Today was a long day that involved a lot of snow, and food coloring.
Archive for the ‘bees’ Category
Snow Bee!
Sunday, January 3rd, 2010The sun that brief December day
Wednesday, December 16th, 2009Rose cheerless over hills of gray,
And, darkly circled, gave at noon
A sadder light than waning moon.
Snow-bound, John Greenleaf Whittier 1866
Buttoning up
Saturday, November 21st, 2009We’ve had an extraordinary November here in the northeast US. While nighttime lows have been fairly normal, around 28 degrees F., daytime temperatures have hit record highs all month. By noon today it was overcast and 57. I have put off getting out to the bee yard to set things right for winter because the bees have been out and active, but one of these days winter will set in with a vengeance – that’s just the way it is.
I decided to take my smoker and wear my suit, and I’m glad I did. It was quite warm and still and the bees were active, poking their heads up over the comb as soon as I opened the inner cover. This is a very social, calm hive but I think the suit and smoker allow me to relax around them and avoid passing on my anxiety. They can tell if I’m nervous.
I put newspaper directly over the frames, leaving a small gap to accommodate the upper entrance, then replaced the shim and inner cover and piled more newsprint over that. You can see that I’m using The Islander and Barrons. Tony J. is partial to the WSJ. The first layer of hive-wrap is on, too.
The next step is to add the second tier of hive-wrap and tuck it under the telescoping cover. I punch a small hole in the top to correspond to the upper entrance. The bees neaten it up with a later of propolis after a while. Et voila! Ready for winter.
I also put away the hive that swarmed early and didn’t make it. I’ve allowed the remaining hive to rob the honey so all that’s left is drawn comb and cells of bright orange pollen around the edges. Beautiful! There are also a few supercedure cells on the vertical frames, if you look closely. I moved these boxes into the hoop house for the winter. This spring the new colony, arriving through the USPS, will have some drawn comb to make them feel at home.
The Tri-County Beekeepers Annual Meeting and Pot Luck
Thursday, November 19th, 2009After work I drove out through Bucksport, over the Verona Island bridge and out Rt. 174 to Prospect. It was dark all the way from Ellsworth, with the sun down at 4 pm and no moon. Floodlights made the long embankments around Fort Knox as clear as day though, and the amber lamps all over the Bucksport Mill lit the cloud of steam over it like a theater backdrop.
The crossroads at Rt. 174 and 1A came up faster than I expected. The road went sharply up hill, leveled out at a rail crossing and suddenly widened out into a plateau at the intersection. After four miles alone on the dark road it was startling - brilliantly lit with street lights and crowded with tractor trailers rumbling up to Bangor and back. And there, surrounded by old Volvos, older Saabs and pickup trucks of all ages, sits the Prospect Community Center.
The good citizens of Prospect built the Community Center almost two centuries ago. It is now way too close to the highway, a matter of six feet or so from the front door. The entrance has been enclosed several times, so that it is now more of a tunnel leading up sets of steps through doors and more doors. The ceilings are low, retrofitted with fluorescent lights and fans. The floor is uneven and the fixtures mismatched through 50 years of hardware store specials, but it’s still standing.
Potluck dinner first, then the meeting. The gentleman standing behind me in line said he judged pot lucks by how many moose dishes were represented. There were three moose entrees: moose balls, moose chili and moose stew, so this promised to be a fine pot luck. I will be adopting this as my personal gauge going forward.
Tony Jadczak is the Maine State apiarist. He gave a terrific talk and slide show (real slides and a pull down screen!) about the various aspects of “wintering over”. None of us can afford to put 1,000 hives in an airtight, temperature controlled building with ventilation systems for the winter, but we LOVE hearing about this stuff. There were also bee shaped cookies. Awwww.
After Tony’s talk we all shook hands, packed up our stuff and headed out into the cold and dark. I can’t wait to wrap the hives this weekend. Oh, and I won the door prize!
Late to the bees
Sunday, July 5th, 2009June in New England brought record high rainfall totals everywhere, and the few sunny hours have been on week days. I hived my bees in mid-May and have been unable to get in to check on them since. Activity levels tell me that they’ve been getting enough to eat – workers are visibly laden with pollen and my check list of flowering plants has been progressing nicely, from Labrador tea to raspberry through pea blossoms to lupine, even in the douwnpours. Today we reached a low of 38% cloud cover and I figured, to these bees, that’s sunlight. As soon as 10:30 a.m. rolled around the temperature had climbed into the low seventies. I donned full gear, figuring they would be testy, and fired up the smoker.
My primary tasks for today were to check for a laying queen (through the presence of eggs and larvae) and give them some additional living space (if necessary).I use medium supers because I’m not strong enough to move a full hive body weighing over 130 pounds.
As soon as I removed the hive top feeder I knew I was a little late to the game. You can see the extensive free comb the bees have worked in an effort to expand upsward. I took the feeders off both hives and added a medium super, propping the feeder on its back next to the hive entrance to encourage retrieval of the honey and pollen stores. This picture was taken a few minutes after I removed the feeder. The picture below is six hours later and the comb is fairly clean.
I run 9 frames in 10 frame equipment. It makes the comb a little deeper and the boxes a little lighter. It is interesting to note that the spacing of the free comb mirrors the frame spacing, even if it cants off in different angles after few inches.
