Spring has been cold and slow this year, so the package bees are running late, as is everything else. They should now arrive from Georgia tomorrow, on May 2nd. A whole pallet load is being picked up and driven immediately up here to Eversweet Apiary in Kearneysville, WV and I will be there bright and early to get my two packages. Then it is home to install the poor things in their new home with some already drawn comb from last year, to help them along. Mixing up sugar syrup today with 1 and 1/2 gallons( = 12 pounds) hot water to 12 pounds of granulated sugar) to pour into their top feeders and thawing some pollen patties to feed them as well.
I will have five hives this year, which means there should be enough brood to share between the hives if needed. I painted them all a pretty spring green so they blend in better with the landscape.
Spring Green Hives
The lowest box holds ten frames, some of which has already drawn comb and one with a little honey on it. The second box is initially to surround the opened package so they can calmly walk out and move into their new home on the frames below. The queen will hang in her tiny cage between the frames until they chew their way in to her and let her out in a day or two. Meanwhile they can get used to her pheromone smell and hopefully accept her. They will kill her if she doesn’t smell right.
The third box up is the sugar syrup feeder which has a round screened light vent cut into it to keep them from building comb up there. They prefer to build in the dark and I do not want comb all over the place. I want them organized on the hanging frames and easily workable.
May 2
I picked up the bees, brought them home and had a problem right away. The queen in box one arrived dead. she was wedged up in the sugar with her head close to the screen and the bees probably stung her to death. So I had to drive back and get a new queen, which cost me an unexpected $37. This time I got a Carniolian Queen instead of the Italian that was shipped. They are supposed to do better here and not eat so much in the winter.
Got the Queens hung on the frames and packages opened and turned on their side in the empty box above. Installed a half pound slab of pollen patty across the top of the frames as well, to supply protein to enable brood rearing. Then I poured a gallon of syrup in each feeder for carbohydrates that enable them to build comb.
Bees hovering around the feeder screen
I was not sure where to install the inner cover, above or below the feeder, so I put it on top of the feeder and then the roof on top of that. I missed the first class where they discussed this and I can’t find an answer on line or in my books.
May 3rd
I called Ed Forney at Geezer Ridge this morning and asked him what to do with the inner cover and he told me not to use it when a top feeder is in place because there is a notch in it that will allow the bees in to the very top and they will drown in the syrup. Sure enough. I went back out right away and took them off but had already lost about 60 bees to drowning. With things put together right the bees access the syrup from underneath and climb out on the wire mesh. It could have been worse.
Mann Lake Top Feeder Tray
While I was out in the bee yard, I removed the now vacated packages and the hive boxes around them. I also checked the queen cages but they had not been released yet so I left them alone. I will check them again in a couple more days. The international marking color for queens this year is black, which is useless. They need to erase that one from the list. There is no way to see it when there is so much black on the bees. Normally, painting them with the annual color could be helpful in spotting them. Glad I did not pay extra for it.
The eleagnus, or Autumn Olive, is blooming right now as are the ranunculus or Buttercups. Also the invasive garlic mustard and the yellow mustard, dandelions and phlox divaricata, or Woodland phlox, are all in bloom, so there are a few things for the bees out there. It has been really cold, damp, dreary and rainy lately, which is not good for bees to fly in. As soon as there is sun they will be out doing double time.
Phlox divaricata and Taraxacum, or Dandelion
Adding the links to these plants has informed me of the toxicity of the ranunculus to horses and cattle. Great. I opened up the small paddock covered in them just yesterday. Now I will be going back out and closing it off, although apparently horses don’t usually eat it unless they are starving, which she is definitely not. It is all mixed in with orchard grass and clover, which I hate to have to kill. Sometimes I feel as though I cannot win. I will keep trying though.
It has been a rough winter here, starting out with a good size snow right after Thanksgiving, morphing into a “What happened? I thought Winter had arrived super early and now we’ve got nothing. No snow, temps hovering above freezing…What gives?” Then Winter came back with a vengeance and it got really cold and stayed there for days on end, dipping below zero degrees a couple of times and into the single digits on numerous mornings. I put my long johns on and kept them on for the duration. My tall waterproof leather Keen boots and beautiful, thick Smart Wool socks got a serious workout every day and have more than justified their cost. I had good traction and warm feet even in 13 inches of snow. I wore them to the barn to do chores, to work, and hiking as well.
