Beekeepers Friend

Without the benefit of research books and charts, I will tell you what I know about the Varroa Mite. It came to the USA about 1990 give or take a couple of years. It hitched a ride from Asia and came with some honeybees, either as a swarm stowaway or as a boxed hive.

The mite is a parasite that sucks the blood of the honeybee. As it sucks the blood, it transfers viruses and pathogens to the bee and these attack the immune system. Because of this, the bees get sick to the point that the they don’t want to do their jobs to the best of their ability. They don’t care for the larvae, keep the floor clean, or don’t guard the hive efficiently, and cannot collect food.

The way it happens is this: The mite is already on the bee and when she is feeding or checking on the larva that is elongating in the cell just before the cap is closed. The mite hops off the nurse bee and enters the cell and hides under the larva so the nurse cannot see or detect it. Then when the cell is closed, the mite lays two to four eggs. The first one being a drone. When the mite eggs hatch, the drone (brother) impregnates his sister(s) and then dies. The girls will then get on the pupa of the honey bee and start sucking blood. When the bee emerges as a full grown adult, the mites will either jump on another bee or stay where they are and wait till the bee starts to inspect or feed another larva that is getting ready to metamorph into another pupa and the cycle starts over again.

This usually happens in the late Summer to early Fall and early    Spring. So now, we need to count mites to see if the threshold is breached.

The mites can be taken care of either by chemicals or by non-invasive means. If you wish to know more about the chemical way, then leave me a commit and I will get back to you either by this blog site or I will send you an email. Follow the link to count mites.

That is enough for now. Plan to feed sugar syrup or corn syrup, unless you have left enough honey on your colonies to carry the bees through to Fall.

REMEMBER: It is hot, so drink plenty to water.

Sunday afternoon, I had my young beekeeper friends over to pull and extract my honey from the colonies in the back yard. We ended up with a shallow, a medium, and a deep. After extraction, there was about eight and a half gallons of honey ready to be strained and bottled.

Now you are wondering why did I have three different sizes of honey supers. Well—I’ll tell you. When I was in Arkansas April and May, a year ago, one of my beekeeper friends made a check of my hives and had to put some of his supers on.  He only uses shallows.  I got most of them back to him, but I missed some and this is one of them. I use Illinois or medium supers, but sometimes I will put a deep super (brood box) on for a honey super so the bees will draw comb so I can have an extra ten frames for when I might need them. You know, pulling frames of brood and the frame I am replacing with is old comb that needs to be melted down, or a frame is broken, or a frame with duragilt  with all the wax chewed off.

I don’t do many of the deeps as I cannot lift them without help. Sometimes I have to pull  frames of honey and brush the bees off and carry the frames to a nuc box just so I can transport to the pickup or honey house.

Anyway, back to my story. You remember that I had three hives in the back yard, well now I only have two. I found that the beetles and wax moths have moved in. Seems that the bees decided to vacate the premises for reasons unknown. I had opened the top of the hive and found webbing in the second super. I will have to clean all the boxes sometime this week and I will post what I have found. I do know that the Small Hive Beetle larvae are all over the top super and assume that is the case throughout the hive.

Are all you out there ready for the Dearth from now to Fall (which is the bee’s Winter)? I hope you left at least a medium or two shallows of honey for each of your hives. They really need honey as a food. Also as a side note, I have a friend in Argentina, Oscar Perone, who has an article that is interesting.It is in English so you can read and understand. Talks about the Nosema Ceranae parasite that is the real cause of CCD, with the help of beekeepers. Go figger. hehe Good reading anyway. Another article that you might want to read. This one talks about the reason you shouldn’t feed sugar to the bees. My thoughts for a little over two years, but I didn’t know how to put it in writing. One more link is from UK, Caroline van Issum has a blog that is informative.

Now to get back to reading some more bee books. Happy 4th of July!!

