All posts by wendylee

Homesteader turned Gardener, Landscaper, Horticulturalist, Arborist and Greenhouse Manager. Writer,Potter and Artist. Mom, Grandma, and other half. Rider of bikes, horses and kayaks. Hiker, Swimmer and Storyteller.

Bees, Homesteading

Dead Bees in January

January 13, 2017 wendylee 1 Comment

Wintertime Bee Status

January 11, 2017
The weather has warmed up to 54 degrees F today, warm enough to open my six bee hives and do a thorough check. I still have syrup top feeders on them, with the vents mostly sealed with duct tape, and pollen patties. I hope to not find too many dead bees in January.

Hive 1. Heavy with honey stores, some syrup left in the top feeder and some pollen patty between boxes, the bees happily moving about in a loose cluster near the middle. I used a stick to clean a few dead bees off the bottom board and closed it back up. So far so good.

Hive 2. This hive greets me with total silence. Dead bees are sitting along the tops of frames, others are in groups with their faces buried in cells, and then there are 3 inches of freshly killed bees laying on the bottom. I am horrified and disgusted and mad. It is so aggravating to do everything I can to keep them alive and still have them die on me.

Hive 3. Sounds and looks Ok with plenty of stores and the bees near the middle.

Hive 4. Plenty of honey, pollen patty, and bees but they are all in the top box, so I switch the bottom box to the top, clean off the bottom board and seal them back up. Bees like to move up, not down, so I am giving them room to do that.

Hive 5. Dead quiet. A few frames have patches of dead bees with their faces pushed into cells but the entire bottom of the hive is covered in three inches of dead bees. I am again mad and frustrated. I feed them, buy them new queens, treat them for mites and am repaid by them dying anyway. I don’t get it.

Hive 6. Feels nice and heavy, still has some pollen patty and syrup and the bees are hanging around as a loose mass. After cleaning off the bottom board, I closed them back up, relieved that four hives have made it.

Two Hives Dead and Four Left

It is only the middle of January and I have lost two of my six hives already. Winter has not arrived in earnest yet. It makes no sense to me that these bees have died surrounded by plenty of food. I pull off my gloves, hang up my bee jacket and call my bee guru, Ed Forney.

He asks how I’m doing and I tell him, “Well, I was better before I opened my hives and found two dead outs already. “

I tell him about the three inch deep mass of dead bees in the bottom and he says,
“Sounds like they must have gotten into something, maybe some kind of pesticide.”

“Seriously? What could they possibly get into this time of year? “

I wonder if it is possible that the farm across the road, recently replanted to wheat, might have been sprayed to kill the weeds first.

“If there were low growing weeds blooming in there when he sprayed, your bees could have been hit by that.”

Herbicides aren’t supposed to kill bees but something certainly did.

I am hesitant to call up Neil, who farms across from me, and ask if he sprayed anything recently. I don’t want to sound accusatory or make him feel threatened, I just want to know what might have killed my bees. He told me earlier this year that he would let me know in advance if he needed to spray any insecticides and that he doesn’t usually need to. This kind of conversation is better done in person. Phone calls can be like E- mails and Facebook sometimes- you can’t read the persons face and body language- so things can come across differently than you intend them to. He is a nice guy and I know he does not want to kill my bees. I need a good old, foot-on-the- bumper kind of talk with him, out in the tractor shed, just trading stories.

Storing Hives With No Bees

I have to deal with the two dead hives yet, so I go back out to the bee yard to retrieve the two dead-outs. I load them, so nice and heavy with honey stores, into the wagon and pull them up to the porch to clean them up. The piles of dead bees seem so fresh, almost alive. I scoop them up with my hands to put in a bucket to feed the chickens. They are so beautiful that I retrieve a magnifying glass from the kitchen to get a closer look. It is not often that honeybees are still enough to study up close. Then I see one moving. She is not dead yet. They are so freshly dead that this one is still dying. I grab my camera and take some close up photos, thinking maybe I will be able to see better with the zoom. Maybe I can learn something.

