Category Archives: Critters

Stories and photos of encounters with various animals, wild and domestic

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

Bees, Homesteading, ShepherdstownWV-1993-2017

Bees, Queens, Mites and Beetles -September 2016

September 27, 2016 wendylee

My bees are having a hard time these days. There are Small Hive Beetles (SHB) attacking their space. I installed screened bottom boards onto the bottoms of the hives because they have a slide out tray the larvae drop onto from above. Weekly I collect the cappings and pollen they have destroyed which has fallen into the tray, along with the numerous white, wiggling beetle larvae. It is disgusting and I kill them by scraping it all into plastic shopping bags and freezing them for a few days. Some I have then sieved out, so only the pollen remains. The rest I feed to the chickens. This does not bode well for my bees.

Beetles

I have twice now, on September 8th and 25th, drenched the ground around the hives with Permithrin insecticide to kill any pupating SHB larvae in the soil. This is supposed to do the trick but I have not seen positive results yet. I still have a lot of larvae showing up on the slide out trap drawers. Supposedly, I should see a drop in populations at three weeks, which is later this week. I am keeping my fingers crossed.

I installed honey supers on the first five hives on July 20th but after a month, only the number two hive had drawn out any comb, so I removed the supers and the syrup feeders from the other four hives on August 22nd. I had been feeding them 1:1 syrup all this time so they would have the energy to excrete wax and draw new comb out on the foundations. The bees seemed really strong there for awhile and I was hoping I might even get some honey. But no. Plan B was that they would at least get the supers prepped with drawn comb so next year they would not have to work so hard.

Mites

To combat the Varroa Mites, which all beekeepers must assume we have these days, and which is most likely what killed my bees the last two winters, I have hung two Apivar miticide impregnated strips in each deep hive body (except #2 which had the super left on longer). I am seriously hoping that this will kill all the mites and enable me to overwinter my bees this year. The last two years I had only treated with HopGuard, which is considered organic, but it did not work well enough to kill all the mites, so I am using the harder stuff this year. This is what Ed Forney of Geezer Ridge uses and recommends, and since he manages to keep all his bees alive, I am following his advice this year.

Feeding

I am still feeding pollen patties to all 6 hives, about every week to ten days, to help the bees feed their brood. The Goldenrod and Autumn Asters are blooming now but, according to Charles, a beekeeper who moves his bees up and down the East coast following crops, the bees around here don’t utilize these plants here so much. He tells me it is an elevational thing and that up in Pennsylvania, at higher latitudes, the bees are all over the Goldenrod. I don’t see very many on the plants here in my yard, but the wasps seem to like it.

Queens

September 18th, while going through the hives and laying the pollen patties between the two hive bodies, I discovered that hive # 3 had no brood and no larvae on their frames. So, no queen. I have no idea what happened to their queen but now I need a new one. A fellow beekeeper showed me a photo of the frames in her Russian queened hive that were absolutely brimming with brood, so I bought my new queen from the same place she had. Charles lives fairly close by and raises queens himself, which means they have not been stressed by shipping at least. I borrowed a frame of capped brood from hive #1 and installed the new Russian queen (another $36) in hive #3 on September 20th. This is the fourth queen I have had to buy this year, even though all of my hives are new this year. I had one package arrive with a dead queen, and the others have disappeared for unknown reasons.

Today, I will order some more Apivar from Mann Lake, which will cost me $10.40 each double deep hive, since I am ordering a 50 strip package this time. It was about a dollar a strip more when I was buying it in 10 strip packages. Then I can remove the super and treat hive #2 for mites. I will have to treat all six hives again next spring and fall, so I can definitely use the larger amount.

Meanwhile, I attend every workshop and monthly class I am able to and I am also planning on working with another beekeeper close to me so I can learn as much as possible about keeping bees. So far it is an uphill battle and I admire anyone who does it for fun. I am finding it a little stressful myself, as well as expensive.

-Wendy lee Maddox, writing at Edgewisewoods, Gardens and Critters

Critters, Homesteading, ShepherdstownWV-1993-2017

Wild Turkeys

July 31, 2016 wendylee

Stepping out onto the porch this morning I saw our resident wild turkey flock. There were four hens, a bunch of young ones and one Tom, cruising around eating in the back paddock. Last week I saw them up in the bee yard.

