GardenFork – Eclectic DIY

Tag: bees

  • Easy Native Pollinators

    Easy Native Pollinators

    Just a short “bonus” video from Rick this morning on Easy Native Pollinators. He’s been guarding his dill and fennel patches in the front yard from the Perfectionistas’ in the neighborhood (and inside his own house) all season long. The result is this somewhat seedy but extremely prolific butterfly habitat, a Motel 6 for Monarch Butterflies headed for Mexico in successive waves new hatchlings.

    Rick also covers up his innate laziness in not getting a spring garden planted in a side bed by showing off his stand of Buckwheat. It grew from seed to super pollinator attractor in less than 3
    weeks.

  • DIY Solar Beeswax Melter Video by Rick

    DIY Solar Beeswax Melter Video by Rick

    Solar Wax Melter plans here. Rick built this DIY solar beeswax melter out of a cooler and stuff you probably have in your garage.

    Beeswax is made by the honeybees, and when you harvest honey, the cappings on the cells of the honeycomb are cut off, and you can save these wax cappings, melt them down, and make candles, soap, and all sorts of beeswax products. In this how-to video you’ll see how honeybees make beeswax, and how they build honeycomb in a beehive.

    A solar beeswax melter will melt and clean beeswax without using electricty. Its very hands off, you don’t have to do much with it, just leave it in the sun and the solar power takes care of it. This wax melter uses a cooler and a piece of glass, its important that the glass not be double glazed, according to Rick. A few pans from the store and you are good to go.

    With the melted and cleaned beeswax, you can make all sorts of beeswax based products. Some of the most popular are candles, soaps, and lotions.
    Some interesting facts about beeswax: bees eat honey from their hives to produce beeswax, and the ambient hive has to be between 90 -97 degrees F.

    Do you use beeswax? let us know how below:

  • Inside the Hive: Views from a First Year Beekeeper (Scene 19)

    Inside the Hive: Views from a First Year Beekeeper (Scene 19)

    After eight days in the wonderful state of Maine on a much needed vacation, I did a quick “hey howya doin’” on the hives this afternoon. As a first year beekeeper, I’ve resigned myself to the fact that the best thing I can do for the hives is not rob them of honey so instead I’m feeding them a 1:1 sugar water to help them draw out comb and create strong first year hives. During today’s check on the hives my son and I added another super to each hive (they’d completely drawn out all the frames on the top super and filled most of it with honey) so they’d have something to do with their time. Idle mandibles are the devil’s workshop… or something like that.

    It was hot and we’d already decided that today wasn’t the day to do a full hive inspection unless we saw something obviously bad when we opened the hives. Everything was humming along smoothly and the bees were calm so a quick look to see how the top frames were doing (fully drawn, mostly capped honey) and then we added our supers and refreshed their bug juice.

    Buttoning up things, I noticed this odd little insect busy stealing some sugar water off the lid of the inverted mason jar and so did the honey bees. I’ve not yet identified it and first thought it might be a syrphid fly but it has a head more like a wasp. I’m going to check with my online bug guru buddy Debbie Hadley to see if she can identify it from my admittedly bad pictures.

    Honeybees aren’t much for sharing and definitely didn’t like this little bugger anywhere near their hive. Within seconds there were a half dozen of them ganging up on it and they quickly dispatched with the intruder. This was the best shot I got of the attack and it is tough to see the prey. Two workers in the center had it locked up and a third had come in from above.

    Bees may be vegetarians but they are fierce fighters and territorial creatures. On previous inspections I’ve seen them going at it with both bumble bees and horse flies that ventured near their hives.

    Moral of the story – if you’re going to venture into a hive, bring along some friends or you’ll be sorely outnumbered.

    Enjoy,

    Matt

    Read all of Matt’s Inside the Hive Posts here

    Matt (twitter @MattInTheGarden) is quite enamored with the low bush variety of blueberries. These smaller berries are  sweet and delicious. He loves to kayak and take pictures; neither of these things does he do particularly well. He thinks most people would benefit from having a canine companion. His favorite Brady was Marsha, of course.

  • Inside the Hive: Views from a First Year Beekeeper (Scene 18)

    Inside the Hive: Views from a First Year Beekeeper (Scene 18)

    The last half of June and the first week of July 2012 have been HOT here in Virginia. I live in the Piedmont region and…

    Stop. Geography Time!

    I’m doing the MC Hammer shuffle dance right now. It ain’t pretty, folks, but I try to imagine that it looks good. Humor me. I have almost no rhythm and I paid a fortune for these parachute pants.

    Ahem…

    Virginia is broken up into five physiographic regions:

    1. Appalachian Plateau – way down in southwest Virginia. Factoid:  Virginia actually extends west of Detroit.
    2. Valley and Ridge – western part of the state. Beautiful and so different than heavily populated NoVA.
    3. Blue Ridge – picturesque and home to some great hiking and camping opportunities.
    4. Piedmont – rolling hills and some plateaus.
    5. Coastal Plain – typically we call that “Tidewater” around these parts. GF’s Rick lives in the Coastal Plain region.