That is when I remember that the USDA Bee Lab in Beltsville will analyze bee and comb samples you send to them. I go back in the house to Google them and then search the house for isopropyl alcohol and a shallow plastic container to hold a handful of bees. Maybe they can figure out what killed my bees.
After getting back from the Post Office I get back into clean up mode on the two hives, scraping off and saving the excess wax and flicking dead bees off the frames. Some of the bees are wedged face first into combs and I have to pinch their tiny butts and pull them out, without squishing them. I can’t get them all and hope that’s Ok. I will be using these frames of honey to help rebuild new hives in the spring if all goes well-unless the USDA finds there is some horrible disease lurking in there.

Sealing Up Stored Hives

To keep my four boxes (2 from each dead hive) safely stored until I need them, I need to stack them up and treat them with ParaMoth. I learned the hard way just how destructive Wax Moths can be a couple of years ago when I tried to store another dead hive. Moths will get in there and dig deep trenches in the wooden walls of the hives and eat through the wax , letting all the honey drip out on the floor, while they chew up all the wax. I can’t afford to loose drawn comb, honey and expensive wooden ware to them again.
I start the storage stack by placing a lid upside down on the porch floor. This will seal off the bottom. Then I add an empty deep box, moving the frames into it one by one as I clean excess wax and dead bees off. I have three other frames of honey saved from earlier this summer that I add to the stack. I end up with a stack five boxes tall, and on the top frames I lay a paper plate with 6 Tablespoons of the ParaMoth crystals, then the top lid, weighted down with bricks. The stack will freeze which will kill any Small Hive Beetles (SHB) and the fumes from the ParaMoth will kill any moths.
I told Ed on the phone that I was giving my bees until August to start paying me back for all the money and hard work I have put into them and he assured me that he would help me with that. He is going to show me how to set up two of the hives for serious honey production and two for back up population and comb builders. The stored honey and brood frames should really help out with starting some new hives in the spring from splits off my over wintered bees.

That is the plan so far, I have not given up yet.
-Wendy lee, writing at Edgewisewoods, Gardens and Critters.

Homesteading

Winter Water Buckets

January 10, 2017 wendylee

No More Frozen Water Buckets

In 2016 I upgraded my winter water buckets to heated dog bowls for the chickens and dogs (well, more for the wild birds, since the dogs are inside a lot) and a 3 gallon heated bucket for Mara, my horse. This was a major improvement. Daily barn chores became much easier. No more ice chopping and shattered plastic buckets for me.

January 2017 has arrived, with a new division in the hen house holding 25 young Golden Comets, due to start laying in April. They were hatched October 26 (the same day my new granddaughter was born ) and the chicks have all feathered out but still have a Mama Light Bulb to get warm under. With temps in the teens, their unheated waterer has frozen every night for the past week.

This winter we also have three Mallard ducks I could not resist bringing home from the feed store last Spring. They share feed, pasture and barn space with the laying hens and our one Rooster quite well, but they make a complete mess of the communal water bowl. I have to clean and refill their water bowl twice each day. It wasn’t much of a problem when the ducks had their swimming trough outside but I put it and the water hoses away when winter hit.

I was trying to design a waterer that only the chickens could reach and was thinking of a raised platform surrounded by a perch for the chickens to jump up on. Ducks don’t seem able to jump or perch at all, so I figured it would keep them out. Then I saw a Nipple Waterer, which has little drip nozzles that the birds peck at to release the water. Both the chickens and the ducks learned how to work the foot pedaled feeder in only 2 weeks this summer so surely they can learn how to drink from drippers.

The company I purchased the electric (anti-fox) poultry fence from has this Heated Nipple Waterer and I have ordered 2 of them, one for each chicken pen. I can’t wait to set them up.

This will supply all the chickens and ducks with clean, ice free water year round. Handy things like this make me really appreciate having electricity and running water in the house and in the barn!