Here is an article that I found on another forum and thought you might like to read it just because. It is about some pre-teenagers from the southern part of Maryland that have started keeping bees as a school project.

Now to give an update on the observation hive. I really think the queen is out of the OBH. There is more bees outside than inside. There is at least two groups of bees in the neighborhood of the hive and I cannot seem to get them to move. I will probably end up putting a frame of brood, open and capped along with some eggs, in the bottom of the OBH and move the frame of foundation up to the honey section. But for now, I will just let you enjoy the article.

Stay cool and hydrated! it is hot all across the US of A.

I finally replaced the brood frame with foundation in the observation hive. Yeepee! I had put it off as long as I possibly could. I made all kinds of excuses for not doing the thing I should have done a month and a half ago. First, I was not feeling well, then it was too hot, after that, I was going to let my young protegee help me so she would get some more experience in an area that she has not been in yet. All this was to be on a Saturday. But that didn’t work out as she had company, then I was  on a bee talk, then it was Mother’s day weekend and she was out of town, then it sprinkled enough that I called it off, then she didn’t answer the phone, and so forth and so on. I really needed to work the OBH so today I did it.

The bees had plugged the two frames with honey and left no empty cells for the queen to lay eggs in. The top frame was capped and I decided today to remove the capped honey and put it outside for the bees to rob and put the brood frame up stairs so the bees could finish the honey and cap it out.

I had a frame already put together with a Duragilt foundation ready for  installation. For those of you who have an inquisitive mind, Duragilt is a very thin piece of wax coated plastic that has been ran through the imprinter that has two pieces of metal, tin I think, on the two narrow  sides.  The imprinter embosses the starter cells  for the bees to built the comb upon. I really don’t use that kind of foundation anymore, but I have a box of it left so I use it occasionally for emergencies.

Let’s get back to the story. After putting the brood frame into the bottom section of the observation hive, I then proceeded to put the top story back on the stack and snapped it together with screen door latches. I really looked for the queen, but there were so many bees everywhere that I didn’t find her. I would really prefer to get her marked so the kids would stop asking where she is and I wouldn’t have to say, ” I don’t know”. I would just say, “She is marked, find her.”

But alas! I didn’t find her and I really don’t think I will be tearing down the OBH before the honey is capped. And at that time, I will probably just replace the top frame and let it go at that. hehe

By the way, I have gotten one of my other observation hives fairly cleaned and almost ready to put some bees in. My partner in bee talks and I could have used the extra OBH today as the 4H leader split us up to do two different age groups. We only had one hive between us and I got it for the k-2 grades. His older students didn’t get to see the bees today and that was a bummer for them. But maybe the next time.

Okay, I have to get outside and make sure the bees are working on the new foundation and make sure that most of them are in the hive, so I’ll talk to you later and give you a  report on the meeting tomorrow.

Good night and have a good weekend.

Today, I had a young beekeeper and her husband over to get ready to pull honey and extract. I was disappointed to say the least. I had visions of about 100 pounds of raw honey.

First we had to clean the extractor by piecing sections of pipe from the extractor out the door and to a five gallon bucket with a strainer to catch any wax we flushed out.

I had somehow left 4 frames in the extractor the last time I used it and had forgotten about it. We found that the wax moths didn’t want anything to do with the frames, but there were several spiders that did.

After wiping the webs out and washing the extractor with cold water to keep from melting the wax that was stuck on the basket and sides, we decided to let the extractor air dry while we checked the three hives in the back yard. I was already planning on boiling some water to sterilize the extractor when we moved the honey supers into the honey house.

As it was, when we checked the first hive, which was in the past, a pretty rambunctious colony, we found that the bees had probably replaced the queen that might have been missing the last time. This time they were really nice and docile. We didn’t find the queen, but we saw young larvae and lots of sealed brood. In fact, the queen had been laying in the honey super. We moved the deep super that we had put on the top of the hive down to the top of the deep brood box and forgot to bring up a frame of honey to encourage the bees to check out the new cavity. At the time I thought that the bees would find it anyway as they crossed the new deep on their way up to the honey super that had some brood in it. I will have to check it in a day or two before I make a judgment.