    As I was saying, I live in the Piedmont region and it comprises the largest area of the state. We’re west of the Tidewater and the fall line separates the two regions. It is higher than Tidewater and it is also HOT here in the summertime for man and beast alike. August can be brutal here. This year it’s been pretty hot since my kids got out of school. Anyhow…

    So my lovely bride and I were out working on our garden fence (pictures soon) one evening and noticed that the bees were doing something interesting. This picture shows them doing something called “bearding” which is different from the bee bearding that some folks do where they get bees to hang all over their face. I don’t understand doing that at all, quite honestly. Hanging bees off one’s face is akin to sword swallowing, running with the bulls and juggling running chainsaws – they all fall into the same category entitled “Activities Which May End Badly”.

    Bearding is something honeybees do when it is hot. It helps with ventilation in the hive and is a normal thing when it is hot. I use, as I’ve written before, a screened bottom board so that helps somewhat with ventilation. I do need to, however, vent the hives a bit at the top (you can do this by propping the outer cover open with a stick) when I’m home. I’ve also seen folks offset a honey super a bit to help let some of the heat escape. It isn’t absolutely critical but every bit helps.

    I thought it was interesting that both hives were doing this and the patterns were similar. They definitely were making use of the landing boards (those slanted boars on the bottom) and stayed out there until well after 8:30PM. I don’t believe that bearding is any indication that there is a problem in the hive, just that it is hot.

    Bees are quite good at regulating the temperature in the hive. They’ll flap their wings to help cool things off. If you are quiet and put your ear up to the back of the hive – it is quite safe back there – you can hear them inside, buzzing away and flapping their wings. I think that sound is cool. They also will bring water into the hive so I keep a large plastic pan filled with large rocks and water nearby to provide them with easy access to water if they need it. The rocks give them someplace to land without drowning in the water. They also weigh down the pan during windy times.

    Enjoy and stay cool!

    Matt

    Read all of Matt’s Inside the Hive Posts here

    Matt (twitter @MattInTheGarden) enjoys the music of the Punch Brothers, Crooked Still and The Greencards. He is a fan of pepper jack cheese. He doesn’t like liver of any sort. He believes the world would be a far better place with more folks like the late Fred Rogers in it.


     

  • Inside the Hive: Views from a First Year Beekeeper (Scene 17)

    Inside the Hive: Views from a First Year Beekeeper (Scene 17)

    Having the right tool for the job makes all the difference. You can try to drive a nail into the wall with your shoe to hang that picture and it might work but even a crappy dollar store hammer will make that job a cinch because the hammer is specifically designed to accomplish that task. Those Top-Siders… well, not so much.

    Tools for beekeeping are no different and today I want to introduce the hive tool to you. There are a few different types and I’ve got two of them. The one I’m not talking about in this post is flat with a 90 degree bend on one end. Both ends narrow down and can be used for prying or scraping. I like it. I’ll talk about it in the future.

    But in this photo you can see my other hive tool – the J-hook style hive tool in action. It has a flat end that tapers to a narrow blade and this is also useful for prying apart hive bodies, particularly when they are stuck together due to propolis. Visible in the picture is the J-hook end that is great for lifting up one end of a frame in order to grab hold of it. This is quite helpful when removing the first frame in the box because there isn’t a lot of room anyway and adding a bunch of bees to the mix only makes it that much more difficult to get a good grip on the frame. Those (as GardenFork’s own Rick would call them) “bugs in a box” seem to have a keen sense for being exactly where I need to put my fingers. Not wanting to crush any bees (or get stung in the process), I just use the tool to carefully move the frame into a position where I can more easily grab it.

    There are a few other tools that are useful when inspecting a hive. I’ll write about those in the future.

    Enjoy,

    Matt

    Read all of Matt’s Inside the Hive Posts here

    Matt (twitter @MattInTheGarden) can be found most summer weekends mowing grass. He’s nonplussed about trimming the ditch along his farm’s road frontage. He stinks at throwing a baseball and really isn’t particularly skilled at throwing objects in general. Matt likes his steaks grilled medium and never uses steak sauce. 

     

  • Inside the Hive: Views from a First Year Beekeeper (Scene 16)

    Inside the Hive: Views from a First Year Beekeeper (Scene 16)

    When folks talk about beehives – average, non-beekeeping folks, that is – they’ll probably mention honey, honey comb, the queen bee, maybe pollen. Those are things most folks would know. Today I want to talk about something that few folk outside the beekeeper community would know about – propolis.

    In this image you can see what look like dirty peanut butter along the edge of the hive body. This is a resinous substance known as propolis. It is produced by the bees from the plant resins and sap. It is a sticky, gooey mess when it is warm and I am told it is hard and brittle when cold. The color will vary a bit based on what plants the bees use to produce the propolis.

    Bees use propolis in the hive to do a few things:  fill in small cracks, seal up anything they think needs to be sealed, coat anything they cannot remove from the hive (such as a dead mouse). Personally I’ve not seen bees do the latter (yet) but I’ve certainly seen them seal up gaps.

    Hives bodies (the boxes holding frames of comb) are challenging enough to handle when they are full – they get heavy quickly. Propolis adds to the challenge by sticking them together, making it harder to separate hive bodies so you can lift them. I had to really work hard to get the hive body above this one in the picture off and found my hive tool worked pretty well to gain some leverage and pop it apart.

