The Bee Line. Creating good and healthy beekeeping throughout MICHIANA PUBLISHED BY MICHIANA BEEKEEPERS ASSOCIATION

Transcription

1 The Bee Line Creating good and healthy beekeeping throughout MICHIANA PUBLISHED BY MICHIANA BEEKEEPERS ASSOCIATION We are once again privileged to be able to have our April meeting at the beautiful Christo's Banquet Center in Plymouth, IN on Saturday, April 21 from 9:00 a.m. To noon. Christo's Banquet Center is located on Lincolnway East just a block south of the traffic light where Lincolnway angles south-east from East Jefferson St. We will be talking about Spring management: keeping our hives from swarming, building up for the honey flow and getting packages and nucs off on the right foot for a successful Summer. APRIL 2012 MBA CONTACTS PRESIDENT Bob Baughman bob.deb.baughman@sbcglobal.net VICE PRESIDENT AND RECORDING SECRETARY Tim Ives liquidgold2009@embarqmail.com TREASURER David Emerson emerson3434@msn.com EDITOR Henry Harris Wednesday, March 28 some of us met with about 40 new henry4744@frontier.com or recently new beekeepers at the Nappanee Library to go into more detail on getting started in beekeeping. Bob Baughman did most of the presentation with some chiming in from others of us. Among the many things discussed were the personal equipment a beekeeper must have to take care of bees and do it safely and comfortably. Sizes of equipment were also covered. Beekeeping for most of the last 100 years has considered the 9 5/8 standard for hive brood boxes with either shallow 5 11/16 or medium 6 5/8 for honey supers. When full of honey the deep can weigh 90#, the medium 55# and the shallow 48#. Brood weighs less than honey so the deeps will not ordinarily reach the 90# mark but will still be quite heavy. Beekeepers, being an independent thinking bunch, sometimes rebel and use all mediums or shallows forsaking the deep altogether for the sake of less weight to lift. Likewise some some have moved to an 8 frame hive instead of the traditional 10 frame to lighten the boxes. Bee hives need protection from cold winds in winter and a windbreak of some sort can be made or a hedge or building taken advantage of. It is also some times advisable to shield hives from sight of neighbors who might feel threatened by their presence. At left a fence can be erected to guide bees up and over a walkway, play area or anyplace else they would be unwelcome. Honey bees use water all year round. Unlike people, bees do not eat honey in its thicken state but dilute it and so will use a lot of water when rearing brood. Bees also use water to cool the hive and can use 1 to 2 gallons a day when it is hot outside. 1.

2 COMING IN MAY, RANDY OLIVER Randy Oliver is a 500 colony commercial beekeeper pollinating almonds and raising bees. Randy is also a biologist who conducts his own research on varroa mites and publishes his findings in the American Bee Journal and on his website He also writes about the health of honey bees and more recently the new threat from nosema cerana. Randy is also on the cutting edge of a movement to promote natural (non-chemical) beekeeping using essential oils, selective breeding and high protein bee food but does not condemn those who do use chemical treatments. This forward thinking, world class beekeeping expert, much sought after for speaking engagements will be the guest speaker at the MICHIANA Beekeepers Association Spring Auction Saturday, May 19. Plan now to be with us to hear this knowledgable, hands-on beekeeper and researcher. Check out 'Randy Oliver' on google and his website. Registration for this auction and learning event will be $10 per family for members and non-members alike. Registration will begin at 8:30 a.m. MBA President Bob Baughman will open the meeting at 9:00 a.m. Randy Oliver will give his first presentation from 9:15 to 10:15. There will be a short break and Randy will continue from 10:30 to 11:30. Lunch will be a carry-in. Bring your favorite picnic dish to pass: salad, main dish, or dessert and table service. Port-A-Pit Golden Glow chicken will be available for $5.00 per half, buy your chicken tickets at registration. Randy will speak again from 12:45 to 1:15 p.m Auctioneer Roger Graham will conduct the auction after Randy is finished and it will go on until everything is sold. Come prepared to buy those gems that others no longer want. Bring that bee equipment you no longer use, nectar providing plants, and anything else a beekeeper might like to have. Non-beekeeping related items are also welcome. The amount received is split 50/50 with you and the MBA or you can donate the whole proceeds to the MBA. Different terms can be arranged for honey tanks or other expensive items if you see Bob Baughman before the auction. The MBA auction meeting is held at the home of Norman Lehman, County Road 16, one mile east of the only traffic light in downtown Middlebury and right next to the Lehman's Dutch Country Market. 2.

