Bee Log 62: July 26, 2011

Honey bee working a leek that has gone to flower


A full frame of honey that is almost ready. Note the whiter area along the top of the frame. That honey has a thin wax cap across the top indicating that the bees have decided that it has been sufficiently dehydrated. We take frames of honey from the bees when they are at least 80% capped. Go bees go!


A family, visiting from California, is watching my husband work a hive in our back yard. We love to educate people about bees when we get a chance.


I got stung on the leg two days ago. My body over-reacts to bee venom. So far treatment has consisted of ice, Benadryl, hydro-cortisone cream, and ibuprofen. I looked up some folk remedies and tried a few but I think I was too late for them to have any effect. Ice seems to give the most relief.

This has been a most frustrating summer for beekeepers and presumably for the bees. We have had cool overcast day after cool overcast day. I look at the weather across the nation and see the temperatures in many parts of the country hovering around a humid 95 to 100 degrees and am thankful I don't have to brave that but on the other hand, it does make beekeeping difficult when the bees can't get out to the flowers that I know are blooming. Our bees are finally able to bring in nectar in excess of their needs. We are seeing a lot of uncapped honey that we hope will be ready sometime this week of next week. The bees put a thin coat of wax over the cells of honey when they are dehydrated enough so the honey doesn't ferment.


We hope to be at the Phinney Farmers' Market on the first Friday in August.

Bee Log 61: July 4, 2011

These seven hives are at the Urban Horticulture Center on the University of Washington campus. The hive on the far right is the swarm hive that was featured in the previous blog. It is coming right along. The hive on the far left is the hive that swarmed. We know this because it ended up without a viable queen. The old queen flies off with the swarm. The remaining hive is left with queen cells (pupa cases) about to hatch another queen. That new queen must go around and kill the other queens about to hatch. If she misses one, then there is often a secondary swarm with an unmated queen. We did have a second swarm at that site so it could be that the hive ended up without a queen. Our last inspection of the far left hive showed that there were no eggs, no larva and no brood (pupa cases). That means no active queen.

Our options were to purchase a queen for $25 to $30, let nature take its course and possibly loose a strong hive with a lot of bees or combine that hive with another hive. We chose this last option combining the hive with a swarm that we caught at one of our host homes. We know that swarm had a queen because of the behavior of the bees as we captured the swarm.

To combine hives, we use the newspaper method. A sheet of newspaper is placed on top of the hive without a queen or with a queen we want to depose. Slits are made in the paper and the hive addition is placed on top. The bees set to work chewing up the paper giving them enough time to adjust to the new queen. If there are two queen, they fight for their throne with (we hope) the strongest, healthiest queen winning.

In the last 3 days, we have answered 4 swarm calls. We love getting these swarms as thay helps make up for all the hives we lost last winter. One swarm was a puny little thing and we combined it with a larger swarm.

We are starting to add honey supers to out hives. Any hive that you see in the above picture with 4 boxes has a honey super. We are hoping to have honey to sell by July 22. That is our target date for starting with the Phinney Farmers' Market. Finally the weather is looking like summer with days in the mid 70's and blackberry blossoms galore.

Bee Log 60: June 15, 2011

This is our Seattle Urban Honey logo on a sign at the farmers' market last summer. Our bees are not yet producing honey that we can take this summer. This might delay the July 1 date that we had hoped would be the debut of this season's honey.


Our bees are hungry. The blackberry bushes are just about to bloom as are the locust trees but they must be waiting for a nice day before they open. The maple and chestnut are finished blooming. The weather is still pretty cool with clouds, wind and some rain so the bees are stuck at home a good bit of the time. We looked through all of the hives last weekend and found that they all needed feeding because they were in danger of starvation. The population is booming in all hives so lack of feed is not a good thing. We did not have honey supers on any hives except the one surviving hive from last summer(in a yard in Bellevue).

