My bees doing their washboarding thing

I happened to notice one of my honeybee hives this afternoon having a 'washboard day'...really going to town on it. Washboarding is a bee behavior that is not entirely understood yet. You can see the bees move forward and back rhythmically, shuffling their front feet around on the surface of the hive, usually near the entrance. Perhaps they are merely cleaning the area, or perhaps they are applying some scent or substance and polishing it onto the surface.
I love to watch them do this.

July 5th

I played my banjo yesterday.

It was about 95F out, hot as blazes. Brian and I went to a friend's house to jump in their pool while they were off on vacation somewhere. Nothing like swimming in someone else's pool. After cooling off we played some fiddle tunes in the cool basement kitchen there with a guitar playing friend, and ate the salad I picked fresh from our vegetable garden just two hours before, topped with slivers of purple kohlrabi and neon orange nasturtium blossoms reminiscent of fireworks. Went home just before dark and my bees were bearding in the heat, hanging in a bee trapezesque glob from the hive, wings frailing in a blur like a million tiny exhaust fans hard at work.

The end of June

Well it's just about the end of June now, Summer is here. The vegetable garden is bursting full. Here, the bee's borage is stealing the scene at the front of the middle bed, a three foot high constellation of pure twilight colored flowers, looking like blue shooting stars cascading from stems of furry pink...

Hard to believe that this previous photo was from May 13th, a mere six weeks or so ago:
Everything except the tomatoes was grown from seed planted directly in the ground.


Back to today... A view from the far end of the garden. Along the left rear bed are tomatoes, cucumbers, and sunflowers all supported by stakes.

Today after breakfast I spent a couple hours pulling out some patches of lettuce, radish, and spinach that were way past their prime and just beginning to get tough and bitter. Into the compost bin it all went (a giant wheelbarrow packed full), and I hoed up the spaces and planted various new seed. It was rejuvenating in a spiritual sort of way.
Years ago I never could have brought myself to yank all those greens out if any of it was still remotely edible. But I've changed my ways...I'm ruthless now! Of course knowing that it gets composted and thus cycled back in again makes it seem less awful. The reward is the joy I get from planting tiny new seeds with my bare hands...tucking them tenderly into the soil like tiny babies, gently patting a fine coverlet of soil over them.

I have small green tomatoes growing now, sunflower heads forming, tiny 1/2" baby cucumbers on the vines. I am getting to know some of the lettuce varieties better, so I know what I will plant more of next year and which types I won't repeat. Definitely more purple kohlrabi next year!

This was yesterday's dinner...
Adding little fresh chevre or mozzarella is the final touch along with the dressing:

The honeybees continue to expand their population and stores, so I added the first medium honey supers on top of each hive a few days ago. I am for the first time using foundationless frames in the new supers, and hopefully the bees will soon begin to draw all their own comb in the new frames, using just the popsicle stick guides I glued in along the tops as a base to start comb building from. We shall see!

My garden after a misty rain

I went out into my vegetable garden to take a few photos right after a morning rain. There was a beautiful intensity to the light, and everything was wet and sparkling. Click on any picture to see it bigger.

Purple kohlrabi.



I took a picture of this tiny yellow fly. It wasn't until I looked at the photo close up that I saw that it had pink eyes.


This is the beginning of a sunflower bud.



Variegated nasturtium leaves.



Kale leaves with rain drops.



One of my honeybees on a calendula blossom.



A ghostly dew-covered spiderweb on speckled lettuce.



This beautiful emerald green visitor comes by regularly. I think it is a small bee species, but I'm not quite sure yet.



My borage is starting to bloom. Twilight blue stars covered in diamonds.
I planted borage for the bees, so far it is attracting bumblebees.






'Divina butterhead' lettuce.



'Bull's Blood' beets.



'Quatre Saisons' French lettuce.



A purple finch made a nest right in a hanging basket of lobelia on our kitchen porch.
Sadly, when the eggs were only about a week old the nest was robbed and completely empty, and the mother finch had left. I suspect bluejays.