My ultimate goal is to figure out how to warm and power the barn using solar. I have visions of a sunken greenhouse…

-Wendy lee, writing at Edgewisewoods, Gardens and Critters

Bees, Homesteading

Feeding Fall Honeybees

November 7, 2016 wendylee 2 Comments

Bees –October and November 2016

If my bees cannot learn to be at least a little self sufficient I am going to have to give them up. They have turned into a very expensive hobby when what I was looking for was a decent supply of honey. Sure, I want to help pollinators and any plants that need bees to reproduce, but this is ridiculous.

The Russian Queen I installed September 20^th in hive #3 is laying well, with lots of capped brood.

Hive #2 was treated for mites with the Apivar strips on the 29^th and I drenched the ground for beetle larvae with the Permithrin again. I removed all the bottom screens with the beetle trap trays when larvae stopped showing up in them. Cold weather is coming and I don’t want them drafty.

Feeding Fall Honeybees

All the hives have gotten way too light, as if the bees are eating more honey than they are storing, which is scary going into fall and cold weather. Lots of empty combs all of a sudden, so October 6^th I started feeding the 1:1 syrup again. I had removed the top syrup feeders Aug 16^th when all the hives seemed full. I Fed them syrup again on October 11^th.

On October 28th, another beekeeper came by to help me look at my hives and we went through all six of them, finding two of them with very little brood, one with no brood at all and all of them still way to light in honey. I went and talked with Ed for advice and he suggested feeding them 2:1 syrup and combining two of the hives, using a double screen he lent me, then re-queening the third hive and eventually combining all three, so they have a better chance of making it through the winter.

When I got back home with the replacement queen, and went through them again, they seemed stronger than I remembered, with more brood than I realized at first. So I re-queened the one with no brood (#4) and started heating water to make the heavy syrup.

2:1 Mix

One pot with 12 lbs water (1 ½ gallons) + 24 lbs sugar (6 x 4 lb bags)

One pot with 16 lbs water (2 gallons) + 32 lbs sugar (8 x 4 lb bags)

Note: It dawned on me that I had no idea why lb is the abbreviation for pounds so I Googled it.

{Lb is an abbreviation of the Latin word libra. The primary meaning of libra was balance or scales (as in the astrological sign), but it also stood for the ancient Roman unit of measure libra pondo, meaning “a pound by weight.”}

Once I added double the sugar, the mixture no longer fit in my two largest pots, so I had to ladle half of it out into a five gallon bucket before mixing it all up. Such a heavy concentration of sugar does not dissolve as easily as the 1:1 mix so it was hard to not make a sticky mess all over the kitchen while briskly stirring it all up and then pouring it all into eight one gallon jugs to cool. What a pain.

I fed them every 2-3 days for four feedings and the bees filled their empty honey frames back up. Wouldn’t you think they could find food on their own? I am starting to think that there is just not enough natural forage around here for bees to make it. Corn, soybeans and grass occupy most of the open spaces near here and they do not provide much nectar. (Click on the green link for a list of nectar producing plants.) Maybe I should move them to a wilder area with less farmland, but then it would be harder to find the time to check on them, and bears would be more of an issue. Here, at least I can see them and they are behind a woven wire fence.

The Queen

A week after re-queening, on October 22^nd, I went in to remove the cage and found the new queen still inside, with a bunch of other bees. She had not moved into the hive. Bizarre. So, I pried the screen off to let her out and before I could stop her, she flew away! Geesh.

I called Ed again.

“Will she come back?”

He laughed.

“Nope. You’d better come get another one.”

I jumped in my car and headed over to Back Creek and Geezer Ridge. Since she had not ever started laying, he replaced her free of charge, luckily. I came back and installed her.

I waited too long for a warm, non windy day to open the hives back up again and check on her. It was 2 weeks, on November 6^th, when I checked all the hives for brood again. I went through and fed them some regular 1:1 syrup mix and gave them each half a pollen patty.

