Old new equipment

This is an old bear damaged hive body.  It took a hit from a bear long ago in Amherst. It hung around the apirary mostly as a place to store old frames and whatnot. After all my bees came through winter looking strong it became apparent I would need a lot of equipment come split season.  

People have many strategies for preventing swarms and mine is to split the bees in a way that replicates a natural swarm but on my terms.  It happens where and when I want and the bees wind up where I choose. It's a great technique but it also means that I need a lot of equipment, albeit temporarily, to house those bees. To that end I repaired this old hive body. 

There's a lot of skills in beekeeping but a really basic one is planning.  That's all this is, just planning. Have equipment before you need it.  You can order a ready hive body to be at your apiary in a hour. You can read all the theory in the world, and even be a dab hand in the yard but without the resources you need in place when you need them it doesn't do any good.

Counting bees at the hive entrance.

I made a few quick videos to show how I count bees to gauge hive strength, the time or the total number of the count doesn't matter but the cadence does. Sometimes, I do not even count out loud.  When you start to trip over your own tongue that means you have a very strong hive and should worry about splitting. When you absolutely cannot keep count with landing bees you hive will almost surely swarm. 

This hive is moderately strong and will likely need swarm prevention, splitting in my case, sometime in late April or May.  

Here's a video of a double nuc that came from a late September swarm.  I housed it and didn't think much of it.  The hive even full over in the winter but still survived. This hive is less strong than the other one but still OK.  Counting landings means that you can gauge strength that might otherwise be masked by different entrances or landing boards.  It's a simple quantitative measure. 

All my hives use these same red hive entrance reducers which are supposed to reduce small hive beetle, and they may or may not, but it does take the bees around an hour to learn them and I think this also helps stop robbing. When these entrances clog up with returning bees on a honey flow the hive must absolutely be split. 

In this last video you can see bees entering a moderately strong hive but they're all going in on the left side. They're brining in a lot of pollen and the pollen sources look fairly diverse. What stands out to me is that almost all the activity is on the right side of the hive.  To me, that means I will find the brood nest there so I probably want to pull frames from the left side of the hive to open that up so that I am not pulling frames of eggs, brood, or the queen up and possibly rolling the queen. Seeing this imbalance influences where I will stand and start an inspection. 

Overall, I am trying to do less invasive inspections where the hive is opened up and bees are smoked. I am trying to learn more from external observation.  Take time out before you open a hive for observation, just look at the hive and don't be in a run.  Imagine what you'll see inside.  In time you will be able to look at a hive and have a pretty good idea what' going on inside without opening it up. My goal is to stop needlessly opening hives and disrupting their lives. Stop breaking their propolis seal and let them be bees.  I also don't have endless time.  So, a less intervention approach can benefit both me and the bees. 

100% winter survival.

 

100% of our bees made it through winter.  Commercial operations nationally lost over 50% nationally.  In my mind, anyways, this is a bigger deal than 'colony collapse' from 20 years ago.  Now, nobody cares. There's such a shit show in Washington right now that nobody can pay attention.  The government will not respond. 

You can see our bees here photographed on March 4th.  We're using a clear plastic cover now so we can observe them without disturbance. 

Siberian squill

Siberian squill is a garden plant run wild.  You'll find it up by Capen Garden at Smith and around Round Hill Road.  It's also on State street. it's an invasive that you'll find nodding its head in the shade.  It's a demure little flower that you might not notice and it's far prettier up close. 

It's around at a time of year when we're not looking for flowers but bees are. Big daffodils hog the attention and snowdrops too, but squill is there, pretty and quiet in the shade. It's the only blue flower I know of that also makes blue pollen.

Squill is out at the same time as the mat green maple pollen and it's often too cold for bees to fly when it's here.  There must be thousands of times more maple trees but the bees faithfully bring in quite a lot of squill so they must like it. 

 When bees bring in squill they can build up strong before dandelion and fruit trees hit and they can field more bees for those crops.  Squill and maple are a big boost early int eh season when bees have neither resources or numbers. It's an auspicious start to the season.

We're back, again.

It's been a while since Northampton Honey produced any honey to sell.  My work situation changed and it was no longer practical to try an keep bees for honey production.  I wound up working more than I did when we started Northampton Honey. The trees grew up in our yard and made it too shady for bees. 

There were a couple of false starts along the way. We wound up owning a little vacant lot after we bought and dissembled a warehouse there, giving the parts to Habitat for Humanity.  We also remediated an oil spill too, cleaning up the land.  We've now planted it in clover to enrich the neglected soil.  It seemed only natural to bring back bees as well. 

We've had bees there since last spring, and they're doing great.  We hope this year we can extract a bit of honey for friends, family and for some for sale on a very small scale. 

There's a lot of changes that are happening in our beekeeping, all for the better.  One is that our bees will reside in boxes made by Union Bee Company next year. These boxes have roughened insides that would be more like a natural tree.  This causes bees to deposit propolis there.  This is sap they've collected from tree wounds.  It's naturally antibiotic and antiviral because trees use that special sap to heal wounds. 

This acts as a kind of shell that protects the bees. It's the first line of defense. Our smooth hives don't encourage this behavior and this makes bees vulnerable. 

