Queenspotting after Brunch

We had a busy day at the apiary last Sunday. We had a visit from friend Hillary Price. We'd post a picture of her here, but everyone looks pretty much the same when their photo is take in a bee veil. We took her over to the yard and we poked around in some hives.

I cannot really imagine what it's like to look into a bee hive for the first time. They're so strange. Anyhow, we had a nice brunch with friends and then did some beekeeping.

Later on Rick Intres from Bear Meadow Apiary stopped by to help us beekeep. We know Rick from the Franklin County Beekeepers. He's very knowledgeable about bees and kindly offered to come by and show us a few tricks.

The early spring has lead to record large hives for this time of year. It's great for taking advantage of nectar, but can very easily lead to swarming, so we had to take action. We set about finding the queen bees in the hives. Can you spot her in the photo above?

It may seem easy there, but in a hive of 30,000 bees it's not easy. Rick showed us tricks that help him locate her. We then moved each queen we found to another part of the hive where she'd be less crowded and have more room to lay eggs. We spent about 6 hours in the hives. If things work out it could be a record year for us, but the swarm impulse will be intense.

This year we're inviting many experienced beekeepers to visit us in the hopes of learning a lot and sharing what we know. Nothing beats really seeing what others are doing that makes their practice special.

We also gave Rick a small colony with a queen from one of our best colonies. We're hoping he'll do well with her too. In this way we preserve and spread the best genetics to deal with the complex and harsh challenges bees face. Think of this practice as being a lot like seed sharing. Beekeepers can't compete and hope to survive; we cooperate.

Add to the list of challenges that bees face a newly emerging disease, Nosema Cerene. Most beekeepers know Nosema Apis pretty well as bee dysentery. This "new" nosema was formerly a bee disease from a social bee found in northern India. Now thanks to globalization it's here too. It's a likely contributor to Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), and we're trying a new fix against it. It's the extract from the bark of a tree found in Czechoslovakia. Nosema is a fungus, and trees have to fight off fungal infections all the time. The first line of defense is their bark. Make sense?

Lastly, there's been a lot of news lately about neonicitinoids killing off bees. Everyone is looking for the magic bullet that'll stop CCD but IMHO there is no magic bullet. CCD has many causes, not the least of which is how we live. Sure, neonics are probably not helping anything, but neiter is nosema cerene. I'm not sure what will stop it, or if anything ever will. In a small stand against it all we gave away a queen from our best colony to a friend.

She's been a strong girl that came to us through a swarm I captured in Florence. She was strong enough to fly away and try and make it on her own. She did this in a world with Nosema Cerene, neonics, varroa destructor and crazy weather.

Good luck with your queen Rick. She's the future, part of the one I want to live in anyhow.

Preservation Honeybee

It's a little known fact that Northampton Honey's original name was Preservation Honeybee.  It's still the name we have on file with the state of MA as a DBA.  It's on our business checks if we ever need to pay you for something but in the end Northampton Honey made more sense to us. 

The reason we originally were called Preservation Honeybee was that we want to support land conservation with our honey operation.  Western MA is a beautiful place for many reasons, but the land is chief amongst them.  I am often astonished how sprawly other places are, the land chewed up for nothing but two acre lots and endless Jiffy Lubes. We're in love with the land and want to keep it beautiful for all time.

We've kept at it and now expect to be keeping bees on city conservation land that the Kestrel Trust holds the permanent conservation restriction to . We're going to give a portion of our proceeds from bees kept on Trust to the Trust to further invest in land conservation here in Western MA. We think this is how business should operate, we think people should give back.

Hive Scales

Update: If you are looking for the most up to date information on our hive scales please use this link: Hive Scale Data

I had thought that the chart would update automatically, but that doesn't seem to be the case!   The above link should stay current.

What you see below is a chart of hive weight and ambient temperature for one of the hives in our backyard. Right now the hive weighs 142 lbs. You can see it's lost a few pounds over the past few days as the bees have not been able to fly due to the rainy weather.

A few days ago we purchased two "grain scales" or old fashioned platform farm scales from someone on craigslist. We've loaded hives onto them so we can track the weight of the hive and see if the bees are adding nectar, pollen and new bees or dwindling.

It's been pretty amazing to see how quickly hives gain and lose weight even in the few days that I have been keeping track.