We decided that since that hive is so populous and because it really needs feed that we would take this time to make a three way split. (You can't feed bees when there is a danger that the syrup might get stored as honey for human consumption. That is one of the ways that beekeepers cheat.) The bees were filling 4 western sized (medium)boxes. A fifth honey super (honey storage box) was pretty much untouched by the bees. We bought 2 new queens from Corky Luster Of Ballard Honey. We went through the hive and found the old queen in the third box from the bottom. She is big and beautiful. We set her aside along with a box full of bees and brood. She was going to go back on the old hive site. The rest of the hive was split into two roughly equal boxes of brood and bees. There was NO HONEY to divide up. Each box of bees got a second almost empty box on top and a feeder full of 2 gallons of sugar water (1:1 this time of year). The two new hives got a new queen inserted in a little screened box with a hard candy plug. By the time the bees eat the candy plug, they should be used to the new queen's scent. The queen will get fed through the screen.

The owner of the property had been asking for more bees. He had 4 hives last year, 3 of which died so he is happy to see more hives. This split will limit the honey that we could have gotten from such a vigorous hive but at the same time we were worried about the lack of honey and starvation. We should get three good hives and maybe some honey.

Bee Log 59: June 11, 2011

We caught a swarm on Thursday evening. The swarm was from our own bees at the Urban Horticulture Center. I did not think of getting my camera out until we had bumped the swarm into a 5 gallon bucket and poured the bees into a waiting hive. Here the bees on the inner cover of the hive are scent fanning, rears in the air and wings going like mad, to call the rest of the bees to the hive. The queen is inside the hive and the rest of the bees in the swarm are being informed of her whereabouts.



This picture was taken about 5 to 10 minutes after the first picture. Notice that almost all the bees are aiming toward the hole in the top of the inner cover.



It takes time to hive a swarm. We spent about 45 minutes to an hour waiting for the bees to march into their new home.



Almost all the bees are in the hive now. It is time to put the cover on the hive and to place the hive where we want it. The old queen will be in the hive with the swarm. The hive where the swarm originated will be raising a new queen. She will hatch within about 5 days. The new queen will then need a 70 degree day to get out to mate.


Bees in a bird house:

This cute little bird house belongs to friends of mine, J&B. It fell out of the tree where it was hanging and B went to pick it up and was quite surprised (understatement) when bees came pouring out. In general, we do not handle bees for people other than honey bee swarms but for close friends with bees in a bird house we do make exceptions. We were in a time crunch because we needed to be at a high school graduation so my husband with his bee suit on popped the whole bird house into an empty bee hive and left the hive sitting in J&B's yard so the rest of the bees could find their home that evening. My husband described the bees as fat and fuzzy. He knew they were not honey bees but did not have time or leisure for further identification.

After the graduation, we raced back to change clothes and retrieve our hive with unidentified bees. We plugged the entrance to the hive, strapped the hive together, took it home in the back of our pickup and left it there until morning. This morning, we located a place in a tree in our yard for the little bird house, suited up and placed the bird house in the tree.

The bees are a small bumble bee. I am glad that we saved them because we need native pollinators as well as the honey bees. I will try to get a picture of one of the bumble bees.

Bee Log 58: June 4, 2011

The hive on the left is a combination of two weak hives. We piled the one hive on the other with newspaper between. It must have been too late because both hives died. There was plenty of honey. The top box must have weighed 30 pounds or more. The hive on the right is a new hive placed in April. It is doing very well on this first really nice day of the year. The spring has been cold, cold, cold and wet, wet, dreary wet. We are on a swarm list (Puget Sound Beekeepers' Association) and anticipating calls and maybe some excitement!



Yes, a happy hive! (on the right)


A close-up of bees being busy on a really nice early June morning.


Elegy for a dead hive. We had such great hopes for this year but we are down to one surviving hive out of 19 that went into the winter. We did order 18 new boxes of bees which, despite the cold spring, seem to be doing very well. We cleaned most of the equipment that contained the dead hives with the idea that the causative organism for the bee deaths might still be in the hives. We also cleaned out a whole lot of stored honey which at this point is just waste and will go down the drain. I know that we are throwing away potential resources but there is some evidence that bees housed in dead-outs have a high mortality.