    Propolis, I’m told, is quite effective at hermetically sealing nasty stuff in the hive (such as that dead mouse) so that it doesn’t foul up the hive. It apparently has some antimicrobial and anti-fungal qualities depending upon what plants resins are used. I’ve witnessed that honeybees are pretty clean creatures and act in a very methodical way to maintain order. If I ever have an opportunity to capture them coating something (other than the cracks of the hive) with propolis, I’ll be sure to snap a picture.

    There are folks who use propolis for medicinal reasons. I’m told you can find it in heath food stores and that claims are made as to its efficacy in the treatment or prevention of this or that. I don’t have any personal experience here so I can’t really say. I’d probably want to see some scientific evidence of this before plunking down any cash on this. I’m not sure that there is even any requirement to prove its efficacy before selling it. And if there’s (potentially considerable) variability in its makeup, it might be difficult to know if that propolis you’re buying is going to do you any good. Again, I’ve got no experience here but I’d be reluctant to shell out too many of my greenbacks on a substance that might not be regulated and may not provide any real benefit. I simply don’t know enough about this to definitively come down on one side or the other. Caveat emptor.

    Beekeepers wanting to collect propolis (and potentially make some cash by selling it) can put a screen in the hive – these are available from the various beekeeping supply companies – and the bees will coat the holes with propolis. Personally, I’d rather that they make honey but who knows… I might try this in the future.

    Enjoy,

    Matt

    Read all of Matt’s Inside the Hive Posts here

    Matt (twitter @MattInTheGarden) enjoys making his own carbonated drinks with his Soda Stream. He is not a fan of horse flies but prefers them to deer flies since he can hear them flying around. He is tired of replacing rotted wood in his raised bed gardens and wants to move to brick ones. First, he’ll need to get some mad mason skillz(TM) to accomplish that task.

  • Inside the Hive: Views from a First Year Beekeeper (Scene 15)

    Inside the Hive: Views from a First Year Beekeeper (Scene 15)

    The bees in hive #2 (the hive formerly known as “the nuc hive”) have been very productive. Three weeks ago we put a medium super with new foundation atop this hive and when we checked it on Father’s Day, we found not only drawn comb but drawn comb filled with nectar in the process of being turned into honey. All ten frames were drawn and most of them were full of nectar or were in the process of being capped so we put another super on this hive to provide them more room.

    In this image you can see a sample of what I mean. The bees are very busy working to create honey. This is accomplished via enzymes within the bees which break down the complex sugars into simpler sugars. This is called inversion. Then the water content is reduced by the bees via fanning. Once it has reached the proper moisture content, it is capped by the bees.

    I personally find bees amazing. There are so many aspects of their lives which make me wonder, not the least of which is how do these bees know when to cap the honey. I suspect it is passed down through their genes but still… it is fascinating that they create a substance which has an insanely long shelf life. Cool huh?

    One other thing.

    A medium super of honey is pretty heavy. I can completely understand why some folks opt for the 8-frame mediums vice the 10-frame ones.

    And don’t get me started about the weight of a deep hive body full of brood and bees. But that’s a topic for another time.

    Enjoy,

    Matt

    Read all of Matt’s Inside the Hive Posts here

    Matt (twitter @MattInTheGarden) is not a fan of Bermuda grass. He likes Art Deco but not Zydeco. He prefers to make greeting cards rather than buy them. Twenty-eight years later he still can play (albeit poorly) a tenor sax solo he had to memorize for jazz band concert in high school.

  • Inside the Hive: Views from a First Year Beekeeper (Scene 14)

    Inside the Hive: Views from a First Year Beekeeper (Scene 14)

    It was a Father’s Day hive inspection. Dad (that’s me) and son checking out our two hives. Beautiful day. 78 degrees Fahrenheit and just a light breeze. Quite a few things to say and show about this inspection so expect more posts from me in the coming days.

    There are a LOT of bees in these hives. I think non-beekeepers (as well as this first year beekeeper) just don’t get how many bees can live in a hive. It’s incredible quite honestly when you pop open the hive and there is just frame after frame of bees – often so many of them that you can hardly see the comb underneath. The frames with brood on them are just teeming with bees.

    I’ve written before about pheromones and how the hive uses these to communicate. One pheromone they use quite effectively is the alarm pheromone. I understand folks say it smells like bananas. I’ve got a particularly poor sense of smell and am not sure I personally could smell it. At least I haven’t noticed it yet.

    Here is a closeup of my glove. Yes, there’s some goo on it – white shows every stain – but right in the center of the shot is the topic of this post.

    The stinger.

    Today we were on the business end of the stinger. Not the place you want to be, quite frankly.

    My son was taking the lead on the inspection and the bees weren’t all that happy that we were bothering them today. We used the smoker a couple of times and it helped a bit but they were head  butting us from the beginning. They were crawling all over my son’s gloves and that, pardon the pun, bugged him out a  bit. I think he was worried about squashing them as he lifted up frames.

    He got stung on the index finger through his glove while trying to take out the sixth frame and let the frame drop, maybe only an inch, back into the hive body. That didn’t, as you might guess, improve the hive’s disposition. The stinger stuck in the glove and a bit of the venom went into his finger. He wasn’t happy. They weren’t happy. We stepped away, I took the hive tool in my hand and scraped the stinger off the glove. That step is important. The sooner the stinger is removed, the less venom ends up in the body and the less it will hurt. Scrape it, don’t grab and squeeze.