Checking bee pupae for mites

Ok some might find this a little gross or even heartless, but it's for the overall good of the bees.

My honeybees came from a 'natural minded' beekeeper who doesn't treat with pesticides for mite control or antibiotics for disease control. They seem pretty healthy and I've had them about six weeks. But one of the biggest problems honeybees face these days is varroa mites. Just about all hives in the U.S. have them now, or else they get them from nearby hives, so it's good to periodically get an idea of just how many mites there are amongst your hive population. Monitoring mite levels can give you a warning when something is going wrong and give you time to correct it in various ways.

To check for my hives' mite load, I first put a frame of specifically sized drone (male bee) foundation in each of my two hives. Varroa mites particularly target the larger drone cells in which to breed, attaching themselves to the drone larvae and pupae, sucking on them while the pupae develops in the capped cell, and emerging already attached to the adult drone bee. The affected drone bee is weakened and sometimes deformed by the mites, and the mite reproductive cycle continues.

Yesterday I removed the two 'mite bait' frames of capped drone brood from my hives, put them in the freezer overnight to quickly kill the larvae and whatever mites might be there, then I thawed the frames today to examine them.
I was delighted to find almost no mites at all on the drone larvae and pupae. I pulled about 30 dead drone pupae from their cells, and among the 30 I found only one lone varroa mite.

In this picture you can see the capped drone brood still on the frame in the background, and on the paper towel a few grub-like drone be larvae, and some immature developing drone bee pupae with darkening eyes. I removed the single little red mite I found on one pupae and placed it on the paper towel to the right in the photo so you could see it. It looks like a shiny little reddish-brown bead with tiny legs.

When these varroa mites run rampant they can destroy a whole hive of bees. But if their population remains modest the bees have little trouble living with them.
My drone pupae examination was very encouraging! I needn't worry about combating mites at the moment. I put the thawed drone frames back in the hives where they had been. The worker bees will quickly clean out the dead pupae, repair the comb, and the queen will lay new drone eggs in it. I will now let the bees raise the next couple of batches of drones in peace. I'll probably check the mite levels again in about 6 weeks.

If there had been a lot of mites, I would start more regularly pulling and freezing those drone frames when they are capped, since that is where the varroa mite concentrates its breeding activity. Some beekeepers use this mite 'bait frame' method to keep mite populations under control instead of using miticide/pesticide applied inside the hive to kill the mites. I would much rather freeze some drone pupae than apply pesticides to my hives. The bees do raise additional drones on the edges of 'regular' brood frames anyway, so there will always be some drones in the hive to mate with nearby queens.
But for now, I can relax... my bees are doing well on their own.

Vegetable garden...June 1, 2010

A few photos of my vegetable garden on June 1st. (click on any picture to see a larger view) We have been eating an abundance of various lettuces and salad greens. The colors and textures are so beautiful on a cloudy morning...

A general view of the garden. Tomatoes and cucumber vines are staked all along the right side bed.



Borage in the foreground. Bees love the little star-like blue flowers. Veronica is blooming in the background.



Speckled trout back lettuce



Purple kohlrabi



Black seeded Simpson, and Red Deer Tongue in the foreground.



Front to back: Swiss chard, Red deer tongue, Black seeded Simpson, and scallions.



Spinach and cilantro.



French Breakfast radishes.



Pickling cucumbers.



Red deer tongue and Quatre Saisons lettuce.



From top left corner down: Bull's Blood beets, then lettuces romaine Tin-Tin, Speckled Troutback, Red deer tongue, and Quatre Saisons lettuce. (green lettuces on the right are unknown volunteers from last year.)



Nasturtium, worth growing just to look at the leaves.



Rouge Grenoble lettuce.



On the left, Buttercrunch lettuce.



One of my honeybees on the Veronica.



A Tri-colored bumblebee on Veronica blossoms.

Movin' on Up...

