars carrying comb. They stay at the far end away from the entrance and don't ball up much, but are kind of 'slowly active' over the combs.

The Country bees are in the 30" kTBH and are about equally active, although the little brats have been mean since October and the onset of colder weather. They like to clump up on the combs closest to the entrance end of the hive.

I opened both these hives' observation windows; the City bees just looked up and said "huh"? and sent out a few scouts to check me out. The Country bees, however, jumped at the chance to boil out a couple dozen angry ladies who needed to sting me just to show who was boss. I got two nice stings and quickly closed up their window.  Both hives seem to have gone through about half their stores, so I'll be checking often now that it got colder (down to +28F last night) and feed them if necessary. I figure about another 6-8 weeks before there is a viable resurgence of springtime blooms here in the Willamette Valley/Cascade Foothills location.) I'm waiting for the grocery store Xmas candy canes to go on clearance sale, when I can load them up. I'm toying with the idea of cooking up some fondant and adding some pollen patties. Looking around for good recipes. (hint, hint)

Karen and Maria's Hive -- is that 48" kTBH that has the main swarm the City bees cast last spring. They are a big thriving colony, still doing quite well. They are tucked in for winter, too. I plan on monitoring them about as closely as the City /Country hives from now until spring. They'll get some candy canes too.

The Hard Luck Warré -- Has done the best of any of my colonies. It began this winter with three full Warré boxes, with a large population of bees. I don't take any honey, as the idea is to 'keep' the bees, and promote healthy swarms with as little interference by me as I can manage.  I put another box on just before the rains came. (and I mean right before they came!) These are that first colony I received from the farmer's stock over in Creswell. These bees turned out to be "Golden Bees", a variety of very yellow, very pretty Italian species. A member of one of the bee listserves read that I had them and wants a nuc this spring. T'will be interesting to try my hand at splitting and "nuc-ing" this colony. Stay tuned.

Here's the hive a couple of days before New Year's, everybody inside and staying warm in the +29F degree weather and the snow. (You can hear them buzzing inside if you put your ear to the boxes. Nobody comes out to object or I'd have a stung ear, btw.) It hasn't been warm enough since then to see them doing any outside flights, but I expect the first warm day will bring them out.  I've been careful to slightly tip the hive every so often to check and see if it feels like there's any honey stores left. So far so good, but they'll get fed if they seem to need it.

The Biodynamic Lang -- has been quiet. They were the second of the Golden Bee colonies from the Creswell farmer. They filled the bottom brood box with rapid growth. The bees built a lot of combs on the foundationless frames I put in there. However, they seem not to want to build up into that first super on top, although they have propolized the entire interior of both boxes where they felt they needed to. I worry most about this hive, as it had a lot of bees inside with only that one large deep for resources. It still feels heavy to heft it, but the first warmer day we get in January I'm going to set up the feeder (and stick a mirror in there to see how things are going.)

So, I end 2010 with just five colonies. The small 24" kTBH managed to lose its short occupancy of a small swarm we captured in mid-summer; and the redwood Warré never got populated, despite my best intentions. (I kept giving swarms and swarm opportunities to newbeeks.) I think the redwood hive will get some modifications before spring -- it'll prolly be the first one I try those little porthole openings on. I'm also set to produce a bunch more of my famous-unpatented-oversized-paperflowerpot swarm traps, as soon as I get the garage cleaned up. I reckon that by the end of Feburary I can spread the traps around, put my little "Got Bees?" notices up and get ready to acquire a bunch more swarms. (wish me luck!)

Okay, Solstice has passed, the New Year is upon us, and we're headed for the light. Happy 2011 beekeeping, y'all.

Smoker Irony

Yeah ... well ... I don't use my smoker a lot. Obviously. Looks new, doesn't it? I think I've only had it lit about twice. Nobody uses one with horizontal kTBHs, I think. Like a lot of other newbeeks of the biodynamic/organic persuasion, I've been working without it when I open the vertical hives. I mean, I just haven't seen the need to use it. So these wasps were able to turn the neglected smoker into a nice home. I s'pose if I ever start moving around lots of supers or Warré boxes and do more harvesting and splitting and stuff, I may rile up the bees enough to start using smoke.

