We are in Troy, MI, at the moment; attending Michigan Basset Rescue's annual fundraising event. We left Minnesota at 3:30 AM CDT yesterday morning. Across northern Wisconsin and into Michigan's upper peninsula, we rolled across the Mackinac Bridge nine hours later. Upper Michigan has the same look and feel of far-northeastern Minnesota - very rural, paved roads but mostly single lanes, scenic overlooks, and poor cellphone reception. It is very pretty in that rustic, pine-bog way - comfortably familiar to those of us who grew-up and continue to live in the boreal forest region of the upper midwest (see Taiga).
Here, in lower Michigan, it is more low, rolling hills mixed with farmland and deciduous forest. Near the hotel, I spotted a black walnut tree (and empty shells). On the hotel grounds, all the flowering crab trees are in bloom - complete with their wonderful smell.
Before leaving Minnesota, much had to be done with the bees.
During the winter, when planning out this season's bees, I had planned out eight new hives. The two at the house were still doing well, and so, we were not going to have do anything new with them. One of the two at the house failed to make it through winter (as I have mentioned on this blog before). I put in a second order for a package of Italian workers with a Russian queen.
Last week, one of the newly installed packages of eight at the Ahrens' bee-yard, swarmed. This left down one package. However, the second order of a package of bees was arriving on this past Tuesday. That would suffice for the Ahrens' bee-yard, but it still left us short one hive at the house.
As it would have it, Theresa, of Fifth Avenue Farm, in Rice Lake township, in a bit of a panic, ordered a new Italian queen. She was worried that one of her new hives of Carniolans was in the process of beginning to swarm; she could not find the queen. I stopped out at the farm on Tuesday after installing the package at the Ahrens'; The queen was there (see bee photo), and the rest of the hive was working hard to bring in nectar and pollen - not getting ready to swarm.
This left Theresa's Italian queen still arriving on Thursday. We settled on the idea of making a split of the Italians that wintered over successfully and using Theresa's queen.
In between packing for the trip to Michigan, we began to get things ready for the queen's arrival. Mixed a pail of sugar syrup; loaded dog crates into the truck. Cleaned out a hive deep, selected four drawn frames of wax; loaded luggage and miscellaneous hound gear.
We had never made a hive split before. For those unfamiliar with this concept, it is basically take a number of frames with bees, comb, pollen, honey and all that from an existing, strong overwintered hive and putting them into a new hive with a new queen.
With the truck mostly packaged, and the arrival of the Italian queen in its fancy "Beeware!" box from the postoffice, it was time to get a split made and the queen installed. The donor-hive was stronger than I had thought it was be; three hive boxes full of bees, larvae, pollen, and honey. From being a struggling hive last May; needing to be requeened because of no queen and a drone-laying worker. We even combined the hive with a feral hive shortly after last season's requeen.
The split went well, and it is a just a matter of seeing if the queen and workers mesh well once the workers free the queen from her candy-cappedcage. We will have to check once we return to Minnesota.
Back here in Michigan, senior-hound, Gertrude, fell ill. She was lethargic, refused food and was running a fever. Luckily, this being a large gathering of dogs, there was a dog-doctor in the house. A visit from the doc, a few pills, some homeopathic treatment, and Miss Gertrude is doing better. Her fever broke, and she ate dinner; now she rests and sleeps.
With a busy two weeks of work, travel and hound fundraising ahead of us, and nearly a week of laryngitis behind me, I needed to squeeze in a run to the bee-yard. After work, and after a quick bite to eat, we packed up the 2500HD and headed up to the bee-yard.
Beth, the woman who owns the property the hives are located on, has been wanting to dig in a bit more. She has shadowed me from a distance since the installation of the bees. She decided to put a suit on this time, and get into the hives with me.
Over all, the hives are doing well. All of the Carniolans are living up to the abilities to lay down wax hard and fast. Of the six Carniolans, we rotated frames from the center out toward the edges in roughly ½ of the hives. The queens were laying eggs and larvae could be seen quite well against the black foundation.
The one sour note of the evening was hive #2 - one of the Russian queened hives. There was little activity in the access area from the hive into the feed-box. This was somewhat alarming because all of the other hives' feed-box accesses were choked with bees coming to get a sip of syrup. Lifting the feed-box off revealed an empty hive. There were dead workers on the bottom, but those were from originally emptying the package into the hive. No queen, either - we easily found the marked Russian queen in hive #1.
There are questions, of course. Why did the hive empty out? Why would a hive leave a place where there is 2.&half gallons of food sitting on their roof? Honestly, I do not know. The queen may have had a bit of wanderlust, or a parameter within the hive was slightly incorrect -- too drafty.
I have one more package of Italians with a Russian queen arriving on Monday or Tuesday of this coming week (May 9 or 10). The plan is to install this package at the bee-yard instead of here at the house. There are a few things that I am going to do this go-around.