By the time we finished the first hive, lunch was being put on the table so we broke and ate. After lunch, my young protege, who is pregnant by the way, was not feeling so good so we just sat there and talked about the bees and how to super without using any foundation.

If you have some drawn comb then alternate comb and empty frame. The bees will pull the frame out and make a descent comb there.  As it was, I didn’t have any drawn comb and only had limited waxed plastic inserts. so I was planning to use foundation alternated with empty frames just to see if it would work. I will have to check the other two colonies before I try this as I may still have some honey to extract and that will give me some drawn comb to spread around to the colonies so I can get some more supers into the works.

My wife and I ended up going over to our friends’ house to look at their 3 hives to see what I could see and tell them if they were working the bees correctly. Here is what I found.

One colony had swarmed and was holding it’s own trying to rebuild it’s numbers. The second colony had been split and was still looking very strong. The third colony was the split moved to the other side of the yard and turned 180 degrees so the door was facing North. Actually with the trees and brush on the north side of the yard, there was a good wind block and the door could have stayed that way, but we still turned the hive 90 degrees and will leave it that was for a day or two so the bees can find the door again. Then they will turn the hive another 90 degrees so the door will face South so the sun can hit the door in the early morning and get the bees to working faster. They will have to work hard because most of the workers that was transported to the split have already gone back to the mother colony.

Time will tell. That is the neat thing about being a beekeeper, you can always experiment or not as you wish. This is one way to learn your bees and what they are capable of doing.

Summer is here so that means the bees are in their Fall. Just keeping them alive from here to August will be an accomplishment. If they are weak on food at that time, you need to feed them so they can have lots of babies going into our Fall which is their Winter.

More on that subject coming soon. Until then, keep you veil handy, your smoker lit, and you hive tool sharp.

I guess that I have not gotten too far behind in posting. I see that the last post was on the first of this month so that means that I need to think of some reason to post another one soon. I have let the bees rest for 3 1/2 weeks since I split and/or went through them. I did put the honey I took off of the bees on the new split so the beetles wouldn’t get too rambunctious. However, since the split was really a nuc, I may not have had enough bees to patrol all the extra rooms and space. I may have let the honey be destroyed! That would be my fault, and my just reward. I knew better. Well, since I have not yet looked at the honey, I may be surprised.

My thoughts were to extract this past weekend, but my darling spouse decided that we could afford to take off the weekend and go to Texarkana to a family reunion that had been brewing for some time. We rented a little Chevy compact, I forget what model, and left here about 7:00 am and arrived about 7:30 pm. For a trip that was supposed to take 9 hours, it wasn’t hard to make it last over 12 hours, but we did get 30.9 mpg. My brother-in-law rented a midsized sedan and got 35+ mpg. Who would have guessed? Anyway, we had a grand old time and renewed acquaintances and shared memories with several people.

The trip back was just as uneventful as the half going up there. We took all of yesterday and this morning just resting up from the trip. Now it is time to get to planning my visit to the bee yard on the other side of the swimming pool in my back yard. Probably wouldn’t hurt to mow the grass so I can at least walk on the grass rather than through it. hehe.

Be sure to not take all the honey from your bees at this time. In some places it is a drought from now to November. That is unless you are planning to feed sugar syrup or corn syrup. Then you need to keep on top of the situation so your bees will not starve to death. Also check the pollen supply. You may have to think of feeding some pollen substitute.

Otherwise, sit back and enjoy your little girls. Sometimes I set a chair close to the hives so I can just sit there and watch the little buggers come and go and watch the interactions at the doorways. You can learn a lot if you just sit back and smell the roses and watch.

Until next time, keep your veil handy, your smoker lit, and your hive tool sharp.