I let a few wasp's nests stay around, for the sake of balance and biodiversity in the garden; but I encourage most of them to seek other habitat, since they do attack my bees. I think these guys are gonna have to go.

Vancouver and the Bees

So I was gone from the blog for awhile. One of the things I did while away was to travel to British Columbia ... an awfully nice part of the planet. For part of the vacation Molly and I traveled by ferry from Vancouver, BC to Victoria on Vancouver Island. On the ferry were several notices and stickers on port windows warning visitors to the island that it was prohibited to bring honeybees in. I since learned that the stickers are obsolete, the BC Government having relaxed some of their prohibitions against importing honeybees to restore their varroa-devastated honeybee stock. I'm not sure of the actions' consequences, but the sticker was a good indication that Canada has been addressing the problem.

One of the major attractions outside of Victoria is the Butchart Gardens, where they grow justabout every kinda flower imaginable that can survive the B.C. spring and summer. As we wandered through the different garden areas, I was pleasantly surprised to see the blooms attracting copious amounts of honeybees, bumblers, and other pollinators. It seems like the dearth of honeybees on Vancouver Island have been Mark Twain-ized a bit, in that the reports of the deaths of all those honeybees were a little premature.  There are lots of bees in the pic to the right, ... even if you can't see 'em.

Well ... you know me ... I just had to go and find the garden's beekeepers and get a look at their hives! I wandered around asking the staff, but nobody knew anything. Eventually I was directed to the information booth where there was a knowledgeable botanist lady who set me straight, "The Butchart doesn't have any honeybees, as we are not concerned with pollination or plant reproduction here. The bees you see are from outside the Gardens. We're glad they come, but we don't keep bees here." They have about 50 gardeners on staff, and several greenhouses were visible. I never did learn where their annuals appear from, nor how the perennials reappear, but apparently they just don't raise any stock that requires pollinators.  Hmmm, I wonder if this is true of other big garden operations? (Learn something new every day, huh?)

In a way it was a good sign. Vancouver Island may have suffered devastating losses in their apiaries, but out there in all those woods covering the island there still must be a lot of feral, escaped, and "unkept" bees. They seem to be doing just fine.

Link to book review

I've been recommending the Complete Idiot's Guide to Beekeeping since before it was published. Here's a very literate, first rate review by David Heaf; emphasizing the strengths and weaknesses of the book -- particularly on the treatment-free and small cell issues. Mr. Heaf's own book is on the way, due to be out this month (Sept '10). I'm really looking forward to it as well. We can advance order his book here. (I'm hoping they'll ship to the US of A via this link.)

Oh, hey, while you're at it, Phil Chandler could use a little help keeping his web stuff going. Along with the basic TBH fundamental materials, he provides a bunch of important free stuff, so much vital information, as well as hosting biobees, and David Heaf's Warré sites! Go here and see what you can do to help, huh? (I sent him a cuppa joe.)

Bait Hive Success

"I don't personally know any one who has caught a swarm in a bait hive here in my area, ..." I wrote last time.  Well, consider that statement as inoperative now. My first bait hive just produced the results exactly as I had planned it!

My friend with the big bee tree called yesterday. Her bees had finally swarmed out of the tree cavity! They had swarmed up to the place we thought they would go: under the eaves of her detached out building. This is where the bees went the last two times that colony swarmed. Some days ago we had placed the bait hive just in front of the now-closed-off opening into the dead space under the roof. The hive was now occupied!

I collected the swarm in the evening, when all the scouts and foragers had returned. It was a simple matter to stuff some paper into the opening in the bait hive, tape it over and then just remove the hive from the hook where it was hanging under the eaves. I carried the whole shebang over to my friend Julie's apiary and let her have them as kind of restoration of my karmic balance for that last swarm of bees she had delivered to me even though she had lost a queen. 

Any worries I had had about how to do the transfer from the bait hive to a permanent hive were erased.  It was a simple matter to unscrew the four deck screws holding hive closed, without having the whole thing fall open when the screws came out. Opening it up disturbed a few of the bees, but the cluster in the bottom half remained in place until Julie shook them into a western super she had already set up and made ready for the transfer. The swarm was mainly in the upper half so it was a simple matter to shake the rest of the bees into a space where half the frames had been removed from the super.  She set a white sheet on the ground next to the super leading up to the entrance. The loose bees and the flying stragglers just marched in. In a few minutes all the bees were at home in the super.