3 Wandering with an Old Timer by Henry Harris I hope you are all enjoying this Spring as much as I am. It came in a bit early but all of the colors are there and it is comfortable to be out of doors. At the March meeting many of us reported finding capped drone brood in our hives. I first noticed these in one of my hives on March 16. A lot has happened since our March meeting. The temperatures have dropped back into their normal March and early April ranges slowing down what was beginning to look like a race towards swarming. Rest assured, swarming will come, but swarming is not something new beekeepers starting with packages or nucs need to be concerned about. The underlying factor in swarming is that honey bees have the same compulsion to reproduce that other animals have. With other animals, fur or fowl, it is primarily the offspring that are in danger of being eaten by a predator ending reproduction for that year but leaving the parents intact for a try next year. With honey bees not only the swarm but the parent colony plus all future offspring are put at risk of perishing in the reproduction process. Because of this danger the animal urge to reproduce is tempered by other factors to give the greatest likelihood of survival to both the swarm and the parent colony and by extension future colonies too. The most visible part of this multifaceted check and balance is a large population. We usually refer to it as congestion or over crowding. The colony must be packed with bees. When the colony detects that the population is sufficient one obstacle to swarming is passed. Brood is another requirement. The parent colony is going to be without a laying queen for about 23 days with the result that when the new queen is ready to start laying eggs all of the old queen's brood will have emerged except for possibly some drones. The queen cannot fly when her abdomen is enlarged with ovarioles producing eggs. The queen must be put on a diet and exercise routine to bring her down to flying weight and size. Queen #1 on the left is a laying queen while queen #2, overlaid on the right, has just returned from a mating flight. There is a big difference in size. It was only a few years ago that I learned the queen may actually be chased around inside the hive to make her reduce size faster. The queen lays eggs according to how much food she is being fed. So cutting back on her royal jelly and possibly adjusting its composition to be less rich will stop the queen from laying eggs prior to the swarm issuing from the hive. This cessation of egg laying must take place at least a day and possibly more before the swarm leaves the hive. Quite often when a beekeeper finds capped swarm cells in a hive there will be no worker eggs meaning the queen has already been prepared for her flight out and stopped laying eggs at least three days previously. After the new queen emerges from her cell she will need from 5 to 7 days of maturing, gaining strength and taking orientation flights before she is ready to mate. She will then make multiple mating flights over a 1 to 5 day period mating with as many as 20

