Well it has been more than one month since my honey bees were delivered and all seems well. They are still pulling in the sugar water I am providing and are using it to substantially build comb upon the new foundation. The brood cluster is as dense as as can be indicating a queen of good breeding and high moral character.
I will soon begin rotating frames from the outer edge of the brood box into the center region of the cluster to start filling out their foundation.
The first few weeks of working with these bees seemed like a dream come true. I felt like the Monty Roberts of beekeeping. I could work without wearing gloves and the bees seemed to read my mind, moving out of my way when I needed to lift or replace a frame. This is easy!!
By week three or four my 10,000 pacific daughters of virtue turned into Brazilian Amazon she-bees. Coincidentally this seemed to be synchronous with the first set of new adult bees emerging from their cells. Even with a gentle waft of smoke into their hive entrance and the surgeon like care of removing the frames during inspection the bees seem to go on the attack. Brazilian style. After completing work with one hive I would have to take a walk and lose some of the warriors through the three foot high grass surrounding my cleared mowing area. I would have to walk about 150 yards before the last honeybee was sure I was done meddling with her home.
She-Bees of the Amazon
Then it would happen again with the next batch.
I know I can be somewhat ham-fisted when I work but this seems ridiculous. At this rate, the bees are going to become sentient by August and deflate the air out of my tires to fly in through the vents to kill me before I can even don on my protective clothing or drive away.
These bees are touted by BeeWeaver as being hardy and able to survive mites and disease without treatments. Maybe this hardiness also comes in the form of angry bees who get pissed off at the drop of a hive tool. Hopefully they will grow to learn I am their friend and advocate.
One of the nice hippie ladies who is working on a massive garden in front of the hive said there was a report of bears in the area. Maybe they are coming up to the hive but I have detected no sign of damage or stepped in any bear poo. Maybe this has caused my girls to become a little anxious.
My new bee friend working with me has had less success with one of his hives. After 3-4 weeks of nice looking brood patterns the queen just seemed to stop laying. So he ordered a new queen and we found the old one and “replaced” her. Only during the next few days will we learn if the succession was a success.
His bees are sweet angels compared to mine. He often works barehanded and they don’t seem to mind one bit.
Well for now that is all to report. I will try to write more frequently. I am just surprised how busy summer can be.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/may/02/food-fear-mystery-beehives-collapse
Get ready for potatoes with every meal.
At least the massive oil spoil by BP will not affect the bee population.
Yesterday I went out to the hives to check the progress of the honeybees in regards to releasing their queens. The first two hives did a bang up job. They were even able to pull the queen cages to the front entrance for easy extraction. How they did this, I do not know, since I had the cages wedged between two frames in the traditional manner.
The last cage however the beekeeper forgot to drill a small hole through the sugar candy to make it easier on the workers. As a result she was still sitting inside her bower staring glumly out of the cage while the attendants assured her they were working on the problem. I took the small cage out and pulled off the screen gently and let her out into the frames. For a brief second I worried she may just fly off with a “Smell You Later!”, taking her colony with her but luckily she decided her new home was good enough.
This year I decided to use the frame division feeders. You simply replace one of the normal frames with a frame shaped container which holds about 1 gallon of sugar syrup. Two hives had sucked it down like a fat kid on a 7-eleven slurpy. The other one had imbibed about half of the sugar syrup. Fortunately, my new beekeeping friend brought some sugar water with him and let me use his to refill my containers.
The bees had started drawing out comb in good order. I saw some eggs in the two hives with the freed queens and pollen was also seen in some of the cells. I also centered the cluster as they had begun drawing out comb close to the hives wall. Other than that everything looks pretty good. I will go out again on Friday or Saturday to feed them more.
Jesse
It has been over a month since I have posted last. The main reason is that I am starting a new business selling Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Gi’s (KillerBeeGi.Com) and have been devoting most of my time to creating an efficient process for a smooth running business. The other reason is that I sometimes get lazy about writing but now that the honeybees are here I feel rejuvenated about writing something new instead of rehashing old beekeeping anecdotes from the past.