Julie put the remaining frames back in place and covered the super. In a day or two when they are acclimatised she'll do the newspaper trick and add them to an underpopulated hive in her apiary. When we looked into the now-empty bait hive, there were three saucer-sized combs already attached to the underside of the hive roof. They had built that much in less than 24 hours, and filled the combs with nectar and a fair amount of blackberry pollen!

I'm glad this whole plan came together, and I have high hopes now for the other two hives I have set out.  I'll keep you all informed.

[Added July, 2010: Some inquired, "What will happen to the queen if she combines the swarm with a colony????" It's okay, through the auspices of the Beek Association the queen got a new home.]

Swarm Trap / Bait Hive

One of the things you'll probably want to try eventually is a swarm trap or bait hive. There are a bunch of different designs out there ranging from small boxes that are basically nucs, to the paperboard flowerpot style that are cheap and easy to acquire. You can even make them out of wastebaskets. They are not actually "traps", since the bees can come and go. It's just that you provided them a temporary shelter that's portable and allows for easy transferring of the swarm to a hive. You can bait an empty regular hive body as well, particularly if you have an extra  set up around your other hives when the colonies decide it's time to swarm.
 
I was looking around to try to find a comprehensive web page that had both pictures and a description of how to make one of those double flowerpot style bait hives that I have been using. There's not a good website yet, but there's a nice plan for this in The Complete Idiot's Guide to Beekeeping, on pages 66-67. I copied it and had pretty good success in construction.The single flowerpot style costs about $20 from beehive suppliers. My double flowerpot  swarm trap has a larger capacity, which is probably a positive factor for getting the bee scouts to choose it. (I suppose you could use just one flower pot and a piece of heavy cardboard or plywood for a cover.)  Whatever. There doesn't seem to be a good illustrative set of instructions anywhere handy that I can find; so I decided it ain't all that hard, I'll put instructions and pix here on the blog. Wall- la:

 It takes me about fifteen minutes to make one, but I'm gettin' old and slow.

Cost: The first one I built cost me about twenty bucks as well, including all the materials, but I made about 5 of them; so the cost averaged out to less than ten dollars. Not as cheap as that wastebasket hive up above, but still a pretty good value.

Materials: 
2 molded pressed fiber nursery pots 12"x11". Mine are 100% recycled paper and biodegradable.
[9/8/10 Note: I used big 12" pots since they seemed to offer the size of space bee-girl scouts like best, but I am beginning to think pots around 8" are perfectly fine and a bit easier to move about, and manipulate. Your choice, of course.]
1 Cable/Zip tie
4 1" outdoor deck screws or wallboard screws
1 can of foam weather sealant
1/2 pt clear sealer such as polyurethane


Tools
drill driver or screwdriver
small paintbrush
1 bottle of Foster's Beer (not shown)

 Instructions:
1. Invert one flower pot. Using drill driver or screwdriver, put two small holes an inch apart in the bottom center.
2. Insert cable/zip tie into one hole from inside, loop around and insert in other hole, slide tie end into lock end loosely, leaving an ample loop outside.

3. Place inverted pot onto rim of upright pot.  [9/8/10 Note: This is a good time to slip an old piece of comb into the bottom pot and maybe drip some lemongrass oil in too.] Using drill driver or screw driver, screw 4 deck screws through rims of pots, joining them together.

4.Place pots on their sides and fill 7 drain holes on top and bottom with spray foam. Remember to leave one opening on bottom pot for an entrance for the bees.

5. Hang bait hive/swarm trap in convenient work area. Allow sealant to dry.
6. Coat exterior with clear sealer. Allow to dry. (You can skip this step if your conditions are not super wet, the pots are fairly sturdy and water resistant)
7.Variations:  Smaller diameter pots would prolly work just fine, too. You can make small holes in the sides of the pots if you feel there needs to be more ventilation, depending upon how often you can check the swarm trap. If you dislike spray foam, you can plug those drain holes with anything -- wads of paper, chewing gum, putty, etc. You can also use a serrated knife to carve a larger opening in the bait hive if you suspect you're going to be inundated by the Mother of All Swarms.
8. Remove cap from bottle of Foster's Beer by twisting it off.  Consume contents at leisure, the project is completed. Repeat Step 8 as necessary.