These charts will become more useful over time as we begin to really see when hives are growing and when they are dwindling. It's should also be useful to see how hives perform over the winter.

These charts are linked directly to data we enter into Google Documents and should stay updated even as we add data over time. We hope they are useful to us and to other bee keepers in the region.

We'll also be participating in the NASA climate change program that uses hive scale data to understand flowering times as correlated with other data the agency collects.

Honey Harvest!

This field of winter cress came into bloom about two weeks before we started to harvest. It's several acres big and alive with bees. The day we took honey the bees were so concerned with flying here that they barely bothered us. A situation like this is called a honey run. July 2011 honey will contain winter cress, sumac, dandelion, fruit tree, catapula, basswood, and garden flowers. Since both bee yards have good access to Smith College there'll also be some gingko honey in there!




























Priscilla gears up by clothes-pinning her pants shut. Beekeepers know something running down your legs is sweat, something running up is trouble.






















Priscilla takes the first super of honey from me. A super is the box the bees put the honey in. A hive body is the box bees raise brood in. This box weighs about 40+ pounds. Note the lack of veils and gloves. The bees were really mellow throughout. We did put them on later but after disturbing all the hives in the yard the bees are bound to get a little testy.



























Priscilla holds up a perfect frame of honey. This frame is so perfect we should have saved it for a county fair entry. That is what success looks like. A frame like this will only be drawn by a strong hive with good nectar foraging options.



























Priscilla, Erin and I inspect a hive for removable frames with well-capped honey. Erin is our bee "intern". The relationship is pretty informal but Erin helps out around the bee yard learning about how to keep bees. She's a sustainable agriculture grad student at UMass and a Smith grad. She helped set up Smith College's community garden program. We're confident Erin will put her education to good use. She's super smart and fun to be around.


























We use an herbal substance called Bee Quick to clear supers of bees. It was made by a company called Fisher's, and contains a blend of herbs that bees don't like to smell, so most move out of the super. It's sprayed on a board that is positioned above the hive and the bees just move down into the lower parts of the hive. A few stragglers are always left. Priscilla uses a leaf blower I had laying around to clear the rest of the bees off. It works amazingly well. The bees just get blown out of the top and don't even seem mad - maybe a bit confused. They just sail back to their hive. This is common practice but we had never used it before. I feel that it's less disruptive to the hive and way fewer bees are harmed than the older process where bees are brushed off each frame.




























This little mini hive is called a nuc, short for nucleus Colony. It contains a queen and some workers and a little bit of brood. We use them as a back-up in case a hive goes queenless. The laying queen with consort is accepted quickly by the hives and things go back to normal quick. While we were working in the yard we looked into all the hives to see that things were going well.

The queen in this hive is from a USDA breeding program that uses stock from the Siberian region of Russia.



























During the hot day we took several swims in the Mill River to cool off. Priscilla is seen here after harvest and before extracting, the process by which honey is removed from the comb. She's standing in front of the greenhouse we use as a honey house. The very warm temperatures in there help the honey flow out of combs and eventually into bottles with a minimum of trouble. I love the fact that it's surrounded by bee-friendly flowers.


























Here is the final haul of supers stacked in the honey house. We left plenty of honey on the hives for the bees to use and they are still flying strongly to plants in the field. It's best practice to always leave enough honey for a hive to winter over successfully.


























We started to process the honey after dark, so the bees would stay back in their hive. We tried to process during the day once before and it was like the house was under attack by bees. I guess that's because it was under attack by bees.


























Priscilla cuts the caps off the honey so we can put it in the extractor to be spun out. She has a great touch with this. When done just right the cappings come off in roll like this. She uses a heated electric knife to do this. It's just warm to the touch, not hot.


























The honey-containing frames are then spun in our Maxant extractor, made in Ayer MA. The spinning action slings the honey onto the inside of the extractor where it collects at the bottom and...



























...finally pours out the bottom through a course strainer, and passes into the stainless steel bottling tank. All our equipment is stainless including the strainer. The strainer is course and frequently overflows so a lot of wax, pollen and propolis wind up in the honey. These are all safe and natural hive products. Pollen in honey is reputed to help with allergies and loaded with protein and amino acids. Propolis has a lot of medicinal properties including being an antibiotic capable of killing MRSA, the super bacteria found in hospitals. Our honey practically defines raw unfiltered.


