- Move Hive #2 to far end of the line of hives
- Turn the entrance to face opposite of the others
- Restrict the entrance to just one or two holes with the adjustable entrance reducer
I spend large amounts of time planning; it is my nature - I am a planner. Planning a thing - new endeavor, trip, construction or woodworking project - is often a source of great enjoyment for me. From the end of December and through January, I researched and read material on relative newcomer to the arena of honeybees in the United States: the Russian bee. The Russian bees, originating from the Primorsky Krai region, were first imported into the US by the US Department of Agriculture's Honeybee Breeding, Genetics & Physiology Laboratory in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in 1997. The particular strain of bee has a few interesting properties which drew me to it. The region of Russia where it originated has a similar annual average temperature and precipitation to that of our region of Duluth, MN. They have also shown excellent overwintering in colder climates. In addition to the climatological similarities for their home region, the bees have the added advantage of having resided in the home region of the varroa mite (Varroa destructor) for over 150 years and consequently are relatively resistant to the mites (A Comparison of Russian and Italian Honey Bees - North Carolina State University; Breeding, Genetics, Stock Improvement and Management of Russian Honey Bees for Mite Control and Pollination - Agricultural Research Service, USDA). As I developed a plan for rolling out more hives this spring, the Russians looked increasing interesting and a very viable option.
Spring made its first appearance early in the second half of February; we had a nice stretch of very warm weather. This short warm stretch, however, was the death knell of the Carniolans. They broke their winter cluster in anticipation of spring; the warm weather left and was replaced with -40 degrees. The Carniolans quickly consumed the remaining food stores and starved to death. The Italians, on the other hand, have come into the real onset of spring quite well.
With winter having peaked, most northern beekeepers will have wanted to check on their bees by mid-Fedbruary (we were impatient and opportunistic; we checked our hives in late January during an unusually warm two-day period). Here in northern Minnesota, we will likely have at least a month more of below freezing daytime temperatures. This means the bees in the hives will need to remain hunkered down in the hives until we get a little warm and the willows start to flower. Even with temperatures slightly more seasonable for us humans, this last stretch of winter is often the time when there a good chance of die-out in your hives.
As previously mentioned, we gathered requirements, purchased equipment, assembled equipment once it arrived, priced and sourced bees, ordered bees, and the list seems to go on from there. The bees have been ordered; six packages of Carniolans and two packages with Russian queens and Italian workers (the idea being the Italian workers will eventually be replaced with Russian workers). Brood boxes have arrived and have been assembled and stained with a nice mandarin orange color. All of these capital costs (business-speak for total cost required to bring a project into an operable and functional state) add up; as of this writing, each hive is having an average cost of about $208.00 (€ 153; £129). This amount will rise as we still need to purchase honey supers, bulk cane sugar for initial feeding, pollen patties, and as winter approaches, homasote board and insulation wrap and, possibly, more cane sugar. We are also relatively certain there will be other, small costs along the way.
Tucked away, under the snow and ice, my bees await for spring to return. They bide their time - consuming the winter store of honey and fondant - all while shivering together in a ball-of-bees; on nice, sunny days, the occasional adventurous girl will come out of the hive and take flight. She will most often make several loops in the air before returning to the comforts of the warmer hive.
But, this is January, and it is Minnesota. From time to time, one of those adventurous girls gets too adventurous. You will find their cold, lifeless, little insect-bodies far from the bee yard; they look like they are sleeping atop the snow.
Somewhere between a Roman holiday celebrating the winter solstice and the birth of a baby (who would eventually have a religion formed around him), coniferous trees, garlands, cookies & milk, a whole lot of money spending, and the former Bishop of Turkey, e.g. St. Nicholas, all got involved with what is now known as Christmas. Eventually, and somehow, St. Nicholas went from being the Bishop of Turkey to being a fat man of western European descent who lived at the North Pole with elves and reindeer; his name also changed to Santa Claus. Some European cultures never advanced the idea of magical reindeer and elves; David Sedaris tells in Six to Eight Black Men that in the Netherlands, St. Nicholas roams from house to house with a small posse of former slaves to give good children small gifts and to kick and beat bad children.
With the recent snow fall staying on the ground, and the air temperature staying in the region of below the freezing point of water, I can say with a weatherman's confidence, winter is here. Hound Sarge has also informed us on several occasions that "it is winter; it is cold; I would rather poop in the living room." With my thumb healing up, I was able to get the hives winterized only two weeks after I had wanted to get them buttoned up. The Hygienic Italians (in the photo, the one on the left) will need to be checked on mid-winter. The Carniolans swindled them out of honey, and I am concerned they might run low. Other than that, the bees will be left to their own devices for the winter.
Fall begins, astronomically for us, today, September 22, 2010, at 10:09 pm CDT. We had our first frosts at the beginning of the month, but the ground was still warm enough to ward off any damage from it to the gardens. However, the cold, nighttime low temperatures are now hanging on longer into the mornings, and the daytime highs now are not getting that high anymore - barely breaking into the low 60s (mid to high teens for you metric people). Even with the temperatures getting lower, and each day's light noticeably shorter, there is still much to do with the bees and the gardens. Hives need to be winterized and bulbs need to be planted.