Today I added a second large brood box on top of each of my two hives of honeybees. A few days ago I inspected most of the frames and found my two colonies had almost filled their living quarters in the first deep brood boxes. You don't want your queen to run out of places to lay, and you don't want the bees to become overcrowded, or they will begin to make swarm preparations. That will lead to losing half your bees! So when they become crowded, you either add more brood space or you split your colony into two or more hives.
Most hives in northern cold winter areas need the equivalent of two large brood boxes for overwintering, so today I added the second brood boxes. I shifted a couple of frames between the bottom and top boxes to encourage them to move back and forth between the two boxes.


The hives look so tall now! You can also see the nifty new ventilated inner covers I bought, with screened ventilation holes all around and a dead air space inside. I can use this in the winter with foam insulation as well, which will help ventilation and reduce winter condensation. Those are the chairs I have for sitting and meditating on my bees, also for the braver guests. ;) Click on the pictures for larger versions.
With all the manipulating of frames around today in both hives, I was lucky not to have been stung!

Hives a' hoppin'

Here are my two new hives, 15 days after installing 5-frame nucs into them.
Things are really busy now! Last weekend I took one frame of brood and nurse bees from the stronger hive ("Aurora", the one on the right) and put it into the slightly weaker hive ("Esperanza", the one one the left), and now the two hives seem to be pretty equal in strength. It worked well!

When it's a warm sunny day the air is thick with buzzing bees. Gives you a healthy respect for 'the power of bee'. They are bringing in pollen like mad, and next week I will go in to see how much comb they have made and check the brood pattern.

Guests and gardens...

We had guests last weekend- my brother and his girlfriend, Joy.
Joy loves taking pictures and she took these photos of my vegetable garden and the salad we made for dinner.
You can see the garden is really just getting started for the year, but already we've been harvesting enough to make a nice salad from the carefully cut young leaves every other day or so.


This salad was really a wonderful dinner for the four of us one night. It had spinach, leaf lettuce, kale, bok choy, and French breakfast radishes picked fresh from the garden. To that I added some chevre cheese and a cucumber that I bought, and some black pepper. Note the pink hard boiled eggs!- last winter I pickled a whole lot of beets, and when the beets were eaten I saved the pickling brine (which of course had turned intense pink from the beets) and filled jars of the brine with hard boiled eggs and let them pickle slowly in the fridge. The pickled eggs take on the pretty pink color and look a bit like a sunset with the golden yolk.

First big inspection of the new hives

So today my bees have been in the two hives for 12 days.
I had a few hive chores to do, so I did a full inspection today. Full inspections are not done often or it would disturb the bees too much.

First I removed the sugar syrup baggie feeders and switched the shim and the inner cover in order to remove the extra space over the frame tops while keeping good ventilation going. There seems to be plenty of pollen and bloom so I am quitting the syrup (which is commonly given to brand new hives to give them a little jump start). I have last year's honey still in frames to give them anyway.
The bees love the big upper entrance and I've widened/chiseled the entrance of the inner covers to 2" wide.

Then I checked to see whether they had eaten any of the honey in the frame of old honey I had placed inside on the edges, honey from my hive last year that died over the winter. They hadn't touched it yet, but I left the honey frames in since there were several frames still undrawn for them to expand into, so no harm in it.

Did a thorough inspection of every frame very slowly and carefully. I was determined to move slowly and gently so the bees and I would all stay calm. Both hives are very packed with bees on their original 5 deep frames each of nuc they came on. Both are beginning to build comb on the two neighboring wax foundation frames on either side, but not on the farther out frames yet. I'm fine with that since it's only been 12 days.

I couldn't see any eggs, there were so many solid-packed bees covering the capped brood frames that it was really hard to get a look at what was there under the nurse bees- I did however see white larvae in worker sized cells in both hives! And they looked to be no more than 7 days old, still not that big, so they must have been laid as eggs after the queens were out of their cages. From the timing, couldn't have been laid before the nucs arrived 12 days ago, or they would have been pupae by now.