Well…just thought you might like to know, the observation hive of the last post surprised me. All the brood had hatched out and I just let the bees chill for a couple of days (more like a week and a half). I finally got around to deciding to call my beekeeper friend to see if I could have a frame of brood. But before I did that, I thought that I should check on the bees so I could answer any questions that he might have about the condition of the observation hive and bees within it.

I went out to the patio and opened both customed built solid sideboards to check on the bees. WOW! There was a frame of sealed brood on both sides! At least one of the two queen cells carried a developed queen in it. I have seen her two times since then and wished that I could have gotten her out to mark her, but to me, it is more trouble than it is worth. In fact, she has a small brood area in the honey frame up stairs. I am so happy I could jump up and down if it didn’t hurt so much. (Remember, I am 5′ 7″ tall and carry 325 plus lbs on two very used 70 year old knees.)

This is not my observation hive. I am just the custodian of it with the use as my payment for keeping it alive. I will have another one ready soon (my own this time) and will be working on another one just to say that I have an extra one or two to swap out so the one will not get too stressed out from over use in the schools.

I still do not have a camera to help get some pictures into my posts, but I can’t quite remember to get one until I need it and by the time I get home, I have forgotten about it.

Gallberry and Privet are blooming in my area now and the Tupelo flow is over or, at least nearly over with now. Palmetto Palm is getting ready to bloom in the next two weeks or so. I hope you have your extractors cleaned and ready. Some of you will be be extracting now and some will be extracting off and on for the next four to six months depending on the different honey flows and if you want to keep the specialty honeys separated.

Also, you can melt your wax down to 25 lb. blocks and send them to the supply house that you use primarily and they will trade supplies to you for your wax. I say this because I found that I have accumulated something like six 5 gallon buckets along with several of my wife’s pots and pans of wax cappings. These cappings are real good for making candles for gifts and sales.

There I go mixing several subjects into one post and I will probably be hearing from my Number 2 son. He will be trying hard not to chew my uh huh out for doing a no-no. I have no intentions of changing this post now. I worked too hard to get it finished as it is.

Have a good day and remember, you need to read–read–read.

Just in case you are new to this site, my back yard has been the deposit point for several observation hives in the area. I seem to be the only one able to keep the bees alive for any length of time. I did have three last year, but they finally died in November. Not enough bees to keep the place warm. I have been thinking of some kind of wrap that might help keep them warm.

I now have an OBH that all the babies have hatched out before the queen cells hatched. They might not anyway because I think the cells were squashed against the glass when I put the OBH in the front seat to strap it in. I forgot to stand the back straight up.

I don’t have a frame of brood to spare so I may have to go to one of my beekeeping friends and beg a frame from him. I wonder if I have a good friend left now.

If you would like to know a little more about me, go to the top of this page and you will see some links that will help you understand where I am coming from.

By the way, I hope you have some extra boxes ready because the swarm season is in full swing and you will need those boxes to collect the girls in.

Keep you veil handy, your smoker lit, and your hive tool sharp.

Since my last post, I have had the privilege of talking 16 times to: 4 H groups at seven different schools, three different festivals, and 2 different garden clubs that spanned six weeks. I am getting ready to do some more promotion on bees at several more festivals in the near future.

I just went through three hives with two new beekeepers explaining what I was looking for (basically anything that was not normal in the hive),  splitting, and pulling honey at the same time. On the first hive, I found about 6-10 queen cells still capped. No need of splitting them. I will have to monitor this hive to be sure that I keep the brood level replaced until the new queen can start laying.

The second hive was pretty hostile and the brood frames were not filled out as much as I had hoped. I may have to replace the queen and see if I can get the meanness knocked out of them and get their numbers up.

The third hive, that all I have done to it in the last five years was to pull honey and replace the supers, was gone through with some regrets. I really didn’t want to destroy the relationship I had with this colony. However, it is a survivor and I really want some more colonies just like it. In order to to that, I must split and develop some queens from the parent hive.