We worked until 2 AM processing, as we didn't want to leave a lot of honey in the house to attract bees. We finally gave up and went home to bed.



























We returned the next day to to bottle our liquid sunshine.





























We placed the used equipment in the back of this field for the bees to clean off. They harvest a surprising amount of honey from the equipment.



























The bees then cleaned out any honey spilled in the bed of our pickup.





























And finally everyone went home and back to their regular jobs.

Signs and Wonders

My sister sent a note to me saying it had been a "great summer!" meaning we'd had good beach weather. It's true, we had more sunny, hot days this summer than any I can remember. All that heat and sun meant we had a drought. A big patch of our lawn browned up. You can see it in the crowns of some trees that started showing fall color in mid-August.

We started the year with an amazing spring. We had just the mix of sun and rain to produce a huge bonanza of nectar! Everyone was optimistic, including the bees, who took it as a signal to swarm! Swarms, really, are a sign of optimism. Bees think to themselves, "Hey, conditions are pretty good, the days are still getting longer, I bet we can split and form a new hive! Whaddaya say!" More or less, a swarm is like a business opening another office someplace.

The great spring gave way to a hot dry summer. Not much bloomed, and what did didn't have much nectar it in. In drought conditions plants don't put out much abundance and try and hang on until conditions improve.

Our bees, which took off like a rocket in May, were in stasis by the end of June. You can tell this because the bees which had been furiously drawing comb in early Just just stopped when nectar stopped coming in. You can see this because the partly drawn comb is no longer white, but yellow. It sounds funny, but it's because the bees walked on it with dirty feet!

Around August 1st I saw bees on Queen Anne's Lace. A sure sign that everything had gone from bad to worse. Queen Anne's Lace is a plant of last resort that bees turn to when there is nothing else. It's the bee equivalent of taking a job at MacDonald's.

Last week two wonderful things happened:

1. It rained more than an inch for the first time since June. I put a glass on our deck looked outside and watched it fill over the course of the day. We slept on our enclosed porch for two nights to listen to the rain fall on the roof. I walked across the back yard to the compost bins in my socks and didn't mind at all when they get soaking wet.
2. The tall goldenrod came into bloom. The early goldenrod had been out, but is apparently of little use to the bees. The world is gold again. Like the dandelions that have come to symbolize the abundance of spring, their fall sisters arrive to rescue our girls from the nectar dearth that is midsummer in Western Massachusetts.

I think, in the end, that 2010 for beekeepers nearby will be remembered as a dry year. Maybe, if the frost comes late and we get a bit more rain we'll come to remember how the strong fall honeyflow was this year.

Though summer isn't over, I can now look back over enough of it to see the greater pattern of much of it. I can see how our actions managing the bees fit in with the bees themselves and the environment we operated in. I wonder what I could have done differently, and wonder what to do now.

Sometimes we see into the past no better than we can predict the future. Yet, this year, I am beginning to see how our bees, my actions, and the progression of the year interacted. Beekeeping means reading signs, either from the bees or from the environment. It means interpreting these correctly and acting appropriately. I don't think any of this is possible without wonder.

There is a sweet-sourdough smell that comes from a strong hive processing lots of goldenrod nectar. In late afternoon when the field bees have returned it's quite pronounced in front of several hives hard at their work. Somehow, here, I feel a fellow traveler with our bees and the land.

I am sure of this at least: I will not lack for wonder.

Through the Eyes of a Servant

In my teens and twenties I played at being a trout fisherman. Spare time took me into the woods to stumble along the banks of streams and narrow rivers. Along the way I began to notice vegetation and soil types, the makeup of the trees and the feel of the ground under foot. I looked at the plunge of water and where light came over hills and into valleys. I learned about nature, but for the purpose of catching fish.

In my twenties and thirties I worked for a farm in Connecticut. I once worked a 106 hour work week and did many 18-hour days. We planted corn, squash and other market garden crops on 1600 acres scattered from south of Hartford to north of Springfield. I learned to identify weeds; I became familiar with sumac. I learned how water flows across and through the soil by watching newly plowed land dry after rains, and much later seeing how crops grew. I learned about nature, but for the purpose of growing crops.

In my thirties I moved to California and took up surfing. I spent hundreds or thousands of hours watching waves break on the shore. I learned about what makes a wave strong, how the land and wind affect its shape. I became familiar with the things that live there, in the dangerous boundary between earth and sea. I learned about nature, but for the purpose of surfing.