Best news- I found the queens in both hives! And they looked wonderful...active and large with very long abdomens. One abdomen was reddish brown and the other was a little more golden. So cool!!! It was important to find the queen in the strong hive since I wanted to transfer one frame of brood and nurse bees from there over to the weaker hive. Sure wouldn't want to accidentally transfer the queen!
So I found the queens and was careful to immediately take a brood frame packed with nurse bees that was located far away from the strong hive queen, and while smoking everyone lightly I transferred the brood+nurse frame into a side brood slot in the weaker hive. I put an empty wax foundation frame from the weaker hive in its place in the strong hive (to the side of the brood area). Nobody seemed to make a fuss at all. I really think this one frame switch will help even the hives out and give the weaker hive a needed boost. Now they'll be on their own.

Overall everything looked terrific- active queens, worker larvae, no burr comb, lots of bees covering five deep frames in each hive, and no signs of disease or anything suspicious.

It was a real confidence builder for me. Now I feel good about leaving them alone for a while...they seem to be in good shape. Mission accomplished!

Did I get stung? Had good layers of regular comfy cotton clothes with the pants tucked in, my long beekeeper WalterKelly gloves, and a good veil and that was fine. No one could get to me at all, though the girls stayed pretty calm through the whole long ordeal...I was very gentle and slow.
HOWEVER....before I even got started in my preparations at all, I casually went to see what activity was going on there at the hives (like I've done a million times, just watching them peacefully from a nearby chair) and some nervy girl just nailed me on the back of the neck for no good reason at all! What a nerve!! She got me good...scraped off the stinger. It was very unlike them, they are always so laid back when I go sit by the hives. Maybe they knew I was planning to 'rock their world' later on in the day. lol! Good news is it doesn't seem to be hurting or swelling too much. Thus, sting #2 from my girls. Considering all the fussing- more than one typically would once things are established, I think that's pretty good. ;D

Mason bees laying and nesting...

Just a little video showing the wonderful progress that has been made in my solitary mason bee nesting houses. 24 tubes filled with brood chambers and sealed up with little mud doors so far! A lovely warm sunny May morning...

The serenity of hummmm....

We were lucky to have a nice sunny day for my new bees' first complete day in their new hive homes. They spent a lot of time today getting their bearings and flying close around the hives, though some were already busy bringing in pollen. This is a little video just to give an idea of the pleasantness of watching and being around bees. Please excuse the unevenness of the sound volume- I must have blocked the microphone holes with my finger on the camera for a little while.

The new honeybees are hived.

Today I installed the two 'nuc' colonies of honeybees into their waiting new hives. My friend Cris helped me., and he was not afraid. We weren't sure what kind of mood the bees would be in when we pried open their shipping boxes, so we had the smoker ready and had veils and gloves on just in case the bees were unhappy about having been cooped up in a little box for 2 days.
As it turns out, the bees were unbelievably sweet natured, and our precautions seemed a bit overdone. Neither Cris nor I were stung despite handling thousands of bees on the ten frames that had been shipped to me in the two nucs.
Here we are, installing the frames of bees and brood into my waiting hive boxes along with some new frames as well, to fill the spaces out. Click on each photo to enlarge and see it better. The nucs came with lots of nice looking brood in capped cells, developing into new young bees which emerge over the coming days. The top picture above shows a nice patch of capped worker bee brood being covered and cared for by nurse bees.
We did get to check the two queens which were in their little queen cages and active. Over the next couple of days the worker bees will continue to chew off the little candy 'door' on the queen cages and release the queens each in their own hive. By that time the bees will be familiar with their new queen's scent and will accept her. In a couple of days I will check to see whether the queens have been released from their cages yet.

Me and Cris (on the right) having lots of bee fun. :)

After getting the frames of bees and the queen cages safely situated in the two hives, I made sure they each had a full frame of honey (saved from my old hive) and also some sugar syrup as a tonic for them after their journey of hundreds of miles rumbling down the highway to get to me from down south in Georgia. My thanks to Don Kuchenmeister, the "Fat Bee Man", for shipping such wonderful healthy bees to me!

I named the hives Esperanza (which means Hope) on the left, and Aurora (which means Morning) on the right. They are named after two of Cris' sisters, all of whom seem to have been blessed with lovely names...