I haven't found the exact right source of information about where and how to set up a swarm trap / bait hive, other than some reference to always keeping one near your hives so that you stand a good chance of capturing your own bees when they swarm. (9/8/10 ... I still haven't found much of a better source of placement information than the short two pages in Dean and Laurie's guide. Most links, like this one, say put the swarm trap about 8' up in a location where lots of bees are active, and where swarms have landed before [duh].  I'll keep lookin', but if you find a good source of swarm trap placement info, let me know, okay?)

So far I have had three of these hives out in various locations since about the end of May. It's been rainy and swarms are not quite so plentiful this year, so I have not had any results as of yet. My first bait hive is set up by the Bee Tree from last year's swarm captures. The other two are strategically located around the neighborhood and at the Eagle's Rest apiary. I'm thinking the grove of bee trees from last year's week o' the swarms might be an ideal location.  As for lures, I haven't acquired any of those pheremone lures they sell; I've just tucked a piece of old comb inside the swarm trap, and dribbled a few drops of  some really good lemongrass oil right inside the entrances.

Last year the Warré hive I baited and my small 24" kTBH never seemed to attract any action or interest from the bees, but I was more of a newbie then and less informed about the process. I don't personally know any one who has caught a swarm in a bait hive here in my area, although the different beeks on the 'net claim to have about 20% success rates. But what the hell, it's worth a shot, right?

Easier Yet (almost)

In the last post I said, "But I doubt I'll soon get any more already boxed up and ready to go ... for free!"

Ya know, it's hubris to think you can predict the future with that kinda certainty. My friend Julie, sometimes known as 'the mentor bee lady who lives down the road', delivered a swarm to me, all boxed up and ready to go! What's better than that???

It was from the same farmer who had called me for the last swarm. He was working off the swarm list, I guess, to give away this second swarm too. Julie is the chief honeybee swarm rescuer in this part of our whereabouts. Normally she has every hive of her own populated, but she loves to save the swarms and to collect them for others. She knew I still needed to populate my last two hives, so she brought them to me. (A couple of long-time beeks have adopted the label "Lazy Beekeeper" on the 'Net, but with this delivery, I may be in the running for the title.)

Anyway, it was the same kind of big box o' bees, perfectly taped-up, with more little windows and everything. I figured, "Hey it's gonna be a snap! I'll just put 'em in the Biodynamic Lang the same way I did the others and let 'em settle in next to the Hard Luck Warré."

Sure.

Hubris, overconfidence, too easily thinking I'd graduated past "newbie"? It was a big unwieldy box and I was a little too careless in shaking them into the Lang hive. About half of them stuck to the side of the box and didn't quite slide out with the rest. I didn't notice this since I couldn't see over the side of the big box well enough. As I was pulling the box away the rest of them fell out onto the deck next to the hive. I had soaked them down pretty good with my water spray bottle, but still ... lots of them flew up, or they were all scurrying to find the rest of the colony. Next thing you know I am down on my hands and knees trying to grab them all in big handfuls and toss 'em into the Lang. (You would have laughed your ass off at the sight of me in my veil and helmet trying to see well enough to determine where they were crawling.)

Yes, I did have my gloves on, and that made it worse actually. First it was hard to feel them well enough to grab properly; and either I held 'em too tight or the bees just slipped out of my fingers. Second, about this time some of the honeybees decided they were through being Miss Nice Bee and crawled down in my gloves to sting some sense back into me. Owwww! Ow, ow, ow!

{Sigh} Eventually I got them all into the Lang, although I was a bit worried that the bees I had spilled included the queen - Julie had said she was a marked Golden Bee queen, two years old. I haven't seen her yet. I set up the entrance reducer, along with a piece of queen excluder I stapled over the hole to keep them from absconding and let them be for the night.