This morning I went up to Andy's to see the bees. When I was there I wondered where they were going. I allowed myself the time to wander from the hive to see where the girls were working. I found some on Queen Ann's Lace, early goldenrod and a kind of thistle I later identified as Canada thistle.

In my wanderings this morning I felt again that searching that I have so many times been party to. I tend to learn from and wander through the natural world when I have given myself some sort of mission. It could be fishing, farming or surfing. I rarely go abroad with binoculars or a guide book to observe for the sake of observation. I don't know if this is good or bad, I just know this is how I am.

When, at liberty this morning, I did wander the fields in search of my girls the great panopoly of things that may be observed by me, were observed by me. There, amidst the grass and thistle, I became again a servant of mission. It is a wonder to think of them aloft above the heads of rich and poor alike, alighting on hundreds of thousands or millions of flowers each day, a thousand times too many for me to even imagine, even had I had the whole day and all the tea in China.

It occurred to me then that for the first time, I was not looking for something for myself, I was looking for where my bees were making their fortune, and that all the work done back at the hive merely prepares them for the changes in the land.

Book Review: Beekeeping by Werner Melzer

Beekeeping is one of those little books by a company called Barrons that you have undoubtedly seen someplace or other. I have another Barrons book called Plants for Your Aquarium. They produce a lot of titles about pets, and books for the school age educational market.

Oddly, like my aquarium plant book, the Barrons Beekeeping book turns out to be surprisingly good. The paperback volume would just about cover a tea saucer but isn't much more than a centimeter thick. It covers all the basics in adequate detail and even has a pretty good section on honeybee physiology. The book has a sizable number of color pictures, but it's really the illustrations that I like. There are several pen and ink illustrations; one is the Beekeeper's Year that shows the changing conditions and activities within the hive and of the bees. This is shown with the beekeeper's tasks, month by month. Behind it all are two curved lines showing the height of sun in the sky at noon and the amount of brood that should be present in a hive. It's a wonderful illustration well worthy of inclusion of Edward Tufte's Visual Display of Information.

Similarly, there is a nice page showing the life cycle of the bee that allows the novice keeper to easily determine the age of brood. If I could buy these in poster size, I would.

Melzer also devotes a fair amount of time to swarm control, and he advocates a method he calls artificial swarming. It uses the old queen and a method that selects for the same type of bees that would leave in a normal swarm. This is said to satisfy the swarm instinct. I really think that this is the only method of swarm control, as opposed to swarm prevention, that could work.

This book is another from England, and devotes some pages at the start to the bizarre English leaf hive that somehow exists like a bunch of filing cabinets in their own house. Mr. Melzer rightly keeps on track with normal Langstroth hives.

Since this book only costs $9, you should absolutely buy it, if not for the illustrations then for the clear, concise swarm prevention techniques. It's quick and accurate and just right for short reads any time. It's not Bees and Honey, or even Roger Morse, but it's a wonderful short volume.

Our Marketing Strategy!

Preservation Honeybee took their show on the road last weekend to the Northampton Gay Pride Parade. We loaded a couch, oriental rug (fake), an Ikea end table, a silver platter (fake), recycled glass pitcher, some glasses and our beloved ceramic cheetah and headed the .45 miles to Main Street Northampton.

For "marketing" purposes we stenciled "preservationhoneybee.com" onto two weathered boards we had and balanced them on the truck.



Our friends Sara and Tom hang out at Preservation Honeybee world headquarters, a 1991 Isuzu pickup truck in front Amanouz Cafe on Main Street Northampton.



Sara admires our board with Preservationhoneybee.com stenciled onto it.



Here the Ceramic Cheetah espies Loreli Eresis AKA Ms. Trans Northampton, who has offically endorsed our Honey. I am not kidding. When it comes to marketing this is how we roll! Her truck looked almost as crappy as our truck.



Lots of potential customers including this synchronized marching shopping cart posse from River Valley Market.



Here the Ceramic Cheetah overlooks all that is wonderful that day in Northampton.



Our awesome crew: Cheetah, Tom, Priscilla (AKA Queen Bee) and Adam (AKA Drone)with special guest Sally.



Here I engage in "extreme marketing" where I try and hug each potential customer, in this case my hometown friend, Casey.



Here the controlling interest in Preservation Honeybee have high level talks on corporate strategy.