    I sent him in to put some ice on it.

    I decided then that it was time to button things up and try again another day. Their mood wasn’t going to improve.

    That’s the issue though with beekeeping. Unlike woodcarving or painting or playing the french horn, if  you need or want to stop, you can’t just walk away from the hive. If you’ve opened it up, you’ve got to close it back up. Even if the conditions stink. Even if they aren’t happy. Even if you’ve been stung. Some beekeeping friends of mine (Eric and Rick, to name two) have been stung way more than this and surely wanted to just walk away for the day. But you have to finish what you started because that hive won’t put itself back together.

    There were a dozen or so bees banging into me and buzzing that distinctive “I’m pissed at you” buzz. It took me about five minutes to get everything back together because A) the smoker had gone out and B) I needed to step away a few times because they were getting a bit overwhelming, quite honestly. Crawling over my hands, walking all over my veil, flying about, bouncing into me.

    Then they stung me in the hand. Just two or three times. I only felt one of them, looked down and instinctively wiped my one glove with the other. I scraped one more off that I saw before the camera guy in me said “you dummy, take a picture” and then I looked over the glove and found another. That’s the one you see here. This one, however, didn’t penetrate the skin.

    Fortunately my gloves are thick and it just felt like a pin prick as no venom reached my skin. I took a walk away from the hive for a minute or two to see if things calmed down. It did – at least enough to finish closing up the hive. And I got that picture, which was cool. We took one of my son’s finger post-sting but it didn’t turn out well and he wasn’t all that keen to have dad keep messing with it so I gave up on that shot.

    For the keeper, the poke of the stinger and the pain of the venom is a temporary thing. My son’s already over the sting and off to camp to enjoy a week of fun. For the bee, well… it means death… at least for the workers. The barbed stinger of the worker ends up sticking into the skin (or the glove in our case) and causes the back end of the bee to open up. The bee soon dies. Unlike the worker, the queen has no barb on her stinger so she could, in theory, sting you multiple times. In practice the queen isn’t likely to sting you. The male drones have no stinger, so one can pick those up barehanded without incident. The workers… yeah, they sting. A little smoke applied to the sting area helps to mask that alarm pheromone.

    Box checked. First stings have happened. There will be more. No worries.

    I plan to get back into the hive again later this week to finish what I started. I talked with my son and he was OK and said he’d definitely be back in his beesuit again. I’m glad for that.

    Enjoy,

    Matt

    Read all of Matt’s Inside the Hive Posts here

    Matt (twitter @MattInTheGarden) once went to timber framing school with his brother. He prefers homemade jam to store-bought. He loves the puzzles of Martin Gardner. He wonders why all milk products aren’t packaged in the same plastic as milk jugs.

  • Inside the Hive: Views from a First Year Beekeeper (Scene 13)

    Inside the Hive: Views from a First Year Beekeeper (Scene 13)

    Bees, particularly those in new hives, require a lot of energy to draw out comb. To help jump-start the hive, a 1:1 sugar syrup can be used to help feed them during this time. I’m pretty certain they could make it without this feeding in the spring assuming there were sources of nectar around. But, since my hives are new and I’m not expecting or planning to take any honey this year, I’m OK about feeding them sugar syrup to provide them with the food they need to draw out comb on the frames this year.

    I started with baggy feeders but they are a bit messy and quite honestly I don’t like them because they are really a one-use feeder. I’ve got a bunch of canning jars and those can be reused so I’m trying some 1-quart jars in my hives as feeders. All one has to do is punch some small holes in the lid (I tapped a nail into the lid just a bit so that the smallest of holes was made.)  and fill the jar with sugar syrup. With the lid screwed on tight and inverted over the hole in the inner cover a vacuum is formed and the syrup will not run out. The bees can then slowly eat the syrup. When it’s emptied, I can just swap it out for a new one without disturbing the hive much at all.

    Enjoy,

    Matt

    Read all of Matt’s Inside the Hive Posts here

    Matt (twitter @MattInTheGarden) is a big fan of Punch Brothers and the music of Chris Thile in general. If putt putt doesn’t count, he has never played golf. This time next year he’ll be one year older.

  • Inside the Hive: Views from a First Year Beekeeper (Scene 12)

    Inside the Hive: Views from a First Year Beekeeper (Scene 12)

    The queen is dead. Long live the queen.

    Well, not yet. And perhaps not for a while. But since I’ve got an interesting picture here, I want to write a bit about the topic.

    So, there is a bit of wiggle room in the hive – there’s space between the frames and if not spaced evenly by the beekeeper or if the frames don’t have drawn comb on them, the bees have space to make some non-uniform comb. In the center of this image you can see some comb that is sticking out from the rest of the generally uniform cells around it. These larger ball-shaped cells are called “queen cups” and are cells specifically set aside for raising queens. If an egg is deposited there by the existing queen and then the workers feed it a special diet of royal jelly, a queen will develop. The queen cup will eventually be extended out and look like a peanut, so they are easy to spot in a hive.

    Now, the location of these queen cups on the frame indicates that they would be used to create new queens to replace or “supersede” the current queen. The existing queen, if it begins to fail, will likely alert the other bees in the hive that they need to find a replacement for her. She does this through changes in the pheromones she produces. If the workers believe she is failing, they’ll go into “make a new queen” mode.