This winter I finally managed to get a heated waterer for the chickens, actually a dog bowl, but they don’t care. It keeps us from having to haul the galvanized waterer in to the house and thaw it on the woodstove. It doesn’t hold as much, but it is so easy to refill with the freezeproof hydrant out in the barn.
Chickens with their heated dog waterer
I installed that after the winter of 96 when we had FEET of snow and we got tired of digging a path to the barn everyday to water haul buckets to the horses. Sometimes I wonder why it takes me so long to figure these things out. I tried, once again, to put a tank de-icer in the horse trough but she will have not drink with anything floating around in her water. Maybe next year I will figure that one out. I broke the trough busting the ice out of it this winter and had to improvise with a plastic tub.
The chickens and horse came through the winter fine, laying well and staying healthy.
Mara in the Snow-Fat and Happy
The dogs spent a lot of time in the house, even though I bought them winter jackets from a friend who makes really nice ones. They were great when it was snowing. I didn’t have to dry the dogs off each time I let them in, just shook off the coats and hung them near the stove. It was too cold to leave them outside all day when I was at work and they turned into couch potatoes quite willingly with very few accidents. They have enjoyed being outside here lately though and now lay exhausted on the couch. It was amazing how close they managed to get to the woodstove when it was seriously cold outside. The cat, Frieda, didn’t go out her cat door any more than she absolutely had to all winter. She loves her heated mudroom, as do we. It is so nice to leave all the snow and mud out there instead of traipsing it through the house. The covered porch/ woodshed was one of our better additions too.
Unfortunately, we did not get our skis out at all. I have been having issues with my shoulder and cross country with poles was not an option. Plus, it was really cold…
Bees -March 2015
Hives in Snow
My poor Italians did not make it through the Winter. They were alive in January. I could hear them quietly humming when I knocked on the hive. But when I opened the hive up on that warm Sunday March 8th, they were all dead. There was plenty of honey left, so at least they didn’t starve, but I think maybe there were not enough of them to keep each other warm. It was very sad. The Russians were buzzing all over the place the same day, acting kind of frantic (which made me nervous) so I left them alone and did not open them until this Monday evening the 16th. They were a mess. They had built comb bridging between some of the frames, there was almost no honey left, I saw no brood and I could not find the queen. I have never found a queen so it is possible she is on one of the two frames I did not move. I put a screened bottom board on to help with mite control, switched the bottom deep with the upper deep, and scraped out all the dead bees. There were way more fatalities than I
Dead Bees
expected and now I am worried they won’t make it either. I disturbed them so much that I figured I would leave the one large mass huddled together alone and just feed them and let them rest. I will feed them again in a few days and look for the queen and some evidence of eggs again then.
I have ordered a nuc to replace the Italians and a 3# package for my new hive and I may have to buy a new queen for the Russians. A nuc is an already started mini- hive with a laying queen, some honey, some pollen stores, and a bunch of bees ready to go. There is so much to learn. I have been to two beekeeping classes the last two Saturdays and have joined the Eastern Panhandle Beekeepers group and been to one meeting so far. I was surprised at how many people were there. We filled to overflowing the meeting room at the WVU Fruit Reseach Station over in Kearneysville, WV. I’ll bet there were 150 members present for the monthly meeting. The weather was a major topic. A lot of folks lost some of their bees this winter. The bloom time of some plants the bees rely on has been delayed too. There was discussion about feeding pollen patties, sugar syrup, IPM (Integrated Pest Management) that will need to be carried out. It seems to be a helpful group. They set new folks up with mentors so they would have local support in their new projects. Three speakers talked about rearing queens, splitting hives, feeding and pest control. Like I said, there is a lot to learn when it comes to bee keeping. I have a long way to go but they are fascinating creatures worth learning about.