These two hives are named “To Bee” and “Not to Bee”. “Not” is a nuc start hive and is still a little more populous than “To”. The bees in “Not” were completely unfazed by my invastion this morning – didn’t even come up to check me out. “To” was fairly agressive, coming up to the face veil and following me about 20′ from the hive after I was finished. Here’s a close-up of the free comb with bees still attending. It was actually fairly difficult to determine absolutely that the queen was not milling around there somewhere.
Second hive installed
Tuesday, May 26th, 2009
The nuc box after the frames have been removed to the hive. Note how many workers are already carrying pollen!
The packaged bees arrived Friday and were installed in Hive #1 (Not Two Bee). On Saturday morning, Andrew came by in his pick-up loaded with nuc boxes and we picked out a likely candidate for Hive #2 (Two Bee). Andrew had Italian, Carniolan and “other” and I suspect these are Other. They are too dark to be Italian (like Not Two Bee) and too short to be Carniolan. They were active on Saturday’s sunny afternoon and when I set the nuc box atop the hive and ripped the duct tape off the entrance they poured out into the air in a steady stream.
I waited two days before moving the frames from the nuc to the hive, to give the bees a chance to locate and begin foraging. Monday, at around 10 a.m. it was still and sunny. I opened the box (3″ screws – they weren’t going to get loose during transit!), opened the hive and lowered the frames full of bees into their new home. I added a styrene hive-top feeder with about 2 gallons of light sugar syrup and closed them up. I left the nuc on top of the hive for stragglers, and to extend the mapping process.
It’s cold tonight, 44 and dropping. When I checked on the hives as the sun was setting (around 8 p.m. this close to midsommer) no one was flying. The upper entrance on each hive was crowded with bees shifting and pawing the raw wood around the entrance. Everything seemed peaceful, all right with the world.
Empty nuc box on top of Hive #2.
Iberis (Candytuft) in bloom.
First bee post of 2009
Friday, May 22nd, 2009
box o' bees
Received today at 7:00 a.m., 3 pounds of bees and a Buckfast queen from R. Weaver Apiaries. There were very few casualties in the box, esp. considering they shipped Monday from Texas and hit a nation-wide frost day on Tuesday, followed by a heat wave yesterday. They were easy to hive; very friendly and more than ready to exchange their screened porch for a real hive. I emptied the box over the open frames, added the feeder and a gallon of spring-weight syrup, covered everything up and went inside to have a cup of tea and let them settle before I went to work. Twenty minutes later there were already guard bees checking me out when I walked in front of the hive. Tonight they seem active, but not panicked. I’ve seen them on the pear and cherry trees in the front yard – both in full blossom – and also zooming into the swamp where there is still plenty of nice, brackish water in sheltered nooks and crannies. The Brunswick Tea, peaches, flowering sedge and sambucus are all ready to flower – this is a good week to be a bee new to the neighborhood.
New colony on Pierco frames with drawn comb from last season.
Pierco frames have been very easy to work with. They’re constructed in one piece of food grade plastic dipped in beeswax. So far, the bees like them just fine, and I like not having to worry about my wax sheets and wire coming loose after the harvest.
Both hives: "Two Bee" and "Not Two".
Looking up the hill from the Great Swamp. (I’m not kidding – that’s what it’s called on a map. You could look it up.) The discarded box is at the foot of “Two Bee”, waiting for the last stragglers to give it up and move on.
Getting ready. . .
Thursday, May 7th, 2009
Tonight I painted woodenware: medium and small supers (I don’t have regular hive bodies – because I can’t lift 160 lbs), the telescoping cover with it’s steel top, a few Beemax styrene hive top feeders – they all got at least a second coat of acrylic primer finish tonight. It’s still raining, but they should be dry by tomorrow and ready to stack for the nuc I have on order.
Below is the hive’s new location, out along the forest border.
Bee post
Monday, April 20th, 2009One of the recent developments in beekeeping is “box theft”. Most professionals in the pollination business have hundreds of hives in remote locations – because commercial orchards are huge tracts of land and anyway, the whole point of hive location is to keep the bee-ways from intersecting with people movement. Bee commuters and human commuters don’t play well together. Meanwhile, bees are dying and colonies are scarce and ever more valuable. Stealing them is easy, establishing ownership of a particular box of bees is hard. There are complex solutions like dye and DNA typing, but most people brand their woodenware. It’s fast, permanent, and doesn’t bother the inhabitants. I have two hives on an island and am not feeling too threatened, but I do have a brand.
My grandfather, Louis Harrison Barnard, had a dairy farm. The barns burned (twice) and there isn’t much left except some photos and a few items that weren’t flammable. The brand is about three feet long. The handle is a smooth steel rod that has been fashioned into a loop at the top. The business end is attached to a rough rectangle about 8″ long and letters (reversed as type) have been welded to the face. This isn’t the sort of implement that was used on livestock - I imagine it was burned into the wooden milk cartons and wagon stakes and a lot of other things that went up in the fire.
Last night I made chicken on the barbeque and set the iron in the coals. Then I hauled all my new woodenware out to a gravel area and went to town.