    Supersedure is a normal part of hive life. The hive needs to thrive and can’t do so with a weak, failing queen. The strongest new queen will typically kill off the other new queens, often before they’ve emerged, and take over the hive. This may sound harsh, but the hive’s survival depends upon a strong queen as only she has the ability to create workers – and new queens.

    If the queen cups were along the bottom of the frame, then that is an indication that there is the potential for a swarm to occur. Swarming is also a normal part of hive life, providing a mechanism to split the hive into two hives. When a swarm occurs, the old queen leaves the hive with a portion of the hive leaving a new queen behind with the remainder of the hive.

    I’ll certainly be on the lookout for changes to these queen cups and relay anything I learn about them.

    Enjoy,

    Matt

    Read all of Matt’s Inside the Hive Posts here

    Matt (twitter @MattInTheGarden) hated raw tomatoes for the first 40 years of his life but now enjoys them. One day he would like to hike the Appalachian Trail. He regularly torments his kids by making up advertising jingles for hole-in-the-wall businesses they see when driving down the road. His lovely bride puts up with his shenanigans.

  • Inside the Hive: Views from a First Year Beekeeper (Scene 11)

    Inside the Hive: Views from a First Year Beekeeper (Scene 11)

    If someone were to ask me to make a list of adjectives describing the time in which we live, most certainly near or at the top of that list would be the word “connected”. Texting, email, Twitter, Facebook, online forums, Instagram, Skype, IRC, email, VoIP, cell phones, land lines and even snail mail. There are literally dozens of ways to stay in touch with what’s happening in your circle of friends, neighborhood, town, state, country and the world at large. Now we could argue whether all this is good or bad, but I won’t. That’s a discussion for another place and time.

    Honeybees are connected as well. They do some “dances” to communicate to one another about where things are – a good source of pollen, a good place to make the hive, etc. Before humans began scientifically studying honeybees, I’m not sure we recognized just how connected honeybees are. The scientific method, introduced in primary schools here in the States, includes the steps of Observation, Collection of data and Analysis. That skill of observation requires one have the ability to stop and focus, capture mentally what is happening and then record that information in some form so it can be reviewed. I don’t think early humans worried too much about whether bees communicated rather they were looking at the end products – honey and wax. The “waggle dance” wasn’t on their radar. Mostly the idea was “don’t get stung and get the honey” – simple and practical. It is easy to miss the subtleties of life when they don’t, seemingly, affect the day-to-day grind. Heck, we do this today, right? Lots goes on that we miss in our preoccupied, White Rabbit from Wonderland rush through the day.

    But, while they likely didn’t spend too much time observing bee behavior (beehavior?), early humans did recognize that the smoke from a torch was helpful to avoid getting stung when robbing hives found in caves and trees. These people didn’t understand the “why” but they did understand the “what” of the situation. Things haven’t changed much in the modern world – we often recognize correlation and infer causation without understanding things deeply. For our ancestors, getting the honey was all that mattered. Why the torch smoke made it easier wasn’t nearly so important. No doubt all sorts of conjectures were made by those who did ask why, but they lacked the faculties to discover the real answer back then.

    Enough rambling.

    What our ancestors didn’t know was that honeybees use pheromones for communication. Glands in the bee produce a variety of pheromones which tell one another that things are good, there’s trouble in the hive, the queen is failing and all sorts of other information. The presence or lack of a particular pheromone in the hive can signal that the hive needs to mobilize.

    Truly fascinating stuff. At least to me. Perhaps because I’m in “observation” mode these days.

    So, this image is of the modern equivalent of that ancient torch, the hive smoker. Made of metal,  it contains – ideally – a smoldering fire which produces a lot of smoke and not a lot of heat. Unlike most every other fire that humans make, the goal with the fire in a smoker is to maximize the smoke production.

    The smoker has bellows to draw air in from the outside and push it into the smoker’s firebox to stoke the fire a bit and to produce smoke which exits from the top. If you look closely, you can see some smoke escaping from it.

    Smoke, used judiciously and sparingly, severs that communications line within the hive temporarily. Without the ability to distribute the “alarm” pheromone through the hive, guard bees have a difficult time getting the message across to everyone else that there’s trouble in the hive. The smoke also signals to the bees to gorge themselves on honey because there might be a fire and they might need to flee that fire.

    Used excessively smoke will send bees into panic mode. Most of my beekeeper friends use it minimally if at all. Like much in life, less is more.

    Oh yeah – smokers can get hot. Metal transfers heat quickly and so you should take care when handling one.

    Enjoy,

    Matt

    Read all of Matt’s Inside the Hive Posts here

    Matt (twitter @MattInTheGarden) believes it is, as Tears for Fears sang, high time we made a stand and shook up the views of the common man. He’s thinks the hokey pokey is what it’s all about. His favorite pizza topping is black olives. He loved the Furniture Guys and misses their show.

  • Inside the Hive: Views from a First Year Beekeeper (Scene 9)

    Inside the Hive: Views from a First Year Beekeeper (Scene 9)

    One of these things is not like the other….