When I got to hive #4 I pulled out the queen cage only to find that, not only was she still in there, the bees had not even chewed through the candy plug to let her out! I should have checked sooner, I know. They can feed her through the screen and she still looked OK, so I carefully released her into the bottom hive and quick covered it back up so she would not fly out.

I do not have high hopes. Talk about discouraged. I am seriously thinking that if I can just get them to somehow make it through winter and pay me back in the spring through selling splits that I might get back out of this bee thing. I have about had it.

-Wendy lee, writing at Edgewisewoods Gardens and Critters

Hiking

Spruce Knob West Virginia

October 11, 2016 wendylee 1 Comment

For our 24th wedding anniversary we stuck with tradition and headed out to the mountains and Spruce Knob, the highest point in West Virginia. We have a cabin not too far away in the same county of Pendleton and stayed there for the long Columbus Day weekend.

The weather started out dreary, drizzly and cold and we were glad to warm up by our wood stove and the first fire of the season. A hurricane was pounding the southern states with rain and wind and we were glad to have it only bring a few heavy showers our way.

By Sunday, the skies were clear and blue with a cold, brisk wind blowing any lingering thoughts of summer far away. It was definitely Fall with all the rich smells and colors to go with it. October is such a beautiful month in the mountains.

We drove out past Franklin on Route 33 west and stopped at the Germany Valley Overlook, which is pretty no matter what time of year it is.

The road to the top of the mountain is paved these days, which has made it less of a dusty chore than it used to be. It is still narrow though, and we had to pull way to the edge to let those coming down pass by. Every now and then we glimpsed a flash of color, from a Sugar Maple or a tree harboring a bright red Virginia Creeper vine.

We drove on by the turn to the top and made our way over to Spruce Knob Lake to see how much color might be there.

It was gorgeous and the trees were further along than they had been in the valley below. It was so cold and windy that I needed to put my ear warmers and fleece on as soon as we got out of the car. We did not stay long because we wanted to get a hike in and had gotten a late start.

Backtracking towards the trail head we stopped at the campground to check it out, just because we never had . There are 42 primitive campsites-with outhouses, picnic tables and fire rings- on a one way loop in the woods. No views but still nice looking, fairly private sites.

There were only a couple of cars parked at the Allegheny trail head as we loaded our day packs and adjusted our boots.

We had hopes of finding some good views from the main Allegheny Ridge trail but were disappointed in that, and also because the gated trail had been recently traveled on by some huge vehicle that left mud and water filled ruts. It was difficult to get around some of the deep mud and I had it go over the top of my boots at one point. We decided to leave the main trail and take a side shoot instead, turning onto North Prong Trail and following it down into a quiet open valley.

Crossing the shallow creek numerous times, the trail became almost to narrow to find, through high summer weeds and amazingly thornless brambles. We eventually came out to an intersection with the Gandy Run Trail and followed that back towards our starting place. We saw hardly any wildlife and only two people the whole 3 1/2 hours we spent on the trail. Still, it was a beautiful day and much warmer and less windy down on the lower trails.

We got back in the car and drove up to the Spruce Knob viewing platform, the highest point in the state.

It was only 42 degrees F and the wind was blowing, as it always is up this high. Looking out from the top of the platform there is nothing but mountains and more mountains as far as you can see.

The Spruce trees sound like the ocean as the wind blows through them. Sometime, I hope to be up here to watch the sun set. Not today though.

Fall color is just starting and should be gorgeous in another week.

You can catch a tiny glimpse of the lake in the top left of this zoomed photo and the most color we have seen all day.

On the way down the mountain, we stopped for another great view to the East.It is always invigorating to experience Spruce Knob and we had another good day.

Back to our little cabin for dinner and warmth by the woodstove.

-wendy lee, writing at Edgewisewoods, Gardens and Critters

EdgewiseWoods, Gardens and Critters

All posts by wendylee

Dead Bees in January

Wintertime Bee Status