Union Bee Company is a little company round an hour away.  He's a small time bee keeper and woodworker.  The wood for the hives is locally sourced and milled by him right into the hives and woodenware he sells. He's clearly thinking about how to make a better product with every product he sells. 

Because he keeps bees himself there's a level of practicality in figuring out what makes things better is a meaningful way. He said he made 500 top bars, part of a frame that holds comb for bees, before he was satisfied that he'd gotten it correct. 

Northampton Honey is coming back as something that is better than it was and I think sourcing product from small makers like this makes us better.

 

This year's bees look as good at this time of year as I have ever seen bees look. I've been taking a lot of these slow motion videos because it helps me understand just how fast the bees move.  They're actually a bit bumbly in flight, more like zeppelins than jets. 

We now have been on our vacant lot and may soon have some in Florence again.  We didn't really have great spaces for a bee yard but that's changed. My friend Kari kept bees through what I think of as the dark times.  Mites were super bad when we stopped.  The best treatment was Mite Away Quick Strips but it was awful.  It was as likely to kill your bees as it was to do in the mites.  I've been following Kari lead and I am optimistic that one can again keep bees successfully. 

What makes a good bee?

 In the beekeeping world you'll see a lot of emphasis on pedigree bees. I suppose this is a lot like the dog world or the horse world or the British royalty.  The headlines didn't say "rich old lady dies" they said the Queen is dead. They said that Charles will succeed her, as if just showing up and claiming the riches is success. 

I've toyed around with pedigree bees having had most of the major lines, and even Buckfast bees, so rare they're bred on remote islands to preserve their genetics. You also hear a lot about 'northern queens' which is a more generic term for bees that come from the north, like New England or Idaho, I would imagine.  

I'm less skeptical of northern queens than I am of pedigree, because it just seems to mean bees that have survived the winter. That's good for us, because we have a winter. 

Over the years I've become more and more enamored of swarm queens. What this really comes down to is nature over nurture. Most queen bees that you can get commercially are raised in a kind of farming fashion. 

The bees are made to raise many queens at once in a small box called a nuc. They do all right and the queens from this process can be good. 

My problem with it is that it's not how the bees would go about doing it.  In an what I am going to call an 'abundance swarm' the bees have survived the winter and charge ahead raising queens and getting ready to swarm.  The hive is literally abuzz with activity.  In the preceding weeks before the swarm this hive and all the other strong hives locally have been launching drones into the air in preparation. 

A complex reaction of pheromones and activity mean the whole hive of tens of thousands of bees, maybe 40-50,000 bees kicks into gear to raise perhaps a dozen queens. Everything that happens is a result of surplus. 

Like a rich household everything is supplied to these queens in abundance.  The bees that supply the queen with royal jelly are young bees with special glands developed to this task. In an abundance swarm these bees will number in the thousands, they will be just the right age, they will be optimally fed. Every bee along the way in that queens development, and there are many hundreds, is primed and ready for the job. 

When that queen emerges to go on her mating flight she will first murder every possible usurper to the throne before she takes to the air. It's hard to overstate the savageness and power of a swarm raised queen. 

A swarm raised queen is by definition of northern queen that has survived the winter. She's got the lineage of a hive that was strong enough in spring to produce in abundance. This is before she even launches into the air. 

When she goes on her mating flight she takes to the air and flies into a sea of drones from all the most powerful neighboring hives.  The other hives that survived winter in enough abundance to make useless drones who do no work and gather no nectar. 

What's more these drones are rich and varied.  The queen will mate with many to get enough seamen to lay the hundreds of thousands of bees she'll lay in her life. Like a litter of multicolored kittens these bees will have many fathers.  In my own bees now I can see the variation, bees both dark and like, orange and yellow. 

It's said a swarm in May is worth a load of hay; a swarm in June is worth a silver spoon; but a swarm in July is not worth a fly.  This was because the later the swarm came the harder it would be for them to become strong enough to survive winter.  

I see that children's rhyme a bit different, linked to the value of a swarm queen.  That May swarm queen will fly into the densest population of drones from the strongest hives in the region. In June this is probably still mostly true. But those drones will be mixed with package bees that came in from the south.  By July she'll be mating with the results of disaster swarms too, were hives just pump put drones as a last chance cheap chance to procreate. These will mostly be package bees from the south that first year beekeepers got in killed straight away 

This genetic variance from successful mating is shown to keep the hive strong.  Like a town of people it takes all types. The variation probably helps the bees fight off disease because not every bee is the same.  They're not a monocrop. Yes, give me a swarm queen every time.

We started using a method called the Tranov method. This method does a lot of things but, in theory, it can cause the bees to swarm into the object of my choice.

This method is hard.  As shown here it's easy to mess up and not have a swarm queen but just have a swarm and lose half your bees, your best bees and have the whole hive set back weeks

The trickier part of Taranov is timing it right to prevent the swarm from happening. Someday I will be able to time this accurately and everyone will think I am a genius. Until then I will keep trying. 

I think that to large part people project onto bees their own prejudice. There's a broad divide between the survivalist, right wing beekeepers and the left wing hippies. They have their own take on what works and why. Not ever one for pedigree or respecting one's betters I think I am naturally predisposed to the wild, promiscuous mutt queens.  Honestly, how can you not be under the spell of the wild, promiscuous mutt queen?