    Take a look at this close up of a frame and you’ll see around 40 adult bees, busily attending to their duties – cleaning out cells, feeding brood and capping cells. Most bees in a healthy hive are female workers. But in this image one of the adult bees is different than the others – the big one near the center of the picture. It  is a drone. A male honeybee whose sole purpose in life is to mate with a queen. The drones in a hive don’t do much of anything else other than mooch food from the working females.

    Ladies, go ahead and insert your quip here about how this isn’t much different than it is in the human population. I’ll wait.

    Ahem.

    So, beyond the obvious size difference, you’ll also notice that this drone has large eyes too. I suspect that this aids drones in searching for queens. Something that isn’t obvious in this picture is that drones cannot sting you. They have no stinger.

    In addition to the drone in this picture, you can see some larva in some cells, particularly on the right side of the image. These are fed by the workers until they are capped for the transition from larva to pupa. I think it is interesting that bees (and other insects) are essentially shut off from the world during this transition and I wonder about that sometimes. What exactly is the purpose in doing so? I think this is a question for my online insect friend, Debbie Hadley. I’ll talk to her about it and report back in the future on this.

    Finally, you’ll notice the glob of comb at the bottom of the frame. This is called “burr comb” and can show up just about anywhere in the hive. I guess any comb that isn’t where you want it to be can be called burr comb. The bees, however, treat it like any other comb and might put nectar, pollen or brood in it. In general  this burr comb is the result of excess space in the hive. Bees fill in the excess space with comb. You’ll also notice that much of the comb on this frame is darker in color and this is because the comb is probably at least a couple of years old. This frame came from my mentor’s nucleus hive so it has some age on it compared to the brand new frames and freshly drawn comb elsewhere in my hives.

    Enjoy,

    Matt

    Read all of Matt’s Inside the Hive Posts here

    Matt (twitter @MattInTheGarden) likes raised bed gardens and collecting rain water for watering his plants. If he’s going to eat fast food, he prefers Chipotle and Subway over burgers. He modified the computer bowling game in high school so that he could always bowl a 300 game. The teacher was not amused. He is allergic to rabbits and politicians.

     

  • Inside the Hive: Views from a First Year Beekeeper (Scene 8)

    Inside the Hive: Views from a First Year Beekeeper (Scene 8)

    Everything about honeybees is interesting to me. I have seen this brood layout in several hives and I think it is interesting that bees make this sunrise-shaped brood pattern. So, what you are seeing here is capped brood in the center of the frame with some open cells – some were cleaned out, some had larva in them. Outside that center brood pattern is capped and uncapped honey.

    I’ve been wondering why the bees tend to lay out their brood like this – certainly it is convenient to have stores near the brood. It is also interesting that they don’t mix brood and stores together, right? But I guess that just makes sense because otherwise the queen would need to work around the stores to find the cells where she can lay her eggs. Hives seem to be very orderly places where bees have their tasks to do, cells are neatly arranged and activities appear to be carried out automatically. Certainly there are a bucket of mysteries that still remain about honeybees despite the fact that they are the second most studied creature after humans.

    Enjoy,

    Matt

    Read all of Matt’s Inside the Hive Posts here

    Matt (twitter @MattInTheGarden) loves berries of all sorts though he’s not a fan of cherries. Weird, huh? He is neither tone deaf nor color blind but can’t carry a tune and is particularly unskilled at matching clothes. Matt loves to listen to Radio Lab and is quite jealous of Jad and Robert. They’ve got an awesome job.

  • Inside the Hive: Views from a First Year Beekeeper (Scene 7)

    Inside the Hive: Views from a First Year Beekeeper (Scene 7)

    Hey there folks. In this scene from the hive, I’d like to show off something that my son and I saw today during our inspection of hive #2 (the hive from my mentor’s nuc). I almost missed this because it was quite hot out today with no breeze whatsoever. It was the first time we’d used the smoker and, quite honestly, it seemed to agitate the bees more. We’ll work on that.

    In the center of the picture you can see a bee emerging from its cell. When we pulled this frame, we could see her antennae poking out of the cell and within just a minute or two, she’d popped her head out.

    About 5 cells above this there is a bee which appears to be in the pupa stage (which is a capped stage) but it was open. Unfortunately the close-up of this didn’t turn out. I think it might have been dead. If you have thoughts on this, I’d like to hear them.

    Enjoy,

    Matt

    Read all of Matt’s Inside the Hive Posts here

    Matt (twitter @MattInTheGarden) enjoys the heck out of cooking and eating ribs and is particularly enamored with his brown sugar dry rub. Insanely delicious. Matt thinks This Old House’s Tom Silva is really cool. He likes iced tea with lemon and sharp cheddar cheese – not together, of course.