The next morning I went out early. The Hard Luck Warré had their bees out and foraging, lots of activity even though it was cool weather. The Biodynamic Hive had a few straggler bees wandering across the landing board but not much else happening. I snuck a peek inside and was at first pretty disheartened. There was a smallish cluster in the super, not nearly half of the about 5 pounds of bees I had put in there last night. Oh no! The queen hadn't made it into the hive! -- and the rest of the bees had struggled out of the entrance reducer/excluder barrier and had absconded in the night! I was an idiot! The queen had fled under the deck as soon as I spilt everybody!

I tilted the super up and looked in the bottom brood box inside the foundationless frames. Sure enough there was a half dome of sleepy bees covering the whole underside of the top bars, about the size of a basketball. Whew! Everything was copacetic!

I noticed that the bees that were moving in and out seemed to stack up for a long time at my makeshift reduced entrance, and I kind of don't trust that piece of excluder. In K&M's hive the bees just about refused to go through it. I headed off to Glorybee and bought another new plastic excluder and some frames for the western supers. When I returned, the sun had warmed up the Lang enough that the bees were moving in and out, albeit sluggishly. I removed the entrance reducer and slid the new excluder in, figuring a whole sheet of it on the bottom would be enough for them to comfortably get in and out and still leave the queen inside. Hey, there is something to this Langstroth standardization thing! The queen excluder fits perfectly on the rim of the bottom board, right under the brood box. I'd had to do surgery on the piece sitting under the Warré. This evening the Hard Luck Warré has foragers bringing in lots of bright orange pollen, some of it prolly from the California poppies on the roadside. Since this indicates the bee ladies seem to be occupying both hives permanently, I will slip both excluders out in a day or two.

Well, I learned what I learned from this; and tonight as the sunlight fades both the new swarms are active, bringing in pollen and sucking up the sugar syrup from the Boardman feeders I set up to keep them fed until they get some comb built and are viable on their own.

I said up above, "Normally [Julie] has every hive of her own populated." But she called me that night after she delivered the swarm, wondering  if I had hived it yet.

"Absolutely," I said, like it was no big deal at all.

Oh that was too bad, since when she got home one of her hives turned out to be queenless all of a sudden; and if I still had them in the big box she would have liked the swarm for herself to put in that hive with the queenless colony.  She regretted a little bit that she had given them to me. I offered to shake them back into the box, quietly rubbing my wrist where the stings were beginning to throb and itch. No no, that's okay, we'll just get another swarm. Am I still on the swarm list? Yep, and I am expecting the bee tree grove to swarm any minute. Although there were major swarm days in May, the timing here has been all over the place for bees this year. Every action, including the main nectar flow, is late in Oregon this year because of the rain. Some swarms are still bound to happen.

I will make no more predictions about how hard or easy the next swarms will be.

Easiest Swarm I Ever Got

A farmer called me via my entry on the LCBA Swarm List. He had a swarm, "Come get it."

I asked, "What equipment do you think I need? Should I bring my ladder?"

"It's in a box already."

I drove over to the most beautiful little farm area by Creswell. Sure enough there on the picnic table behind the house was a big cardboard box, all taped up. There were even little screen windows taped in place so the bees could breathe. Next time I fix up a cardboard bee box, that's the way I'm gonna do it.

The farmer told me he had 5 hives, but was moving and didn't want to start any more colonies. So when this swarm issued from one of his hives, he just called me as the closest beek on the swarm list. He slid the box off the table and carried it out to my car!

"How many times are you gonna get a swarm all packed in a box and ready to go?" he asked, laughing.

"Prolly never again," I admitted, and shook his hand. 

"They produce great honey, too" he smiled.

Me, I smiled too as I drove back home. I had "caught" a swarm dressed in shorts and a t-shirt, wearing flip flops. My part in the operation, minus drive time, was about 5 minutes. You know how there's usually some leak somewhere in a taped-up box full of bees? I drove home looking in the back every once in a while, expecting to see a few bees buzzing around the back window. But no, this farmer knew what he was doing. Every bee was securely inside the box.

