It is late January, and it is time to check in on the hives; see how things are going for the bees. The winter, to date, has been relatively mild; very little snow with many days above freeze with the exception of several days of -10 degrees F (-23 degrees C).
During the winter months, unlike the spring, summer and fall months where bears and errant children tend to be a hive's major foes, the major foes of a hive are moisture (condensation), temperature (cold), and food (or lack there of). Moisture is most easily controlled through adequate ventilation - leaving an entrance open at the bottom of the hive (with a mouse guard in place) as well as having a top entrance of some sort usually allow for things to be well ventilated. Moisture plus cold are a certain death for a hive. It is very similar to a wet human in the cold - hypothermia sets in quickly followed by death.
We deal with cold by adding insulation to the mix. Our hives at the Ahrens' Bee Yard are encased in a polystyrene tomb (with entrance holes). All of our hives at the location are back to back or side to side (we have eight hives at this location). Two hives deep by four hives wide, this rectangle is encased by two inches (51 mm) of polystyrene insulation on all sides (including underneath). in addition to giving the hives an extra R value of about 9, it acts as a fantastic wind and draft break.
Food is a long term planning item for the bees. Because they spend all spring and summer gathering for the fall and winter, under normal circumstances, they should have an adequate store of honey and pollen - if they were left to their own devices. However, we, the keepers, add another variable to the mix when we harvest the sweet goodness of honey. Luckily, we did not harvest honey from the Ahrens' Bee Yard this past season. We wanted to establish the colonies in their hives and be able to start this coming season with fully drawn out comb with seasoned, over-wintered queens. If we had harvested, we would be concerned, going into February, with whether the bees had exhausted their food stores. This is why we perform winter checks -- to supplement, when needed, the food stores of the hives.
Rolling into the Ahrens' Bee Yard in the truck, it was apparent that they had received more snow than at our house thirty miles (48 km) to the south. Looking in the rearview mirror, I could see two paths cut through the eight inches (20 cm) of snow by the tires. We pulled up over the hill, and tucked up against the pines at the edge of the field was our polystyrene sarcophagus. Melissa helped with the initial snow removal from the top and disassembly of some of the panels, but she quickly made it back to the truck when it came time to break into the bee-chamber.
The first hive to check was my beekeeping partner's hive. Upon pulling off the inner cover, the hive-scent hit my nose and the feisty Russian bees began to trickle up toward the surface. The sugary syrup in feed pail had crystalized -- a quick slit of with my knife and the lid was freed. The lidless pail was returned and the hive buttoned back up.
The second hive to check was the Canadian bees. Upon removing the inner cover, I was greeted with emptiness. No hive smell, no hive sounds - just emptiness. I removed all but the bottom deep set of frames - empty. Just dead bees. There was very little honey in the frames, which made think of robbery by the other bees in the sarcophagus.
Hive three's only special attribute was a dead mouse suspended face down in the remaining heavy syrup in the insulation/feed box. Hive four revealed an extremely strong, extremely feisty lot of bees. With the inner covered removed, I found an empty feed box a multitude of bees cleaning the remaining sugar crystals out. Removing the feed box, the hive foamed over with bees and the alarm pheromone of the bees, which smells a lot like bananas, wafted up in my nose. I worked quickly, and frequently puffed smoke at the hive to calm them. I replaced several empty honey box ("super") frames with frames containing fondant.
The remaining hives were uneventful; no other dead hives, no other dead mice, and no other angry, banana-scented hives, just bees keeping busy in the depths of winter.
If you recall, Hive #10, which previously had the issue of being queenless, is now with-Queen. What happened, you ask?
I had ordered a new Russian queens from the same outfit in Kentucky we had previously ordered both queens and packages of bees from, but, unlike my region of Minnesota, which was experiencing nighttime temperatures in the middle 30s F (single digits C), Kentucky was experiencing daytime temperatures of 90+ degrees F (low to middle 30s C). The company would not ship the queens because of the heat. I was just forced to wait it out.
In the mean time, I transferred two full frames of capped brood from two Russian hives located at the other bee yard. The frames were nearly full out to the edges and even contained two or three capped queen cells (why the workers in those two hives felt it necessary to make new queens is not really known - since removing the frames from those hives, the workers have not repeated this action).