  • Inside the Hive: Views from a First Year Beekeeper (Scene 6)

    Inside the Hive: Views from a First Year Beekeeper (Scene 6)

    I wanted to talk about a couple of topics related to this photo – mite control and wax production. There are two mites which are parasitic in the honeybee hive – the Varoa Mite, which literally sucks the life out of the bee externally and the Tracheal Mite which feeds of the bee from within its respiratory system. Varoa is large enough that one can see it with the naked eye while Tracheal mites are too small to see without a microscope. In the upper part of this picture are two “grease patties” which are made of equal parts of vegetable shortening and sugar. Mixed and formed into a patty, these are most easily handled by putting waxed paper between them. Sometimes folks will put some essential oils in the mixture, such as wintergreen. The idea here is that the bees are attracted to the sugar in the patty and get the vegetable shortening on them, greasing them up a bit. Tracheal mites are spread bee-to-bee and have considerable difficulty with the grease. There are a number of ways to deal with tracheal mites, some of which are more harsh than others. What I like about the grease patty approach is that it is something that is both inexpensive and harmless to the bees. These patties go a long way so you dont’ need a bunch of them – maybe one or two per hive per year. How effective is the grease patty treatment? I don’t know, quite honestly, but it is mentioned quite often.

    The zip-top bag (When J&J starts sponsoring GardenFork, I’ll consider using its brand name) in the picture is called a “baggy feeder” and is filled with a 1:1 sugar syrup (1:1 by weight, so 5 pints of water to a 5 pound bag of sugar) that is super simple to make – you could just put the water in the sun and stir the sugar in after a few hours of letting it heat up. Alternatively you can heat the water a bit on the stove (no need to boil it whatsoever), take it off the heat and stir in the sugar. Fill the bag and seal the top. Then lay the bag down on its side (making sure the top is zipped) and cut a small slit in the side of the bag so that the air escapes and the sugar syrup oozes out a bit. As the bees walk on it, they’ll be able to feed on the syrup that comes out.

    Now, the idea with the baggy feeder (or any feeder for that matter) is that the bees in this new hive require a considerable amount of energy to produce wax to create comb on the frames and to fly about and forage. They’ll certainly go out and find nectar but providing a ready source of sugar water gives them all the food they can eat right in the hive and helps the bees “draw out” the comb quickly. In a new hive there’s a lot of wax to produce and shape into comb and the bees will readily take this syrup up and produce remarkable amounts of wax in a short time. As I’m not getting honey from the hives this year (at least this is my expectation), I don’t mind the bees feeding off of sugar water. When they are producing honey for human consumption, you’ll want them to be creating it from nectar rather than just storing up sugar water. I wouldn’t want to purchase (or sell!) honey that was just converted sugar water.

    The nice thing about the baggy feeder is that it is cheap and convenient. The undesirable thing about the baggy feeder is that it is really a one-use feeder and can be a bit messy. I’m changing my hives over to inverted mason jars with punctured lids for feeders. Those are easily swapped out and will last for decades. There are many other feeders out there – frame feeders, hive top plastic feeders, entrance feeders. They all work but have their plusses and minuses. I’ll report later about how my mason jar feeders work.

    Enjoy,

    Matt

    Read all of Matt’s Inside the Hive Posts here

    Matt (twitter @MattInTheGarden) likes sudoku, minesweeper and the “Ticket to Ride” board game. He’s a huge fan of Ze Frank and enjoys the listening to Dan Carlin’s Common Sense. He’s got a “live and let live” attitude toward life and enjoys a good cheeseburger and baked potato wedges with roasted garlic spread on them. In his spare time he writes software.


     

  • Inside the Hive: Views from a First Year Beekeeper (Scene 3)

    Inside the Hive: Views from a First Year Beekeeper (Scene 3)

     

    This block of wood that has been drilled out and covered with some screen is called a “queen cage” and holds, as you might suspect, a honeybee queen. There are other styles of queen cages but this is a pretty common one. The process of producing bee packages involves literally shaking worker bees into a screened box approximately the size of a shoebox and then sticking a queen cage in the box. The bees in the box don’t know this queen and might not know each other either. The queen cage is suspended in the package box next to a can of sugar syrup and is held in place by the metal disk that you can see in this picture. Each end of the cage has a hole with a cork in it and one third of the cage is taken up by a piece of candy, something the consistency of a stiff marshmallow.

    Along with the queen bee are some “attendant” bees who have been with her and know her. They keep her company and, like in the hive, attend to her needs. When the package is installed, the queen cage is removed and placed in the hive. There are a number of ways folks do this – some wedge it down between the frames. I stuck mine screen-side down between two frames. The important thing to remember is that the cork on the candy side needs to be removed if the queen is to be released.

    The cage keeps the bees from killing the queen before she has had time to convince them that everything is cool and that she’s the queen of the hive. Remember – these bees were all shaken together into a box and have spent some amont of time traveling to their destination. Things are a bit messed up in their world and, like all honeybees, they thrive in an ordered world and really don’t like it when their world is upended by humans shaking them into some box and shipping them to some far off land. The queen produces pheromones and generally speaking these will convince the workers that things are looking up in their world. Occasionally they will kill the queen anyway, but this isn’t typically the case. It takes some time for the attendants to eat the candy from the inside out and the bees in the hive to eat from the outside in. And, like the Apollo-Soyuz, they do a meet and greet in the middle. By the time this has happened, the queen is accepted and everyone begins to do their jobs – making wax, foraging, laying eggs, etc. Pheromones keep the hive humming along and are one of the ways that the bees communicate with one another.

    Enjoy,

    Matt

    Read all of Matt’s Inside the Hive Posts here

    Matt (twitter @MattInTheGarden) has a head full of questions. He likes the simplicity of the metric system and wishes the USA would just take the plunge and switch over already. He couldn’t care less about what celebrity X is currently up to and can’t understand why anyone would spend money on magazines like People. He favors the crayon color Raw Umber, introduced in 1958 by Crayola.

