Shaken, Not Stirred: Performing A Sugar Shake/Roll

Check out what our queens have been up to!

This frame is from Buzzers’ Roost (the weaker, over-wintered hive). Look at all that lovely covered brood. These are two sides of one frame. Notice the glistening nectar on the left in the top photo? And can you spot the queen? We were happy to see she’s now laying in the deep box instead of the smaller medium one from the winter (also referred to as a super).

Here’s a frame full of larvae and eggs.

And this one had pollen (near bottom), capped honey (bottom right), some capped brood, and larvae. If you can’t see the difference, here’s a great post from BackYardHive on identifying types of comb. You’ll notice they use different style hives, but the comb is the same. FreeBees also moved up into the deep box we put on last week. See the difference in the color of the bees? Buzzers’ Roost bees are still mainly Italian (offspring of the ill-fated Red Queen), and the FreeBees hive is Saskatraz. We’ll notice a shift in Buzzers’ Roost as the eggs and larvae from the Saskatraz queen emerge and take over.I think we counted about seven and a half frames full of brood in FreeBees. At about 7,000 cells per frame (3,500 a side), that’s a lot of bees! I keep thinking I must have mis-counted, and I didn’t write that figure down (too busy taking pictures and running the timer for the Varroa check).

Part of this week’s inspection was a sugar shake (also called a sugar roll) to check for Varroa. It was much easier this time, partly because we’d done it before, and partly because we used the University of Minnesota’s scooping method to measure out the 1/2 cup of bees (about 300) needed for the sample.

Basically, we measure out the bees, dump them in a jar with a mesh lid, measure in a couple of tablespoons of powdered sugar, roll or shake until they’re covered.After letting them set for several minutes, we shake the sugar onto a paper plate, wet it to make it melt, and count the Varroa.

Now, you’re wondering, “But what about the bees?”

Here’s the answer. When the sugar-covered, unhappy bees settle, we dump them back into the hive with an interesting story to tell their sisters. They immediately started fanning, (perhaps to spread the word), which you can see in the video below. (I’ve discovered that I seem to be able to upload videos to WordPress from my iPad, but not my computer of phone. Weird.) If you’re going to do a sugar shake/roll, here’s a pdf, also from the University of Minnesota’s Bee Lab. Please follow their precise directions, and not my description above!

Lastly, we replaced the pollen patty on Buzzers’ Roost and gave one to FreeBees. We’ve noticed Small Hive Beetles come around whenever we feed this way, so if you do it, be sure to put in a beetle trap or two, and check them regularly. The Buzzers’ Roost trap caught several SHB last week, and I took great delight in seeing them do the dead beetle float in the olive oil. Despite not finding any Varroa in our sugar shake, I know they are lurking in all that beautiful capped brood, especially in FreeBees. That hive now has enough bees, and we’ll do a Formic Pro treatment as soon as we get a spell of weather cool enough for the process. This week’s temperatures are predicted to be in the 90s, so perhaps the next week will be better.

We’ll also be keeping an eye on Buzzers’ and doing another sugar shake for both hives in early August, treating again as necessary.

Queenright Hives

Queenright: A term used to describe a hive or colony of bees that has a producing queen. (Definition from the Maine State Beekeepers’ Association’s “Beekeeping Glossary.”)

We checked our hives Friday, and both are (finally) queenright.

<Insert sigh of relief>

Buzzers’ Roost have accepted their new Saskatraz queen. She’s laying — there were eggs and larvae, as well as a fair amount of brood  — but the hive’s population is still low. Given the rough spring they’ve had, this is not surprising. Since they still have honey from winter, we put on a little pollen patty, closed up the hive and left them to it.

FreeBees appear to be thriving, with lots of capped brood, eggs and larvae, and foragers lugging in nectar and pollen from dawn to dusk. Because their population is growing so quickly, we gave them pollen also and put another box on Monday. We were planning to feed them sugar water, but realized we had excess honey in the freezer from Buzzers’ Roost — the hive’s winter bees proved to be very frugal — so instead, we put some of that and all the drawn comb we had in the new box. Drawing comb takes a lot of energy, so providing foundation that’s already drawn will make it easier for the hive to continue to grow.

FreeBees keeping an eye on us as we check their hive.

At last, The Engineer and I can feel cautiously hopeful about our hives.

On a side note, I now see why many beekeepers recommend starting with two hives. With one, we had nothing to compare to and no resources when our hive ran into trouble. Having two hives means we can “borrow” honey or drawn comb, for example, even supplement a weaker hive with capped brood from the stronger hive if necessary.