I've decided to give the Hard Luck Hive another shot. What is this, the forth attempt? Anyway, I set the hive back up in that nice dappled-sun area by the greenhouse in my back yard. I put 3 boxes on the Warré hive, put on my veil and my gloves and opened the big box. It was big for a reason! There must have been five pounds of bees inside. After spraying them down a bit with water, I shook them into the upper box of the Warré. All around me the dryer bees flew up and buzzed around; but they were so docile that they didn't even pretend to be upset as I put the top bars back into place and fiddled around with the Warré quilt and roof assembly. No stings whatsoever this time.

Because there have been so many absconding swarms this year noted by newbeeks on all the lists, I've tried a trick from several experienced beeks who were posting to different discussion groups: If you want to avoid absconsion, use a queen excluder for the first few days until they start bringing in pollen. My Hard Luck Hive stand is constructed so that there is a raised rim between the lowest box and the bottom board. I placed the excluder over that rim and set the boxes over it, which hold it in place. Now the bees in K&M's kTBH hadn't been very easily able to go in and out through the excluder, but these gals just seemed to ignore it and right away started moving in and out as pretty as you please. I can easily remove the excluder by sliding it out in a few days. For right now, 24 hours later, the bees seem at home, making orientation flights and even sampling the borage blossoms in the back yard.

It's been a strange year for the bees here in Oregon: a cold snap right as Spring began, then a quick spell of sunlight, then almost constant rain from mid-March until just this weekend. Timing is off for everything related to the bees. Some beeks have even had to feed their bees well into Spring, according to Ken at the Beek Association. It seems to have delayed some swarming, because all of a sudden, like my box o' bees, the swarms are beginning to issue now that there is sunshine. There's no news from the grove of bee trees. But I expect they'll be swarming next. I'm looking to fill out the 'Biodynamic Lang' and the redwood Warré here very soon.

But I doubt I'll soon get any more already boxed up and ready to go ... for free!

Swarm x 2

This is the time of year when all the bee blogs start posting articles on swarms and catching them. So, um, why should this blog be any different? Here's my report on "two at once":

Ed called me on Thursday 5/13 and told me that the City Bees and the Country Bees both had bunches of bees crawling around on the outside of the hives. He was concerned that they might be absconding. When I got there, sure enough ... the bees were gone. I was afraid he was correct until I looked in the hive windows and found there were more bees than ever! The last time I had looked was about two weeks ago and they appeared to be still the same remainder bees who had survived the winter. Since the plants were blooming all around, I just let them be to sort themselves out for Spring. In those two weeks they expanded their combs to double what they had before. The Country Bees had filled up their 30-inch kTBH hive to nearly 90 percent capacity. That's apparently the magic number for them, and they had swarmed.

The City Bees had grown in their 36-inch kTBH to nearly 75 percent. Ed had been watching when both of the hives just magically decided to take off at the same time. The City Bees headed for some trees to the right of those in the picture at the top of this blog. I went for a quick scout with Darwin, but the bees seem to have gone to a place deeper in the woods and weren't "catchable". There are lots of hollow trees in that grove, so both Ed and I were happy that they were going to populate his woods and add to the feral population. That's part of the whole sustainable natural beekeeping idea, right? I assumed both swarms had headed for the forest.

As I was packing up to go, I noticed a little group of bees flying in a cloud right over one of Ed's whiskey barrel planters in the garden. When I got up close I discovered a large - volleyball sized - cluster of bees attached to some dead stems of catnip from last year's bumper crop of Just the Buds catnip. It was the Country Bee swarm! In no time at all I had them in my yellow cardboard bee box. They were so docile I could pick up the straggler clumps with my hands and dump them in the box.  I left the box open a while to make sure all the flyers got back safe. When they were all inside I taped the box shut and headed to Karen and Maria's place. These would be enough for a large colony, perfect to replace those that had died out at the end of winter in their big 48-inch kTBH.

I couldn't believe how fast they took to the new home.  I shook them into the hive; and before I could get all the top bars back in place they were already making chains on the guides of the top bars and starting to sort themselves out and build some comb. These gals were ready!  I had put a piece of plastic queen-excluder over the entrance, since our experience last year was that bees would abscond from this hive easily. Watching for a moment, I observed that the straggler bees didn't seem to go into the hive easily and bounced against the excluder several times before giving up and trying to get in through the screened bottom. It seemed obvious to me that they were having too hard a time getting through the small openings. Since the gals inside were already moving furniture around and hanging drapes, I figured they were gonna stay anyway; so I removed the excluder and left them two open cork-holes to go in and out by.