4 drones unless cold or rainy weather interferes. After mating is complete she will be groomed and fed with rich royal jelly for 2 or 4 days while the sperm she received in the matings migrates to her spermathecae, the sac where the sperm will be held and remain viable until it is used up in fertilizing worker eggs, usually 2 to 3 years. A queen kept in a nuc or observation hive may be able to fertilize eggs for several more years because she would be laying a smaller number of eggs. A queen exudes a drone attracting pheromone, a scent, for 10 days after emerging from her cell then she looses the ability to attract drones for mating. A period of bad weather at the point when the queen is ready to take mating flights can prevent the queen from mating. With no sperm to fertilize eggs she will only be able to produce drone eggs and the colony to dwindle and die. A small amount of bad weather can limit the queen to mating with only a few drones so that she will need to be replaced sooner than would be expected. These queen cells on the face of the comb are supersedure or emergency cells raised from eggs originally intended to be workers but changed to be queens within 3 days of hatching. A poorly mated queen may be detected by the bees by her inability to lay eggs at the rate they want but usually it is the poor quality of her "queen substance", a pheromone which is tied to how well she is mated. Queen substance is secreted by the queen and licked off by her court of attendants to share with other bees in the hive. Such a queen may be replaced after only a month or two, or she could have enough sperm to last until she would be replaced next summer, or she could run out of sperm to fertilize eggs in the middle of winter also dooming the colony. I am watching a queen right now that was rescued from a collapsing colony. She is laying eggs but she may have been sterilized, her sperm chilled and killed, by cold nights during which there were not enough workers to keep her warm. Time will tell if her eggs become workers or drones. Other dangers present themselves in the form of birds picking off a queen on a mating flight or her getting confused and returning to the wrong hive where she would be killed as an intruder. Honey and pollen are the last two ingredients the colony must have in abundance for the swarm to leave. In nature the colony ends winter and begins spring near the top of the hive cavity. As nectar comes in the bees force the queen to lay lower on the existing combs and possibly even make new lower extensions for the queen to lay eggs in. In this way there is a solid arrangement of honey above the brood nest for the parent colony to use after the swarm departs. Beekeepers mess with the location of honey in the hive and even remove it so that bees may have the impression they have more than they really do. Or they may have exactly what they think they have: enough to cast a swarm. So we have 4 areas to work with to control swarming: population, brood, queen cells, and honey stores. Weather is also big in this mix but since there is nothing we can do about that we will have to look at these four. If we can sufficiently mess up any one the colony will not go through with swarming. However,...if we reduce the population there also goes our chances for a good honey crop. And the same is true if we mess with the brood the wrong way. Honey is certainly the simplest of the 4 items

5 to deal with. Honey can be taken off and put into a freezer and replaced later when swarming is no longer a problem. But who has enough freezer space to store honey from 4, 6 or 8 hives? This is where the "checkerboarding" from our January meeting comes in. Tim Ives colonies have populations large enough that one medium super full of honey does not constitute a barrier. So a super of empty combs between two supers of honey demands that the larger population fill it up. For smaller hives one medium super full of honey can certainly convince them that they have enough honey to commit to swarming. In this case putting a super of empty combs on the colony but alternating the empty and full frames should signal that the honey storage area is short of the required amount. This can be done with medium or deep supers. Brood can be handled in a similar fashion. The double deep depicted below is jammed full of honey and brood. If nothing is done what you see above is what will happen all through the top deep. Above there is a small patch of capped brood completely surrounded by open honey. There is a good honey flow on and the bees are filling the cells as fast as the brood emerges driving the queen down. But in the diagram you can see she has nowhere to go to lay eggs. This condition will help to trigger swarming. By adding empty drawn combs or frames of foundation into the brood nest. This creates a break in the brood nest that must be dealt with either by laying it full of eggs or drawing out the comb and then laying it full of eggs. Empty combs in the brood nest signal danger for the parent colony if the swarm proceeds just like empty frames in the honey canopy suggest the parent colony may have trouble surviving if the swarm leaves before filling it up. At right we have added a 3rd deep box of empty drawn combs or foundation. The full frames of honey from each side of the original deep brood boxes were brought up into the 3rd box and two empty frames were inserted into the brood nest in each of the brood boxes. Note the empty frames are separated by a frame of brood. If placed together the empty frames could become a barrier that might lead to superseding the queen rather than an opportunity to raise more brood. Also notice that all empty frames are staggered so they do not become a wall to create the same barrier effect. If the colony is getting to big for you to handle at this point, and it will get even bigger if you manage to keep it from swarming, nuccing the colony can also be done but it will reduce your field force. Nuccing involves removing eggs, larvae, capped brood and workers along with honey and pollen to a new location in a box of their own to allow them to raise a queen or you can introduce a purchased queen. I touched on it some last month so I will go on to more on swarming. I hope you understand by now that nothing in beekeeping is absolute. We are not working with a piece of wood or metal. We are working with living beings that are both intelligent and guided by a complex web of social, natural and chemical forces. It is impossible to change "the one" or group and absolutely determine the outcome. So most of the time swarm cells will be built along the bottom bars of the top boxes frames. This places the cells where they will get the most contact, the best resources and ideal warmth. If there are swarm cells in your colony some, if not all, will be here. So an easy check is to lift the back edge