Looking forward to next week, we will be doing a sugar shake, followed by an alcohol wash on both hives (to monitor for Varroa). With luck, the MAQS should have wiped out any of the nasty buggers in Buzzers’ Roost, but we’ll likely need to re-treat FreeBees. If you remember, we treated them with Oxalic Acid, which kills mites on the bees, but not under the capped brood. The hive’s population is now large enough to withstand that treatment, and we’ll  do it when we expect a spell of slightly cooler weather.
I’ll leave you with this shot of the FreeBees bridging (sometimes called “festooning,” which I love) when we separated their frames to inspect the hive. I’ve read several explanations of this behavior and have chosen to accept it as another mystery of the Apis Mellifera.

Bee-wildered by “The Bee Movie”

Last week, The Engineer and I finally watched “The Bee Movie,” mainly because several friends insisted we had to see it.

If you’re a fan of the flick, please close this window and walk away now.

For those who have chosen to continue reading, let me first say I understand the film is not a documentary meant to educate, but a children’s movie. But, I also know children’s learning is not confined to the classroom. With minds like sponges, they absorb information in whatever form it takes.

Let’s begin with what “The Bee Movie” got right.

• Humor — The film had some great one-liners.
• The brevity of a bee’s life. Workers live 40-60 days, unless they are born in the fall to live through the winter.
• The close relation of most bees in a hive — The movie called them cousins, which is close enough to get the point across. In reality, they are usually siblings and half-siblings.
•  The amount of work it takes for bees to make honey. Eight to twelve bees work their whole life to make one teaspoon.
• The important role of bees in pollination. One out of every three bites of food we eat requires insect pollination.

Now, let’s look at what the movie got wrong.

• Most beekeepers are not villains. Like all humans, there are bad beekeepers and good ones. Most the ones I know but are genuinely attached to — if not enthralled by — their bees.
• Using a smoker is not evil. It disrupts the bees, which helps prevent stings, but beekeepers are taught to use as little as possible.
• Bees don’t stay at one job until they die. Worker bees move through several roles in their lifetime.
• Which leads to my biggest gripe about this movie: WORKER BEES ARE FEMALE AND THEY DO ALL THE WORK!!!

“Pollen jocks”? Seriously? In a hive, drones do two things: Eat and fly to the drone congregation area (DCA) to try to mate with a queen. Oh, and die. I guess that’s actually three things.

If you have been reading my blog or know anything about bees, you already understand this.

The blue arrow is pointing to a drone. He, unlike his half-sisters, does not work. He will never be a “pollen jock” or do any of the countless jobs offered to Barry B. Benson and his buddies. The smaller bees are workers. All female, they do every job in the hive.

So, why did Jerry Seinfeld write a film about “pollen jocks”? I can only assume he had a deep-seated need to be the voice of the lead character (Barry B.Benson), and thus decided to re-write nature.

Seriously, writing about male bees pollinating is like writing about bulls giving birth. A complete fallacy.

Meanwhile, the females in the movie get to spend all their time oohing and ahing over the “pollen jocks” or, in the case of Barry B. Benson’s mother, acting the role of a 50s housewife.

I know, I know, you’re probably saying, “Kym, it’s just a kid’s movie. What does it matter?”

It matters because the movie implies adventure is confined to the males of every species, including the insect world, which is untrue. It matters because, once again, little girls see boys having all the fun while the females in the movie are confined to the sidelines.

Okay, so I sound like a raging feminist. That’s okay. I am a feminist, and right now, I am raging.

But back to the movie — why couldn’t the lead role have been a (factually accurate) female worker bee having the same adventures Barry B. Benson did? There is no logical reason to reverse the facts.

I don’t expect an animated children’s movie to be completely accurate, but this movie could have easily been both factual and fun.

Instead, it left me angry, bee-wildered, and disappointed on behalf of our girls and all girls.

Update: FreeBees

We gave FreeBees a few days to settle into their new location before opening the hive to have a look. 
It was lovely. Enlarge the photo to see nearly every open cell with either a perfectly positioned egg or larva. The queen has been doing her job because the hive has about three frames that look like this.

And here’s a closeup of that queen, who we are calling Ziska at the suggestion of my friend Kate. Ziska’s long, tapered body helps her position those eggs right in the middle where they belong. Initially, we planned to use Formic Pro strips for Varroa treatment, but the company rep at field day said a hive needs six frames of bees to do a full-strength treatment. FreeBees has about five.

That was an “Uh-oh” moment for me. Buzzers’ Roost is a small hive, maybe too small for the full MAQS treatment we gave it, which might explain the number of dead bees.

MAQS are similar to Formic Pro, but Formic Pro takes ten days at full strength. The half strength treatment takes twenty. You can’t feed the bees at any time during the treatment, so we chose to use Oxalic Acid (OA). The trade-off is OA only kills Varroa on the bees, not under the caps like the strips.

This means we’ll be keeping a close eye on our Varroa counts and will probably end up using the strips during the early fall/late summer once we know the bees have plenty of their own food.