It was a glorious Spring day. Up into the 70's. It's so interesting that both the hives would swarm within minutes of each other. I don't know the dynamics of all of this, but clearly the temp and the weather have a big influence on the timing of the swarms.

The Country Bee hive is still very near capacity and I don't doubt they will cast a secondary swarm out pretty soon. That's just great with Ed and me - and Darwin. Oh, I'm gonna put a bait hive out there, I have those new Warrés and that biodynamic Lang to fill yet this year. But if we populate those woods with bee colonies, that's a nice secret area ... safe from pesticide spray and any other man-induced fooling around.

Just right.

A "Biodynamic" Lang

In an earlier post I mentioned acquiring a Langstroth hive to add to my little apiary. The idea is to practice organic and natural beekeeping while retaining the advantages of standard beekeeping equipment. Last week, if I had had this Lang hive ready, I could have picked up a colony one of the local Beek Association members was removing. She was keeping all her woodware, just relinquishing the frames and the bees only. I don't want to miss an opportunity like that again.  Basically, now that I have at least one Lang hive, the next time a nuc is available, or a box o' bees, etc., I'll be set up to take 'em.

So, here it is, all painted with latex exterior house trim paint left over from last year's back porch remodel:

Inside, the frames are standard Lang-type frames, only there are no foundations --  I merely turned the top bar wedges sideways and fixed them in place with brads and some carpenter's glue. There are as yet not all that many places on the web to gather information on foundationless Langs, but this link is about the best place to get started.

This way the bees can build their own combs, their way. With all 10 deep frames for the brood, plus 10 Western or medium super frames above, the whole colony will have to produce a lot of their own wax, but this doesn't seem to be asking too much. Last year Ed's City Bees built a dozen combs on kTBH (Kenyan Top Bar Hive) top bars, and Karen's kTBH had a similar amount when we opened it at the end of winter. Ed's Country Bees were a very small swarm, yet by the beginning of winter they had built eight combs on their top bars too.

For the City Bees and the Country Bees, I had gone through that messy process of pouring melted beeswax in little slots cut down the center of the 1 1/4" top bars the way it's shown here. (Never again.) It's all nice and 3rd world-like in its simplicity; but it's not necessary after all is said and done. Using the popsicle-stick guide method, Karen's bees managed to build straight combs on all the top bars just as nicely.  Karen and Maria simply rubbed cake beeswax on the bottom edge of the top bar popsicle sticks. Since that worked out so well, I'm doing the same on the bottom of the frame wedges of this Lang. (Actually -- as you can observe -- I'm letting Dashel take over that job.)

This idea of using Langstroth hives in a more natural organic way is starting to be referred to as "biodynamic beekeeping" in the UK, and there's a whole section on it in the Biobees forum. "Biodynamics" has a little weirdness for baggage on account of Rudolf Steiner's bee lectures. You can learn all you need about that by going here. Another term for it here in the US is holistic beekeeping, and has been applied to several different variants of beehives.

Speaking of variants of beehives, I've added the "Biodynamic" Lang to my tiny apiary of  kTBHs and Warré hives, as shown here in my raised bed garden with my new redwood Warré. Both of these new hives have floors and stands integrated into one unit built with pressure-treated wood "feet" so the Oregon mud won't rot them. It's based upon the idea I posted in the links section, modifying the Ruches de Brunehaut French design.

So now I can make a split for a beek using Langs; or do any of those standard manipulations without rigging up a Frankenhive, or a bee Warré/Kenyan/Lang condominium or other setup.  To move bees into a Warré or kTBH it can be a simple matter then of brushing the bees into the hive, or using swarm catching frames -- modifying them and the combs to fit the kTBH or Warré hive shape of any hive in my apiary. Since I now have a Langstroth to receive the initial frames and bees, I can do this patiently, without any haste. And ... prolly more "biodynamic" Langs will come along eventually.
 
It's the first week of May, and here in Oregon reports of swarm captures are starting to trickle in. It won't be long now before those hives are occupied.

I hope your bees are doing fine.