6 of the top box and look at the bottom bars. In the picture on the previous page the swarm cells were all open, the queens had emerged and from the look of it the colony cast more than one swarm. In this picture there are several open swarm cells three or four days from capping. The beekeeper has slid the top box forward to sit on the top bars of the bottom box to take the picture. For a temporary look it is only necessary to pull the box towards you about an inch to keep it from falling off the front of the hive. DO NOT LASH OUT AND SMASH ALL THE CELLS YOU CAN FIND!! FOR ONE THING YOU WILL NOT FIND ALL OF THEM and cutting queen cells out will not stop swarming. What you have found is a fully loaded freight train, 90 to 120 cars, going at high speed, 55 mph, in a direction you do not want it to go. With all of that momentum the real train takes more than one mile to stop. Your swarm train also has a lot of momentum behind it, a population of 50,000 or 60,000 bees geared up with pheromones and other odors as well as natural drive. You can work very hard to stop the swarm or you can expend some effort to redirect it in a more useful direction. The one action that is least likely to stop the swarm is cutting swarm cells out of the hive. You can cut out the twenty you found, and maybe that is all of them, but tomorrow there will be more because you have not change any of the drives or conditions that have caused the bees to know it is time to swarm. If cutting swarm cells is your choice of action you must do it without fail and meticulously every five or six days until they stop making them, maybe a month. If they manage to cap just one puny cell hidden among burr comb a swarm can leave that same day. And the more cells you cut out the more sneaky the bees will get in hiding them. The more desperate you make them the less sculpting they will make on the cells so they will look less like swarm cells and more like a drone cell or piece of burr comb. The most effective action is to remove honey, brood and adult bees and make a nuc. Find your queen and set her aside or examine every frame very carefully to be sure she is not on any that you remove. In an empty box put a frame with swarm cells and all adhering bees, two frames of the oldest capped brood you can find and all the bees on them, a couple of frames of younger brood and all the bees on them, four or five frames of honey and pollen then shake all the bees off of three frames of open brood into the box. You do not have to add the three frames of extra bees if you move this nuc two miles away. There are two things to keep in mind when working with swarm cells. First, swarm cells are often built down off the side of the bottom bar of the frame, as in the picture at right, so that they hang down between the top bars of the frames below. Sliding the frame with swarm cells side wise will tear the cells off and kill the queens. Second, as in the picture above swarm cells may hang down farther than a bee space below the frame's bottom bar. Be sure the box you will transfer this frame into has enough space between the bottom of the frame and the bottom board or you will smash the cells and queens. Put empty drawn combs or frames of foundation in place of all you have removed and put the queen back in. You could make up two or three smaller nucs, each consisting of a frame with swarm cells, a