For about a year and a half, in the eighties, I lived down the road from my place, in Owl Hollow. It was the cutest little house in the back of the Thackers farm. I had to get out and open and close the gate each time I came through the lane, to keep the cows in. The drive was about a third of a mile long and in the winter, my VW bus tended to be parked out by the road, and we walked in. There was only one bedroom, up in the attic, and the three girls shared that. I divided it up with a fabric and two by four wall so my older daughter could have a modicum of privacy from the two little ones. I slept out on the screened in porch on a futon on the floor. When it got cold, I installed insulation and plastic to keep it warmer. The woodstove was in the tiny living room and I kept the window into that room open for the heat. I don’t know how I managed to fit it all in, but I had my weaving loom, treadle sewing machine, and an armchair in there. The kitchen held a sink with gravity fed cold water, an old fifties style refrigerator, a gas cookstove and the kitchen table. I also had my big shelf of canning jars and the China cabinet (turned sideboard) I helped my Dad build when I was a kid in there too. It was pretty tight but homey. There were two tiny little sheds coming off the kitchen. One had a short iron bath tub in it and we kept a pee pot in there. The other was the mudroom entrance with the chest freezer in it and a flap cut into the screend door for the dogs to come and go through. I’ ll bet the whole house measured less than 500 square feet. It was simple and really cheap. Rent was $65.00 a month, electric was maybe $30 dollars and the phone was like $25. I was able to work off the rent by helping the landlord with chores sometimes. I painted the walls up at his house on the hill, mucked out the barn, repaired fence, chased cows, cut firewood. I finally managed to convince them to let me install a hot water heater. They were sure it wouldn’t work on a gravity fed line and the cows got first dibs on the water. It was esy to set up though and I sure enjoyed being able to use that bathtub inside the house. We still had an outhouse for a toilet but we were used to that. There were two large Sugar Maple trees in the yard and the kids had two tire swings hanging from them in the shade. I had a job as a cook at a conference center about 15 miles away and things were starting to look up. I was hoping to build a house on my land nearby as soon as I could swing it but this little house was a fine place for us in the meantime.
The critters who lived in the hollow with us shared the space freely. Cows would wander right up to the door. Skunks and raccoons came in the dog door into the mudroom. Something lived in the walls and I was hoping it was not rats.
One night, while asleep out on my futon, I felt something run right up the covers on top of me. I was not really thinking, being asleep, and I just grabbed at it, fast like. It was warm and furry and definitely alive. I jumped up, grabbed the empty water glass, pushed it inside, and turned on the light to check it out. I had never seen one before, but I was pretty sure it was a flying squirrel! The poor thing was as startled as I was. He didn’t bite me though. I got a half gallon wide mouth jar from the kitchen, rigged up a screen lid for it and went to wake up the kids. I was so relieved we didn’t have rats. I hate rats. Flying squirrels, on the other hand , are cool. He had the biggest round eyes, although he was smallish in size. The kids were good sports about being woke up and after we all had a good look at him, they went back to bed. I took him outside and asked him,
“Please to not come inside again. Living inside the walls is OK, but running across my bed is not. OK?”
He was quiet but I think he got it. It never happened again and when I heard them in the walls at night, it no longer bothered me. Now that I knew who it was.
I was woken on another night by a scritching sound on my pillow. I could not imagine what it was but it was constant and it seemed loud to me. I got up turned on the light, and looked back at my pillow. There were hundreds of honeybees walking across my pillow! Not flying. Not buzzing. Hundreds of tiny feet, walking across my pillow. They were all headed in the same direction and seemed to not notice what was in their way. I st down cross legged on my bed and watched them for awhile. It was very strange for them to be up at night I thought. And strange to be walking, not flying. Quiet too. I decided to have a conversation with them in the same quiet way. I sent my thoughts to them. I asked them ,
“Please, do not walk across my pillow or come inside the house anymore. I don’t mind sharing the house with you, but you need to stay in the walls and use an entrance on the outside. Please don’t sting the kids or scare them and you can stay right where you live now. I don’t want to hurt you. I can’t have you walking around on my pillow though. Please?”
The bees kept marching. I opened the door to the outside for them and they left. I closed the door , went back to bed, a little nervous about noises on my pillow. In the morning, I put my ear against the wall and could hear them working inside, but they never came inside the house after that. I appreciated their cooperation. Bees are usually fairly calm and docile if you treat them right. They have work to do and like to be left alone to do it. I think of them fondly these days while I tend to my bees at home.