With a post-new-frames-inspection, it appeared that, in addition to the two or three queen cells that were present, the workers had started to transform at least two other cells into queen cells, but abandoned the construction mid-way to completion.
- An egg-laying queen is present and laying eggs in the hive (you may think this brings up a bee version of chicken & egg, but you need to factor in several million years of evolution).
- They begin to build the egg's existing cell into a drooping, elongated cell around, by this time, the larva has formed.
- The larva is fed a strict diet of royal jelly. This will cause genetic traits that would normally not develop or be expressed - to be expressed.
- Once the larva is fully developed, the workers cap the cell and the larva will spin a cocoon and transform into a pupa.
- Once the pupa develops into an adult queen bee, the newly minted queen will emerge a day or two earlier than normal workers. She is cleaned and groomed by several worker bees.
- Over the course of days one, two and three, the queen gets the lay of the hive - where to lay eggs.
- After that, the queen takes flight and hopes to mate with as many drone bees as possible. This is the gruesome part for the male bees; they mate, and their sex organs are snapped off and stay in the queen. A single queen can mate with upwards of 20 separate drones. The drones fall to the ground to die and become ant and bird food.
- If the queen is not eaten by birds or dragonflies, she returns to the hive...
Usually, a hive, in need of a queen, will produce multiple queens simultaneously - all will separately mate, and return to the hive. Once in the hive, it is a Thunderdome-style showdown between the queens. The queen who survives will be the hive's egg-layer.
The weather in northern Minnesota continues to be, at best, cooler and wetter than normal. High winds have also accompanied the cold, wet weather. This has made for sporadic conditions for the bees to venture out from their homes to do their thing. It is not to say they have had zero opportunities; upon opening any of the hives - even ones that are perceived to be in a weakened state - the top bars of the frames are dusted with the bright yellow of dandelion pollen. The frames of nectar are stacking up, too, even with sporadic abilities to reach the nectar in the field.
Hive #10 has had a bit of a storied history. Started last with a package of bees originating from Chico, California, hive #10 had its first queen issue a month after installing the package. With no queen, a worker picked up the call to duty and started to lay eggs. That would be all well and good if workers could just take up the roll of a fertile queen and produce workers; instead, when a worker lays eggs, you will always get drones. Those lazy bugs that just take up space and look out of place with their enormous eyes.
A queen was ordered from Kentucky to replace the missing queen from California. The requeen on hive #10 went well, but we never did get any honey from it last season.
Hive #10 made it through winter and looked be a good candidate for being the source-hive for one or more splits (see my previous post on splits). Unknowingly, and being very new to the world of splits, the source-queen most likely made it into the new hive. This would explain why I had issues "requeening" - the new hive did not need a new queen because it had the original, older queen. On the note of having issues requeen - the new, Russian queen, was freed from her cage (this time). So, what happens with a hive with two queens? It will be a like cage fight; they will fight to the death and the stronger of the two will survive.
This leaves me with a currently strong hive in limbo because of a lack of a queen. There were numerous empty, partially constructed queen cells, but nothing that would suggest a the kingdom was about to throw off a new queen. Without a queen laying female eggs, and after sufficient time for all the existing female eggs to have gone from egg to larva to pupa to adult - there are no viable eggs to be turned into a queen. I did a bit of Internet searching and found several options for purchasing queens, but eventually wandered back to Kelley Bees (out of Kentucky). This is the same outfit that I have been getting my queens from for a while now; particularly this season.
In addition to all the queen drama, the apiary at the Ahrens is set to expand by two more hives. My beekeeping apprentice, Beth, is getting setup with her own hive. I am setting her up with a new Russian queen and several frames from a strong hive of mine. The other hive is getting bees from our neighbors to the north in Thunder Bay, Ontario. I am heading up there with a group from the Cook County (North Shore) Hobby Beekeepers on June 4, 2011. There has been considerable effort on the part of Thunder Bay Beekeepers' Association to keep their area free of mites. I hope to write more about their efforts and my adventure north of the border in another post.
I also received word from the land owners of the Ahrens yard that a neighboring farm had beef cattle and several sheep wander through the field in front of the hives; lets hope that the trail camera caught the beasts moseying along and perhaps the ensuing, Benny Hill-like persuit.