7 frame of older capped brood and two or three frames of honey and pollen with extra bees shaken in and move them two miles away. Or simplest of all, the whole box nuc. Set out a new bottom board and put the top box on it. Do not worry about where the queen is just look to be sure there are swarm cells in both brood boxes then cover them up. The box with the queen will recognize they cannot swarm and will tear down the swarm cells in their box. The box without the queen will let one of the swarm queens kill all the others and head their colony. As can be seen at left, the first queen out of her cell is ruthless in killing her rivals still confined in their cells. After the queen stings her captive rivals through the cell wall workers enlarge the hole and remove the corpses. All of these methods of derailing the swarming of a colony desperately deplete your field force and reduce your honey crop. It is far better to pre-empt. Of course, you could just let them swarm. The important thing when starting with packages and nucs is to feed them sugar syrup constantly for the first two months, 1:1, one part sugar to one part water. Make the water hot but you must not boil or caramelize the sugar or it will be unusable for the bees. Feeding is necessary for a couple of reasons. When starting with package bees there is a mixture of all ages of bees in the package and as soon as you put the bees in their new hive the colony begins to dwindle slowly as the older bee die off. Younger bees out foraging begin to die quickly also. Providing sugar syrup will help keep a large number of bees at home producing heat, making bees wax and feeding brood. It is not until the first of the new bees emerges from their cells, about 25 days after installing the bees in the new hive, that the colony begins to grow again and recover its strength in numbers. Also Spring is very erratic and even a nuc can suddenly find itself running out of stores because of a few days when they cannot forage but must "turn the furnace up". Get the best price you can on white, granulated sugar, cane or beet. Do not feed any other kind of sugar, molasses, brown sugar, Karo syrup or any other type of syrup. While some of these are supposed to be healthier for people than white, granulated sugar they contain impurities and other things that are not digestible by honey bees and can kill instead of help them. Only feed white granulated sugar. Feed your bees a small amount of sugar syrup constantly, do not let them use it all up or let it stay in the jar so long it ferments. Two gallons of syrup put on a package of bees will mostly go to waste because they cannot use it fast enough. Feed them a quart at a time and add another quart as the colony grows and can handle more. Use inside the hive feeders. The syrup should be warm, they will not take it hot or cold. One of the easiest methods of feeding syrup is with what is called a friction feeder. The lid of any kink of jar that will seal is punched with several very tiny holes, just break through the metal with the tip of a small nail. Fill the jar with syrup, put the lid on and turn it upside down. It will rain syrup for a couple of seconds then stop when a vacuum is formed in the jar. Set the jar upside down on 1/4" sticks to hold it up so bees can get under the jar to suck syrup out. Set an empty super on top of the hive around the jars and close the hive up. Perhaps the easiest method of feeding syrup to bees is with the zip loc baggie. The ordinary baggie often leaks under pressure so use the freezer baggie. Fill the baggie with syrup, seal it and lay it on the top bars of

8 the brood box. Using a razor slice two parallel cuts in the top surface of the bag. The syrup will not pour out but the bees can suck it out through the cut. Notice the shallow rim around the baggie in the picture. An empty shallow super will also work. Do not give your new colony too much room. They must keep themselves, their brood and their immediate surroundings and they have to eat to produce heat using up precious food and keeping worker bees fromdoing other things. If you put the nuc or package in a full size box move them to one side. Allow them one or two empty frames to expand into and remove the rest replacing them with anything that will take up the space so the bees do not have to warm it: insulation, a box cut to size or even wadded up news paper. The "Huge Garage S" sign in the hive is just a piece of plastic yard sign cut to the shape of a frame to separate the bees and their comb from the space to be filled with an insulating material. "Were you born in a barn?!" Most of us have heard that at one time or another and even said it. If you go looking in your new hive more than once a week you could hear them saying the same thing if they could shout. Opening a hive lets out heat but it also lets out identifying and guiding pheromones necessary to make the hive run properly. It has been estimated that it takes a colony of bees from several hours to a day or more to reestablish its communication network after the hive has been opened, depending on how long and how extensively you looked through it. If you find the bee hive as fascinating as I do you should get a couple more hives so you are not always opening the same one too often. When your colony has built out 8 of its 10 frames it is time to put a second box on. The second box can just be put on top of the first and watched to see if the bees move up into. More vigorous colonies will make the jump across top bar, bee space and bottom bar to start work in the second box. Others may find it too daunting to venture up. In this case you can try what is called elongating the brood nest. In hive #1, below, there are 5 frames of brood and 4 frames of honey and pollen. In hive #2, below #1, we have moved 2 frames of brood sandwiched by 2 frames of honey and pollen up into the upper box directly over the brood and honey in the lower box. The colony will find it easier to move out sidewise than up. FEED!!!

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