Our experiment this summer is placing bees in all new hives and in hives that have been pressure washed and bleached. So far there is no noticeable difference.

Bee Log 57: May 22, 2011

We have a new spot to keep bees. We are so excited to have a spot at the University of Washington Urban Horticulture Center. It is in an out of the way fenced area. I hope these bees do well enough to earn their rent!



Our own bees ready to go in a hive.



One of the members of the Puget Sound Beekeepers invited club members to his place to help install over 100 boxes of bees. Pictured above are some of the boxes waiting to be put in a hive.



We toured the honey house that the beekeeper had built. Notice the bees hanging out on our bee-suits. These bees don't know where they live.


It is hard to keep writing about dead beehives. Finally, I have something to say about nice lively beehives. We got 18 new boxes of bees. This brings out total hives up to 21. Out of 19 hives of bees, 4 survived. Two of those hives were so weak that we put them together as one hive. The queens fight and one queen will remain in that situation.

The new bees are all booming despite the cool weather. It will take a bit of time for them to build up to the place where we can take honey from them. Our first date at the Phinney Farmers' Market is July 1. Last year with a cool May and June we were not able to get to the market until August 1. I sure hope that is not the case this year. Lots of local beekeepers are out of honey. People are asking for it at the farmers' markets and not getting it.

Bee Log 56: April 20, 2011

This is what the bottom board on one of our dead hives looked like. It looks pretty much like the bottom boards of the hives that survive. There are a few dead bees there.



We are getting some new hives ready to receive the new packages of bees that we are expecting.

We went into the winter with 19 live hives. 15 of them have died over the winter. I am not sure that I am such a good beekeeper. What did they die of and when did they die? Only one hive died of starvation. All of the other hives had more then enough stores to see them through the winter. Two hives died in the last two weeks. They seem to be victims of CCD or colony collapse disorder. The bees just disappeared leaving behind a bunch of honey, capped brood and no recently dead bee corpses. Several hives died between February 1 and March 1. It was a nasty cold winter and the bees probably had too small a cluster to begin raising the spring bees needed to replace an elderly population of late winter bees. In those hives we found a softball sized cluster of bees all dead.

What will we do differently? We did not treat for either varroa mites or trachea mites last fall. We need to do both. There are some new non-pesticide treatments out that show some promise. One is based on hops and one on formic acid. We have started with the hops treatment. We are also feeding sugar water and pollen substitute. It remains colder than normal in Seattle and the bees are just not getting out much. They need to raise brood this time of year and they must have pollen or pollen substitute for protein.

We hived 8 new packages of bees over the last weekend. We are trying an experiment based on the hypothesis that winter dead-outs are largely caused by a disease or diseases. We placed 4 of the new boxes of bees on frames that had held honey last summer. 4 boxes were placed on new plastic frames painted with a bit of bee's wax from our own hives. We are following the work of Craig Cella of Loganton, PA who described an experiment in the April 2011 American Bee Journal. Any boxes, bases or lids that were reused were dipped in a 10% bleach solution before the bees came. Our test will be a count of the blank cells in the brood nest. A 20 X 20 cell area is marked out and then the empty cells counted. We are curious whether the reused honey super frames will affect the brood.

Beekeepers have been putting new bees on old drawn out frames for many years. Bees seem to like old comb. This gives the bees a head start because they can get right down to the business of raising a family without having to build the house first. Recently, there seems to be some evidence that diseases or something bad for the bees is harbored in the old comb. It is known that the wax is a sponge for pesticides and that the accumulation of pesticides is bad for the bees. Some disease like American foul brood bacteria spores are known to stay on the wax and infected subsequent hives (such hives must be burned). This is not American foul brood. It is not known what causes CCD but putting bees in hives that have died increases mortality. Perhaps our small experiment can help determine if the honey supers are also harboring an agent causing poor brood numbers.

We enter spring a bit chastened by our loss. We feel responsible. We do want to be able to produce honey for the farmers' market. There are 10 more packages of bees coming. That will give us a total of 22 hives placed in 10 locations around the north end of Seattle.