It has been awhile since we have harbored any wild turkeys and I am glad to see them hanging around. I think they might be appreciating that I mowed the back woods the other dayso they could get around easier.. It was getting all grown up in invasive weeds again.

After the turkeys entered the woods I went to the barn to let the chickens out and feed them. I tried to find the turkeys again so I could give them some grain but they were too smart to let me anywhere near them. With all the foxes around here it is a wonder there are any turkeys at all, but maybe rabbits are easier to catch. And chickens.

Bees, Homesteading, ShepherdstownWV-1993-2017

Swarmy Weather

July 11, 2016 wendylee

Swarmy Weather

The swarm of bees that landed in our Walnut tree back in June seems happy in their new hive box, with larvae and eggs developing nicely. That is the only way I know if there is a queen laying. I have not managed to actually find a queen visually yet.

The other five hives have been slurping down a gallon each of sugar syrup every two to three days. It seems I am constantly heating up big pots of syrup on the stove. It takes one pot with a gallon and a half of water (12 pounds) and three bags of sugar, and another pot with two gallons of water and four bags of sugar, each feeding. First I heat it up to melt the sugar, then I have to wait while it cools down. I hate feeding them white sugar and would like to try Maple tree sap, or something else, instead. I have to do some research on that to see what would be healthy for them. The beekeepers I mentioned it to, did not think it a good idea. I don’t see how white sugar can be good for them. The only reason I am feeding them this far into the season is that they are still building wax comb on the brand new foundation and that requires a lot of carbohydrates to produce. Next year they will get an earlier start and have the foundation already built when the nectar flow comes in. They also get protein and probiotics in the form of pollen patties, to help them feed the brood.

The bees are continuing to build out their double deep hive bodies (two ten inch deep boxes with ten frames each) and until they get them all filled up I cannot add a super (shallower box for honey storage) to any of them. A screen goes on under the honey super to prevent the queen from moving up there and laying eggs. Otherwise the frames would be all mixed up like they are in the rest of the hive- a little brood, pollen and honey on each frame.

I will have to treat the bees for mites in September, so any honey I get will have to be collected in August, when there is maybe not that much nectar available, although this link may help so I can plant more for them. I would love to get some honey for myself this year but I may not. It kind of depends on what is available out in the surrounding fields and woods when I finally add the supers .

I have to check the hives at least once a week to be sure they still have a laying queen as evidenced by brood and larvae in the cells. Last week I found the number two hive with no larvae and very little brood left. This made me think that the swarm I caught might have come from this hive. They absconded with the queen without leaving me one behind. I called Eversweet Apiary, which is only about seven miles from my house, to see if they had a new Carniolian Queen available, so I install a new one. Heading out the drive the next morning, I glanced over at the bee yard and saw that the number two hive was now covered with bees on two outside walls. This was different than the bees “just cooling off on the front porch”, as Ed Forney of Geezer Ridge likes to say, when they congregate on the walls above the entrance to cool off. These were covering the back and side of the hive. They were dripping off the bottom and not flying through the air, but huddled as if in a flat-ish swarm, or maybe about to take off. Not again!

I hurried out to Eversweet to get the new queen, hoping the bees would stick around long enough for me to introduce her to them. When I asked the guy there what he would do, he said, “All you can do is try. Put her in there and see if her pheronomes will lure them back in. ”

As soon as I got back, I suited up and wedged the queen cage in between two frames. Then I removed the entrance reducer and canted the top feeder box off to the side to give the bees an easier way to get back inside and check her out.

I looked out there every hour or so all day and they seemed to be moving back in. By nightfall, they were all inside and I straightened up the box again.

The queen comes in a tiny cage that has a sugar plug in one end that the bees have to eat through to release her.

It takes the bees a couple of days to eat through and allows just enough time for them to get used to her smell. There is always the chance that they will not accept her but when I checked two days later they seemed to be feeding her through the wire mesh, not trying to sting her, which was a good sign. There was a bee in the tube and almost though the sugar plug so she she should be released by now. I am going out to check…and there is a bee meeting tonight l that I will need to attend. There is so much to learn.

-Wendy lee, writing at Edgewisewoods, Gardens and Critters

EdgewiseWoods, Gardens and Critters

Category Archives: Critters

Feeding Fall Honeybees

Bees –October and November 2016