He hope you enjoyed this look inside the machine that is PreservationHoneybee.com.

Requeening and Hive Inspection

A couple of weeks ago when we set up our new hives at Andy's house we did everything we could to ensure success. Because this is agriculture nothing every works out 100%. Three of our bee colonies didn't accept their queen, and so we had to present them with new queens.

The first step was to look into the hives.



You cans see the bees are only on a few frames. They're clustered on the frames we originally put them in. Although 10,000 bees that come in a package may sound like a lot, a mature hive can have around 50-60,000 bees. So these 10,000 barely cover 3-4 frames. Also, bees only live for a few weeks, so we've already started to loose bees. We may have already lost 1-2,000 bees. So getting a laying queen in there is essential.



Here is a frame of bees on way comb they created. The ones that have a yellow color have been filled with pollen, food for the young bee larvae. The black cells are empty. They should each have a tiny white dot, a bee egg or have a developing larvae in them, but these don't.



The bees on the other hand are on top of capped brood. This queen must have come quickly out and started laying right away. The yellow color is capping wax that seals more mature larvae in for the final stage of development. Many times Priscilla and I have seen a new born bee chew it's way out of the capping to make her debut in bee society.



Here I shuffle things around int he hive to make room for the new queen, who waits in a brown paper bag before being introduced to her colony. I think the Queen of England does something like this too on state occasions.



Here is the view inside the bag. Each one of these girls will lay hundreds of thousands of eggs. We may think that machines are pretty amazing, but bees kick butt all over every machine ever made.



Curious worker bees observe the queen. They will feed her thorough the screen until she is released. The queen is held captive by a plug made of candy that the bees will eat away to remove her.



Here is a view between two frames of bees. I cannot express how amazing bee keeping is. If you're asking for an answer about why I do this, here it is.



We've been experimenting with different fuels for our smokers. There is some evidence that Sumac heads may be a mite suppressor. At any rate, it looks good. It's nice to be able to work with a natural product.



This picture you can see an active queen, can you spot her? This is what success looks like.



Hello. Curious bees check us out during the hive inspection. Here you can see that bees cover the tops of many frames in our over wintered hives. I know that bees are insects, but with their furry looking business I can't help but think of them as sweet somehow, as sweet as honey.

Lunchtime Swarm Prevention

We came home this afternoon to find the bees in the early stages of swarming!

Swarming is a natural reaction to favorable conditions by bees. They create a new queen and about half of the bees leave the hive with her to form a new colony elsewhere. This may be good for the bees, but it means that we have less bees to help make us honey. Moreover, since we are not there to take care of the bees that leave are very likely to die. So, really, nothing good comes of it. Therefore, we stepped in to prevent the bees from swarming!



Here you can see the mass of bees clustering on the ground in front of the hive and on the hive itself. Given another half an hour these bees might have all been in the air with a newly hatched queen off for who knows where!



So, into the bee suit! I had to think quick. I decided to make a "split". This creates an "artificial swarm" by dividing the bees in half so think they've swarmed.



Here I divide the bee hive in half. Now some bees "think" they've left the hive, since they are no longer in a hive with an active queen.



You can still see there are lots of bees in both sides, thousands of bees in fact. They started to swarm as a result of the colony being very healthy and of having used up all the room in the hive to lay eggs. The queen needed more room, so the bees decided to set off!



I shook the bees that were forming the swarm back into the hive. These bees are the "leaders" if they settle in chances are good the "split" tactic will work.



I painted some sugar syrup on empty frames to get bees to create wax comb in it. Bees will often draw comb (create wax) int he presense of weak sugar syrup. Time of of the essence here, since the bees are in a swarming mood! Anything I can do to help them draw comb, I will do!

It's very important that the bees draw comb quickly since the queen has filled all the available space with eggs and brood! The bees have been doing great this summer with the warm snap early on. This type of situation normally occurs in May or June.

Hopefully the bees will quickly draw out new comb for the queen to start laying on so they won't swarm even though we divided the hives!



And the combs go back in the hive!

Since conditions are so conducive to swarming (days getting longer, lots of natural pollen and nectar, strong hives etc) we still will have to work to prevent swarming this spring. Even this split isn't the final step for these two hives. We'll have to take them apart again this Friday and see what's happening inside.

That's bee keeping! There's always a lot to learn.