I put deep supers on all three hives and I will wait until the split is strong and put one on it if we still have a honey flow. I did this just so I could have some extra comb for future splits and/or swarms. I also replaced the solid bottom board with screened bottom boards (1/8″ hardware cloth). Only one was not replaced. It was screwed to the hive body and I didn’t take a Phillips screwdriver with me.

I did see Small Hive Beetles in all my colonies. I will have to go back and treat for them soon unless I can get the bees strong enough to corral them. I really did not see any Varroa Mites but, I will be treating with powdered sugar in the near future. When I get time, I will take a Phillips screwdriver and a screened bottom board and exchange the one I didn’t get to the last time.

I did pull 3 medium supers of honey and then put them on the split so the hive beetles would not work on them before I was ready to extract. That is scheduled to take place this next Saturday.

Gotta go and get ready for bed. Dr’s. appointment in the morning.

I answered a forum question with a short and sweet answer. I think that I might have been kinda insensitive and quick. The question was:

Peaches,

I transferred my bees to all new hive equipment. I put a new box on top of each the new colonies I am starting from the nucs I brought home. ( I have all medium supers) Everything looks great except that they are consuming sugar water at a crazy rate …..but what do I know I am very , very new… Is this normal?

The longer answer is two fold. 1) Yes, if the bees are in a nuc form and there is a dearth going on. 2) And yes, this is normal if the bees are in a package and just came from the shipper or you just hived a swarm.  Either way you will probably have some new foundation that needs to be drawn out.

1) The bees are putting the sugar water up for storage. The bees know there is no food out there. They have already had scouts out looking.

2) As far as the second answer, here is what I tell the new beekeepers that I am mentoring. You really don’t know how long the bees have been caged up and how long they have been in transit. You don’t know how much honey they had a chance to tank up on before they were caged up for shipment. They need some of that honey for energy. Sure, they have been sent to you with a can of sugar syrup, but do you know the mixture? Was it 1:1 or 2:1 or was it cut to 1/2:1? Second part: if you have a swarm how long ago did they swarm? How far have they flown? What are their honey reserves at now?

Bees manufacture everything in the hive except for propolis. In order for the queen to be able to lay eggs, the workers have to build a comb so she has a place to put her eggs. Here is the way I understand it to happen.

Whether a package or swarm, the bees have to have honey, sugar syrup, or high fructose corn syrup for energy to live, to fly, and to manufacture wax. When you receive a package, you need to feed lots of syrup, preferably 2:1 (2 parts of sugar and 1 part water). the same for a swarm.

The young  worker bees will chain themselves to each other and are fed honey or syrup so they can manufacture flakes of wax from eight wax glands located in the abdomen, four on each side. These flakes are almost water clear and the older worker bees will take these flakes and mold them with their mandibles and start construction of the cells, usually in the center of the frame or cross ways of the branch. As a cell is started, the queen will begin laying eggs forcing the workers to hurry and finish the cell. In the meantime some of the older forgers will start to collect nectar and pollen forcing the construction of honey cells away from the brood area.

There will not be a whole lot of extra nectar to store at this point as it takes anywhere from 6 – 8 pounds of honey to make 1 pound of wax. So the majority of the nectar brought in is fed directly to the wax manufacturers. At this point, there is limited nectar so the beekeeper needs to feed the bees. The food in this case is real close to the colony and they can work faster. If the bees have to look for the food any distance from the colony, then it will take more time to build the comb.

Now you have an idea of why we need to feed new colonies. If we already have comb, then the bees don’t have to build so much and can devote their time and resources to filling up the cells with minimal wax repairs.

If you still have questions, then the best place to get them answered is your mentor or at your local bee meeting.

You need to check your hives for weight and add empty supers if need be for the extra honey. Enjoy the new Spring time honey flow.