Of note, I have joined up with a new beekeeper who became hooked on it while serving in Afghanistan in the military. A fellow soldier talked with him about beekeeping and put the bug in his mind to start his own colonies. Now that he is back in the states he has set up two hives next to mine and I will try to teach him what my teacher taught me. Hopefully I will be up to the task.
As I said before I ordered my bees through BeeWeaver in Texas as they do not use ANY treatments in their apiary. This is the philosophy I will employ, maybe to the bees detriment, as my new outlook on beekeeping. Either my bees will thrive on their own or my wallet will laugh at me next year when I have to order three new packages.
The delivery of the bees did not have the perfect timing of a Swiss watch but they got here none-the-less. The bees were shipped out from Texas on Wednesday using a rented Ryder van with only one driver. Imagine shipping a time sensitive delivery across the vertical axis of the United States in a 48 hour time span with one driver, 55 cups of coffee, and probably 4 packets of No-Doze. Sounds like a recipe for disaster to me but somehow they were able to eventually pull it off. My suggestion for BeeWeaver is for them to have a team of drivers like the Tractor Trailer folks use on long hauls. When the bees arrived they were in great condition. Only a few dead bees were on the bottom of the cage and they seemed to thrum excitedly to be let out.
The Bene Gesserit Pain Box
I drove home and then prepared to install them later that day. At four o’clock P.M. I drove out to the property and first mowed the lawn in front of the apiary so the bees would have a clear path of travel and the sea of ticks would have a harder time sucking the life blood out of me. I quickly deconstructed the first cage and installed the queen cage and honeybees. The second package was more of an issue as I dropped the queen cage into the package while trying to pull out the sugar syrup can. I had to stick my bare hands into the package opening and feel my way through the mass of bees for the queen cage. I am always amazed that honeybees are not prone to stinging when they do not have a colony to defend. My mind knows this but my hand inside the queen package does not. I am not sure if you ever have read Frank Herbert’s, Dune, but there is a section in the book where Paul Atriedes is bein
Time to go home.
g tested by the Bene Gesserit witches with his hand in the “Pain Box”. It was kind of like that but without the Sandworms. I finally found the cage by touch and extracted it like an EOD technician defusing an artillery round. With that done I quickly installed the package.
By package three my new bee friend arrived and he helped with some pictures and installation. We then looked into his two hives to see how they were doing and they appeared to be doing well. Because he purchased the standard Italians I might suggest he later order a different variety of queens as I don’t think Italians are suited for our climate.
With that done we talked for a while about bees, politics, economics and enjoyed the scenery. Following a cursory tick check we then headed on home.
So far so good.
Another day milking the bees.
There is something about beekeeping and books. Both words marry well together and just happen to be two of my favorite pastimes. The smell of a finely aged book purchased from a local book shop can bring similar emotions as when opening the hive up for the first time following a long winter. The flood of memories is both nostalgic and hopeful. And like farmers, hope is one thing beekeepers always seem to have plenty of. Hope for a better season, hope that our hives won’t succumb to the mites, and hope that the honey market will boom and we will be selling half pint jars of liquid gold at 800.00 a pop. Whoops I fell into a pipe dream.
When I first got into beekeeping I read all of the standard newbie literature on the subject. And unlike my high school Algebra, I absorbed it like a sponge. But by far the most interesting book concerning the nature of bees was written by an almost blind man with the help of his wife, Karl von Frisch. It was called, “The Dance Language and Orientation of Honeybees”.
Karl von Frish was an Austrian ethologist and zoologist who won the Nobel Prize in 1973 for his work with animal behavior. One aspect of his research delved into the ability of honey bees to transmit information concerning the quality and direction of a nectar resource through the “waggle dance”.
Karl von Frisch - "Now we dance"
As foraging bees search the area around their hive for nectar they will come across resources with varying degrees of worth. Nectar is mostly water and to turn it into honey by the bees, they must evaporate most of the nectar’s water content level to about 18%. To do so requires the honey bees to use their high speed wing action and create a flow of air through the hive that pulls the moisture out of the nectar. The higher the water content, the more time and energy is spent by the bees to reduce its levels. Knowing this, it is in the honeybees best interest to locate nectar resources that already have a lower level of water compared to similar nectar resources.