  • Drone Laying Worker in a Queenless Hive

    Drone Laying Worker in a Queenless Hive

    When we check our honeybee hives, we first just stand there and observe them. We could tell there was something wrong with one of the hives.

    note the large drone cells scattered about

    It was quiet, the hive next to it was buzzing with activity.

    We opened it up to hear this odd low frequency hum in the hive, not something you usually hear. One look at a brood frame told us we had a bad problem on our hands.

    The queen was dead.

    And to make matters worse, one or more workers had started laying eggs in the cells, and since workers are infertile, all the eggs are drones.

    Queenless hive, signs of the drone laying worker here

     

    So how can a worker bee lay eggs? If  a hive is queenless, her pheromone is absent, and a few of the workers can then begin lay eggs. It doesn’t happen everytime a hive loses  queen, and this is the first time it has happened to us.

    You can’t just put  new queen in one of these hives, as the laying workers will kill the new queen. You have two choices, either combine the queenless hive with a healthy hive nearby, or get rid of the laying workers.

    One of our Facebook fans explained how she did this:

    Rhonda wrote: “Not good. I had this happen last year. I took the hive that had some young bees and some older bees in it and moved at about 2000′ away from the original location, dumped all the bees out onto the ground-every one of them, then took the hive body back to the original location. The younger, drone layers had not been out of the hive yet, so they could not find their way back home. I then transferred a queen cell from another hive into that hive and before long everything was good again. I know, it as a bit chancy, but the other options weren’t much better.”

    Healthy frame of brood, note the curled up larvae.

    The laying workers are nurse bees who have yet to leave the hive, so they have don’t know any outdoor landmarks or orientation to return to the hive. The older bees, who are foragers, know the location of the hive, so when dumped out of the hive, they will fly back to its location.

    This hive was pretty weak, so I’m thinking right now i’ll combine it with the stronger hive next to it, and perhaps split the strong hive in  week or two, with a new queen in the split. * we did the beehive combine, click here to see how to combine beehives

    Have you dealt with a drone laying worker? Let us know below

  • Beekeeping for Beginners FAQ Part 2 : GF Radio

    Beekeeping for Beginners FAQ Part 2 : GF Radio

    Matt joins Eric to answer Beekeeping for Beginners questions on this show. What equipment to buy, how to buy honeybees, where to put beehives in your yard, what kind of beekeeping suit to buy all answered here.

    what kind of beekeeping suit and beekeeping veil is good?

    what kind of frames should i use in the beehive, are plastic frames better than wood frames?

    wax foundation versus plastic foundation should i use plastic or wax foundation on the frames of the beehive? eric talks about the benefits of wax foundation and plastic foundation and frames

    Eric suggests 2  beekeeping for beginners books,


    Buy On IndieBound Here
    Click Here to buy on Amazon


    Click Here to Buy On Indiebound
    Click Here To Buy On Amazon

    Beekeeping for Dummies and the Backyard Beekeeper

    do you paint the outside of the beehive? yes, we use latex paint.

    should i buy 8 frame supers or 10 frame supers? matt and eric talk about the benefits of 8 frame boxes and 10 frame boxes

    what kind of beekeeping tools should i buy? eric suggests bringing duct tape, scissors, entrance reducer, smoker, woodchips, matches, 2 or 3 hive tools, a frame grabbing tool, needle nose pliers and more.

    what kind of hive stand should my beehive rest on? cinder block, wood, metal stands are talked about, eric suggests having a work table next to your hives.

    we talk about benefits of top bar hives vs. langstroth hives, and the drawbacks of top bar hives and langstroth beehives.

    should you buy a bee package or a honeybee nuc? eric talks about the advantages of honeybee packages , the pros and cons of bee packages, and the benefits of being a nuc or nucleus hive to start a beehive.

    eric advocates buying local honeybees and queens, either packages or nucs, the closer you can buy your bees the better.

    www.whiteoakapiary.com in Brewster, NY and www.warmcolorsapiary.com in Greenfield, MA is where eric buys queens and honeybees.

    should you feed honeybees in winter and how do i feed my bees over the winter? eric talks about how to feed bees in winter. you can watch our Beekeeping for Beginners video series here, and several videos are about feeding bees in winter.

    Eric uses a hand immersion blender to mix this sugar feed solution, and adds this homemade essential oil recipe for bees to the sugar

    The essential oil mixture is great for spraying the bees to combat nosema and bee diarrhea.

    winterizing beehives is discussed, here is eric’s beehive insulated inner cover video, Eric feeds sugar cakes to the bees in winter, not fondant or sugar syrup. Should you close or open a screened bottom board? Matt and Eric discuss

    Mudsongs.org is a favorite beekeeping blog of eric’s. Phillip documents his beekeeping in Newfoundland Canada.

    where to site your hives in your yard, where should you put the hives, what is the best location for beehives? eric has learned that full sun is best, he talks more about it during this radio episode.

    should I take a beekeeping class? eric says yes.

    and join your local beekeeping group. search on the web for your state’s beekeeping association, and that site should list local beekeeping groups.

    Megan of BrooklynHomesteader.com offers online beekeeping classes, and in-person classes as well.