My history with bees is not the greatest. I originally got started
Two New Bee Hives
through helping my neighbor, Harry, with his bees back when I lived near Harrisville, WV in the 1970’s. I mostly helped him with taking the honey at the end of the season and jarring it up. I made the best beeswax candles from the cappings. They smelled so good when you burned them and lasted a long time. We were able to just run into town, about 8 miles away, to the old Stout family hardware store and get everything we needed for bee keeping. Veils, long gloves, hive bodies, wax foundation and frames, feeders, everything. Some of their stock might be 30 years old but you knew it was in there some place if you had the time to look. Also, if it was a rainy, nasty day the younger brother would let you have stuff for next to nothing, or the price that was marked on it from the 1940’s. Rainy days depressed him. They tended to depress me too and I tried not to take advantage.
I got my own bees after awhile but then I lost one hive to bears- thanks to the DNR for reintroducing them to our area, and then one to foul brood, and I backed off from beekeeping until I moved to Freshwater Cove in Nelson County Va. My partner at the time brought me a present one day of a bee hive that was so mean, that when a bear got into them and turned the whole thing over, the bees actually won the fight. I think he was hoping they would get me too. They stung me every chance they got- even while wearing a protective veil. The last time I went near them I was pregnant with my youngest daughter and they somehow managed to get under the veil and sting me on my neck about 20 times. I think this might be why she was sensitive to insect stings for the first few years of her life. I am not sure what later killed those bees but I was glad to see their demise as they were the meanest bees I had ever encountered.
When I moved to Shepherdstown, I no longer had any bee equipment except a couple of old smokers and a hive tool- no veil or gloves or hive bodies hanging around. I discovered about ten years ago just how hard it is here, to get a hold of an empty beehive when you need one in a hurry. We had a hardware store and a Southern States then but neither one kept bee supplies in stock. So, why did I need a hive all of a sudden when I had no bees? Well, a friend had some construction going on at his house, so he brought his hive over to visit with us for a while as the bees were placed too close for comfort. You cannot move bees a short distance without confusing them as to where home is. The old adage is ‘Three feet or three miles’. They needed to go more than three feet so they came about ten miles to our place until they were done building. When they arrived, my apple trees were in full bloom, along with lots of nut trees and such, so they were quite happy. Anyway, maybe they made so much honey they ran out of room. No one brought them a super to expand with and so they swarmed. A whole bunch of the bees took off with the queen and landed about 20 feet away, on a young apple tree, right about eye level. They were only going to hang out there for so long, until the scout bees found them a new home in a hollow tree or something, and they had to be gathered up quick or lost. I knew that much but not much else.
I called the bees owner at home, hoping he would be around, but of course he was not and neither was his son. They had not shown much interest in the bees since they dropped them off weeks before. So I ran down to the hardware store to see if anyone there knew any beekeepers but the only one who knew anything was off somewhere. A woman shopping for paint gave me the number of a beekeeper nearby in Maryland who offered to come take away the swarm for himself. Fat chance, they are expensive to buy and I did not want to waste them. He would have sold me an empty hive, except his were an unusual size, and I would never be able to get parts for them. So I went over to the feed store to see if they knew of anyone who kept bees and might have an extra hive laying about and they put me on the phone to a local orchardist. The woman who answered said her husband was out in his bee yard trying to catch a swarm right then (obviously a good day for swarms) but she would have him call me back as soon as he came in.
Meanwhile, I was frantically reading my old beekeeping book, trying to come up with alternative bee boxes. They have to be something fairly strong as this group of bees probably weighed 9-12 pounds and they would be hanging from the top of the box. Cardboard would collapse. I was rigging a 20 gallon plastic tree bucket with bamboo stakes stuck through it and trying to figure out how to get them to go into it, when the beekeeping orchardist called back. He was full of useful information and gave me confidence that I could get these bees caught without a problem. I was out talking to him on my cell phone, with the bees clustered around, when the original owner and his cousin finally drove up with a hive body, just in time. Thank goodness they also brought some veils and long gloves. Those are nice. Actually they are more like a necessity most of the time. The pair had very little experience, it turns out, and they were not looking at all enthusiastic, but I convinced them it would not be a problem and it wasn’t. Really it was a lot of fun. The bees behaved as if they were connected in a long rope, moving as one unit, about two and a half feet long and 8 inches wide, wrapped around a branch of the young tree. I placed their new hive, with frames of wax foundation hanging in it, on the ground below the swarm and we shook the branch. The bees all just dropped right in. They started to get a little stirred up and buzzed around us some, but they settled down pretty quick. It was neat to watch and hear them drop – kind of like hearing a few pounds of mini marshmallows fall on the kitchen floor. Not that I have ever heard that. We took a soft brush and made sure there weren’t any missed bees still up on the branch and then the guys went on their way. I stayed out there awhile until almost dark, put the top on after they all clustered back together, and moved them back over next to the other hive Then I took the lid back off, added another empty super box, and set up a feeding station with a jar of sugar water, so they would feel at home and have enough energy to draw out the new comb they needed. Unfortunately, the first hive swarmed again a couple of weeks later, and since we had no more hives for them, I gave them away to the orchardist neighbor, who had been so helpful. That winter, the snow drifted so deep I think my visiting bees suffocated and died. I felt terrible and asked the guys to take their boxes away.