Karl von Frisch realized upon a behavior of honeybees that points out to other foraging honeybees the compass direction of a resource in relation to the sun and its distance from the hive. This behavior is known as the “Wag -Tail Dance”. When a honeybee performs the “dance” she is making any one of several types of movement patterns that each translate to a key piece of information about a resource. Below is an image of several types of dances.
Bee Communication Dances
The type of dance they perform partly translates to the distance the hive is from the nectar source. If the nectar source is about 0 – 10 yards from the hive a bee will perform the Round Dance. When 10 – 100 yards from the hive the dance will transition from the Round Dance into a Crescent Dance. Beyond 100 yards the dance will transition again into the Wag-Tail Dance. Karl von Frisch observed that the number of “straight runs” the bee makes as she performs the Wag-Tail dance is an indicator of how far away the nectar source is. A straight run is the middle course the honeybee takes as she performs the looping pattern.
Cant touch this!
Graphically we as humans can see the pattern of this dance from looking down on to a 2-D surface. However, to the honeybees this visual reference is useless. They rely on a phenomena caused by the dance itself. Following Karl’s discovery it was later learned that honeybees also pick up information related to distance from sound signals that occur during the dance. Honeybees can perceive “airborne sounds by detecting air-particle movements, rather than pressure oscillations as in human hearing.” The Hive and the Honey Bee (page 284) As the bee dances, her wings emit low frequency pulses in the 250-300 Hertz range with a pulse duration of about “20 milliseconds and a repetition frequency of approximately 30 per second.”
The honeybees surrounding the dancing bee pick up on these pulses using their antenna which are placed near the abdomen of the dancing bee. The number of pulses detected translates into the distance of a nectar source from the hive. The greater the number of pulses, the greater the distance the nectar source is from the hive.
So now we can see how bees communicate distance but how do they communicate directional information. Honeybees use a compass not based on the magnetic poles but upon the location of the sun over the horizon during a given time.
During a bee’s flight in search of nectar she may happen to come across a large cluster of plants within the midst of their nectar flow. For the purpose of our first example we will assume it is directly in front of the hive, at least 100 yards out, and the sun also happens to be in straight alignment with the food source and the hive. In this scenario the honey bee would come back to the hive and do her wag-tail dance with the “straight run” going right up the vertical face of the comb as seen in the picture below. (Image 1)
Hive, nectar source, and sun are in alignment.
Hive and nectar source are in alignment. Sun is 45 degrees to the right of the hive.
If the sun was 45 degrees to the right of the hive and the nectar source was in the same place as in the previous example, the “straight run” of the honeybees dance would change accordingly.
So, the angle of the run is 45 degrees left of the compass direction of the sun. 45 degrees left of the sun puts the food source in straight alignment with the hive. (Image 2)
Now if the food source was to the right of the hive by 45 degrees and the sun was straight in front of the hive as in the first example the angle of the “straight run” would also point 45 degrees to the right. (Image 3)
Honeybees are also able to communicate to one another about the quality of the nectar source. When a honeybee forager returns to the hive other forager bees in the hive will vibrate the honeycomb using a 380 HZ frequency. These “begging signals” will stimulate the forager to regurgitate a droplet of its new found nectar source for the others to “analyze”. This is very useful in that it will alert other forager bees whether another source of nectar has been found and if it is better than the resource they are currently culling from.
All of this information compounds upon the initial discoveries from Karl von Frisch’s research during the 1950’s. Although the idea of the honeybees having their own means of communication was put forward earlier by Ernst Spitzner in 1788, it was not until Karl von Frisch published “Uber die Sprache der Bienen” was attention truly devoted to this aspect of the honeybee’s behavior.
It is very interesting to read these older works and learn what was considered “current” for the time. Science is always evolving and building upon itself and to appreciate it one should try reading these little gems. The information may be out of date or completely wrong but being a beekeeper I am fascinated by all that we have learned since the time of their writings. My next endeavor is to complete Lorenzo L. Langsroth classic, “Hive and the Honey-bee”.
Hive and sun are in alignment. Nectar source is 45 degrees to the right.
