Monthly Archives: August 2012

Sometimes it seems that beekeeping is one drama after another. In the spring, it felt like we ran after a new swarm every two days. We spent late nights pounding out brood boxes and frames to keep our winged livestock happy and honey-producing.

In the late summer, we have a different kind of drama. During routine hive inspections, we discovered that two of our hives are queenless. One, as far as we can tell, has taken no steps to raise a new queen. The other, with barely any bees left in the hive is clinging to a pocked, peanut-shaped queen cell.

For reference, this is what queen cells look like when they are produced via “grafting” by bee breeders. The cells look the same in a hive, but they are dispersed across wax comb.

Of course, Kelly and I went into instant panic mode. We usually do this while brushing our teeth, or attempting to run out the door to work. The question is what to do, and the answer, as always, is complicated by a muddle of reason, emotion, and doubt.

If we believe in survival of the fittest and want to breed strong, local, survivor bees, we do nothing and let the hives almost certainly die out. Or do we? We suspect it’s too late in the season for a virgin queen to find drones to mate with even if the small hive can successfully care for its queen cell.

This means that, no matter what, the genetics in the two queenless hives won’t carry on directly (though who knows how many drones from these hives may have mated with other queens over the course of the season).

Playing God with honey bees

We’re left with two options for keeping the bees alive. First, we can combine the colonies with one that has a healthy laying queen. The advantage here is that the bees can pool their food resources and workforce, in theory increasing their odds of survival as a colony. The downsides are that they may also swap diseases and pests and that we will have fewer hives than we do now.

The second option is combining the queenless hives and purchasing a mated queen for them (or frantically hunting for a late swarm, combining it with the queenless hives and crossing our fingers that the swarm queen is not a virgin).  Either way, the idea is to introduce a new queen and let the bees take care of the rest. But can they?

I put in a call to a guild member who placed an order for queens from a breeding facility this week. At this time of year, a mated queen bee will run you about $25. He urged us not to go the re-queening route because he doubted that the queenless bees had enough young nurse bees remaining to care for the brood that a mated queen would lay.

As usual, the bees throw a curveball

In the midst of our decision-making (or lack thereof), nearly all of the bees from the more populous queenless hive took off, bringing me back to the question: do we really keep bees?

Next time we discover a queenless hive, we’ll know to act more quickly to combine or re-queen, as we’ve now heard from others that bees frequently take off and attempt to join another colony if their own is without a queen or a queen cell.

We’ve gone into damage control, drastically reducing the hive entrances to allow remaining bees a better chance of defending against robber bees. Tomorrow, Kelly will combine the two queenless colonies, and if no swarms show up (ha!) we will probably add the doubled up hives to Dave, one of this year’s strongest colonies.

This whole experience reminds us of last fall, when we lost three out of four of our hives between late September and mid-November. The first died of pesticide poisoning, the second was something of a mystery, and the third suffered from the famed Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). This year, we seem to be getting off to an early start.

Keeping bees?

One of our beehive hosts recently sent us a link to a portion of Eddy Izzard’s classic beekeeping skit. It’s a highly comical, if not entirely accurate take on beekeeping. At the end of the day, I have to agree with Izzard: sometimes beekeepers do lose it. Sometimes we are covered in bees, and the veil and gloves aren’t enough to protect us.

As Izzard suggests, Keeping bees is a strange term. How do you keep a group of winged creatures that numbers in the tens of thousands, communicates, organizes, makes some decisions democratically, and routinely moves on to new homes without your help? It might be more appropriate to say that we manipulate bees (or attempt to do so).

Listen to the bees

I’m a naïve second year beekeeper with minimal experience harvesting honey, in part because 75% of our hives last year bit the dust. We didn’t use our smoker much last year; the bees seemed mellow enough, and the smoke was difficult to direct (most of it always seemed to gush out the leaky backend).

This year, we are using it more. But when I found myself sans lighter at a recent hive inspection, I decided to go ahead without the smoke. I should have known better. The bees are cranky lately, eager to rob other hives and defensive against the possibility of losing their own hard-earned stores.

It was late afternoon when I opened the hive in question. The sun was on the entrance, and the bees were very active–more active, in fact, than I’d ever seen them. I removed the lid and inner cover and immediately detected the telltale scent of banana oil—bee attack pheromone.

The defensive hive in early summer when it was just a wee colony (I didn’t dare take any photos at my recent botched inspection attempt).

I’m young and stupid; I kept going. It was when I lifted out the first side frame in the upper brood box that I realized how mad they were. They rose up out of the hive in an angry, buzzing, cloud. My first irrational thought was that they were about to swarm on the spot. I have only ever seen that many bees issue from a hive when it is swarming. But these bees were not honey-heavy, nor were they house hunting.

The activity was so intense that I knew I had to halt my inspection. Unfortunately, the bees were spilling over the edge of the brood box, and there seemed no way to replace the inner cover without squishing multitudes. I speed-walked away across the backyard (the one Olympic sport I’m fairly good at).

I returned to the hive after several minutes, but the commotion had by no means settled. Instead, a group of bees instantly picked up my scent and was after me. I was stung once on each shoulder through my heavy suit and shirt. So much for a sense of security and protection.

It was a full twenty minutes before I finally managed to approach the hive from a different direction and replace the inner cover and lid with minimal carnage. Even then, a group of bees followed me to the foot of the yard, repeatedly body slamming my veil in their quest to sting my face. I stood still with my heart pounding and made a feeble attempt at Metta, a Buddhist meditation practice centered on loving-kindness.

When the bees finally moved on, I jumped in my car, still suited up with both shoulder bee stings flaming, and went shopping for a consolation jug of grapefruit juice.

I’m struck by how quickly a mild-mannered hive can become aggressive when winter food stores are threatened. These bees paid me no mind when I walked up to them. They weren’t out to get me until I breached their home. I’m also struck by how effective smoke is at keeping bees from becoming agitated in the first place. We are using eucalyptus bark harvested at a nearby high school to fuel our smoker, and boy has it worked when we’ve bothered to light it.