Beekeeping, it seems, sometimes involves compromise.

With OA, you seal the hive before inserting the wand through the large opening of the entrance reducer. The foragers below were trying to figure out how to get back in the hive with the temporarily installed reducer. (Buzzers’ Roost, in the background, also has some entrance activity at its fully open entry.) The FreeBees foragers are more active than Buzzers’ Roost’s, out and about early each morning until late evening. It rained today, and I was astounded to see some returning and/or going out even in the rain. It was cloudy when we did the OA, but in the 3-1/2 minutes it took to do the treatment, we developed a traffic jam. 
Below you can see the bees fanning, bums up, beating their wings to get ride of the scent after we removed the wand.
Later this week, we will add some food to this hive to help the girls as they build comb and raise babies. We’ll also have a peek at Buzzers’ Roost to see if they’ve accepted the queen and whether or not she’s laying if they have. They still had some honey, but we’ll check to see if they need fed as well.

Until then, Bee happy!

P.S. I’m not sure if I mentioned it before, but these are Saskatraz bees, just like our most recent queen in Buzzers’ Roost.

FreeBees Hive

The coaster on the front has two loose bees from the hive waiting until we open it tonight to let them in.

The loose bees discuss their trip and new surroundings (a little blurry).

FreeBees!

On Saturday, 2 June, we attended the Lorain County Beekeepers Association Field Day, held in conjunction with Queen Right Colonies at the shop’s location in Spencer, Ohio, near an Amish community.

As we passed through the town center (which may or may not have a traffic light — I can’t remember), traffic came to a standstill. We realized it was because there were several buggies in front of us, and they were also heading to the Field Day.

We pulled in behind a buggy, and parked in knee-high grass.

It was a fun day, with several speakers, beekeeping talks around several hives of bees, and alpaca shearing. 
In my previous post, I forgot to mention that Queen Right is also a bit of a menagerie, which includes several alpacas. The one above seemed to be saying “Get me out of here!” as she gets a cut and manicure. But temperatures last week soared into the upper 80s and 90s, so we can be sure the animals were a lot more comfortable afterwards.  And the two shearers handled the herd members gently and carefully.

More important to this post is the fact that there were raffles, and after an outlay of $20 on tickets, I won the best prize — a hive of bees.

Can you believe it? We’d just been talking about how we hoped to eventually be work up to two hives, and a few hours later, our wishes came true. How lucky is that?

Naming this new hive required much discussion (over a beer or two) before The Engineer came up with the perfect moniker.

Ladies and gentlemen, I’m pleased to announce Buzzers’ Roost’s new neighbor will be called … FreeBees!

Once More, Same as Before

We killed the Queen of Hearts on Monday.

We didn’t mean to do it, but we did.

She’d lost her red marking, so we decided if we found her, we’d mark her.

The procedure seemed simple enough, and we had all the right tools courtesy of our Ohio State Beekeepers Diagnostic Kit.

Picture of Queen Marking Plunger from Queen Right Colonies online catalog

Basically, you catch the queen, gently move her to the end of the tube with the plunger, hold her still while marking her thorax, wait for the ink to dry, and release her back in her hive.

At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work.

In our case, we caught our queen, gently moved her to the end of the tube, held her, marked her, waited a few minutes, pulled out the plunger, and … she was dead.

Did I plunge too hard? Did The Engineer use too much paint? Perhaps it was a bit of both.

Either way, poor Queen of Hearts is gone, leaving only some fuzzy, golden bees as a legacy.

Once again, we called Queen Right Colonies, and lucked out. They had Olivarez Saskatraz queens in stock. And this would be a good place to mention how lucky we are to have a resource like QRC within driving distance. Owned and operated by the St.Clair family, this small shop is a treasure trove of all things bee, including package bees and queens. And anytime we’ve had any question about how to proceed, they are willing to explain exactly what we need to do. (Blue Sky Bee Supply employees have also been quite helpful.)

Anyway, I was able to pick up our queen before I went to work on Wednesday. Since we wouldn’t be able to put her in until that evening, I asked what I should do with her until then.

One of the always helpful St.Clair daughters answered with a question of her own: “You’re going to work?”

Me: “Yes.”

St.Clair daughter: “Put her in your purse. She’ll be fine.”

Me: “Really?”

St.Clair daughter: “I’ve taken them to the grocery store. She’ll be fine.”

And that, friends is how our new queen, Saski, and her attendants ended up spending a day tucked away in my purse in a locker at work.

Later that evening, we put her in the hive.

Today, we opened the hive just enough to see the candy in the queen cage had been eaten through.

Now, we wait for at least a week to give her a chance to be fully accepted by our hive. We’ll probably give her ten days, possibly more, to give her the best chance for a future with the rest of our girls.

Also, I don’t think we’ll try marking our own queen again.