The story of our attempt to split and install a queen from our overwintered hygienic Italians seemed to keep taking twists. For those unfamiliar with what a "split" (each niche activity has its own nomenclature; apiculture is no different) is and what is involved in a successful split, here is a bit of a run down...
The queen runs the show. She kicks off pheromones all while she is laying eggs in empty comb cells. There is only one queen in each hive, but there are thousands of workers at any given time in a strong hive. Traditional Langstroth-style hives (the variety we use) have individual frames (think folders in a filing cabinet). There are multiple boxes (as can be seen in many of our photos), each box contains (most often) ten frames. In a split, you take four frames from a strong, overwintered hive (making sure you do not have the queen), and putting them into the middle of another, bee-less box. You pad out remaining space in the box with empty frames. The frames you pulled from the strong hive should have: (a) plenty of workers, (b) plenty of capped larvae, (c) plenty of pollen, (d) plenty of capped honey. In addition to the empty/bee-less box, the strong overwintered hive, and the empty frames for padding, you will most likely need a new queen. We have been getting queens from a place in Kentucky. You can go without a fresh, new queen - you can allow the hive to develop a new queen on its own.
With that explanation, that is how it should work and usually does work. But, occasionally, things do not work out; which is what happened with the first attempt to queen the split hive.
Two weeks ago, friend Theresa, from Fifth Avenue Farm, had a bit of a panic and in a worry that one of her queens had failed, she ordered a queen from Kentucky. On closer inspection, her queen was there and doing just fine. We offered to take the new queen when it arrived as we were planning a split.
Thursday of last week rolled around and Theresa called; the queen had arrived. Back in Proctor, we made the split and installed the queen in her cage (as outlined above). We then left for Michigan and the hound fundraiser.
Once back in Minnesota, we checked the acceptance of the new queen in the split: fail.
The cage was sitting on the bottom board of the hive, no workers around it, and the queen with the handful of workers that came with her were all dead. We immediately anthropomorphized the situation: it had to be a coup d'état.
"A new queen from a foreign land comes to the kingdom expecting to rule the land for many generations only to be knifed by a close attendant. The kingdom realizes their new ruler is dead and kills the killers."
What exactly went wrong will never be known. The queen may have been weak, the cage may have simply fallen from the top and with the unusually cold temperatures and the hive entrance directly in front of where the cage was found - the queen may have simply gotten too cold. Workers can "revolt" against a weak queen; they will form a ball around her, and raise her core temperature until she is basically cooked (hell of a way to die, is it not?). This, however, usually will occur when new queen cells (called supersedure cells) are present; we did not see any in the split-hive when we pulled the dead queen out.
Another queen was ordered, a Russian this time, and she arrived and was installed on Thursday (May 19, 2011). As it is currently raining, we wait for a break in the weather to give the progress a check. Let's hope the queen install was successful this time.
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.
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.
It has been a hectic month; and an event crazier week. On the 27th of July, the area was hit with heavy rain. As the evening rolled in, I was cooking dinner (sweet potatoes with quinoa and various vegetables; I have embraced being a mostly-vegetarian). Melissa was standing in the back entryway with the door open; she was watching the heavy rain come down in sheets. The back sidewalk was submerged as the water rolled down from the driveway. I continued to cut and clean vegetables. At about 5:30 PM, something hit the window above the sink; then again, and again - then a lot all at once. It was hail. Melissa watched the yard become littered with nickel-sized hail balls (15 millimetres for you metric people). Lightning flashed and without delay a tremendous crack of thunder sounded. Melissa shut the door. The storm was directly over our little town. Without warning, the wind picked up. The hail slammed against the house; more thunder and lightning.
After checking the hives on June 6, 2010, it was determined, with much regret, that the Minnesota Hygienic Italian queen...must die. The warrant was signed when I located a supplier of new MHI queens, placed my order, and 5 days later, a small, buzzing package was in the mailbox. The queen arrived last Thursday, and we got home from St. Paul far too late (bad weather postponed our departure from 5:00 PM until 9:00 PM) for me to depose the monarch; it would wait until the next day.