Setting up the frames and feeders
I am not sure why I have decided to get bees again except that I feel a need to produce at least a portion of the food we eat. I have always kept chickens, grown a big garden and put a lot of food up each year. Luckily, on my third go round with bees, there is internet shopping with UPS delivery right to the porch. My new bee Guru, who has fifty hives and tends bees with his elderly father, told me where he gets his supplies online, so I did some research and ordered mine from the same place http://www.mannlakeltd.com/ . The two complete hives, each with two bodies and two supers, arrived in four large awkward size boxes right on time. I felt kind of sorry for the UPS man. Since I made the decision to get bees late in the season, it was hard to find a source of the actual bees for delivery this spring. When I did finally find some package bees that originated here on the East Coast (for better acclimatization, less shipping time) they were Russian and Italians from http://spillehoney.com/bees.html.
Three pounds of mailorder Bees in their cage
The night before I expected them to arrive, I made up a few gallons of sugar syrup to feed them with so it could have time to cool. The bees arrived in good shape in two shoe box sized screened in boxes at the post office at 6:30 am the next morning. The Post Mistress called my cell to come get them, and since I was already at work, I had to turn around and come back and install them in their new hives, which only took about an hour, plus another hour and a half of travel. I had heard that the Italians were the most gentle but it was one of that lot that stung me and they seemed more riled up than the Russians.
Checking for the Queens ReleaseThe Queens cage-empty
I wore my gnat veil, a pair of leather gloves and a nylon raincoat with a hood, Velcro sleeves and a draw cord hem. That one bee got me on my ankle. Four days later, when I removed the separate little Queen boxes I had hung in the center of the hive, and made sure she was released, I added duct tape to my outfit around my ankles. The worker bees have to work to get her out of her cage, which comes plugged with candy at one end. That gives the bees about four days to get acquainted with each other before she is free. If you release a new queen right away they might kill her. I have had the bees a week now and have refilled their feeders with another gallon each. So far, each hive has been busy building out comb but they have not made it out to the furthest frames yet. When they do, I will add another hive body and move the feeder up a level. When that gets full, I will add a super (a shallower box with frames and foundation) one at a time as they need it. I have an entrance reducer in place so they can defend against robber bees but as soon as this cold rain ends I think I will give them a larger front door so they can forage easier.
The Wild Cherries are in full bloom and I have planted buckwheat for later in the season. I may plant more of that. We don’t need all this lawn. The buttercups I don’t want out in the back pasture are also in full bloom. I might till them up as soon as they are done and plant some clover and orchard grass, which Mara, my horse will also like. The neighbor across the way has removed the cows from fifty acres and is about to plant it in corn. Round Up ready corn of course, which is what everybody plants these days. I was glad they killed the grass more than a week before I got my bees. If they had sprayed it when the clover was blooming and the bees were working it, it would have killed them. Luckily, they now have a beekeeper maintaining two hives on their farm on shares, who will be as worried as I am, and hopefully will help them prevent such things.
I am starting to remember how much work it takes to take proper care of bees and hope I can keep up properly. On Monday morning, before work, I will need to see if I can find the queens and make sure she is starting to lay eggs. If not I may have to order a new queen. I have never been good at locating the queen and probably should have had her marked. I will have to meet with the farmers on both sides of us and ask them to keep me informed and meet the couple doing the bees over there. There is a lot to learn. Rosie, my bee guru at work, is full of information and loves to talk bees so he will be a big help. There is also a local beekeeping group that meets once a month so I plan to hook up with them. All I need now is more hours in the day.
