Even nice girls...

Today I killed two of my three colonies. I've washed my hands and changed my clothes, but I can still smell the mothballs.

A few days ago, I opened one of them up to do the regular, monthly check. I have a medium super on each of the two hives started from packages this spring, and wanted to check for strength, mites, brood, and general condition going into the fall goldenrod flow. What greeted me was a foul oder and brood turned to ropy brown soup.

American foul brood. It's about the worst thing that can happen to bees and beekeeper, because not only have I lost the bees, but the equipment, too. I could scorch the boxes, but it isn't worth it to me. They were among my oldest, and I simply don't want to take the chance.

I called an experienced beekeeper friend, PB, the same one who helped with the hot hive last summer, to verify that this was, indeed, the dreaded American foul brood, and not the less deadly European foul brood. I've never seen it before, and wanted to be absolutely sure. He opened the hive, took a sniff, plunged a stick into one of the cells, twirled, and pulled out the ropy mess. And then he told me how to kill them.

He checked the second hive, too, which I hadn't opened yet. Same thing.

I have a third hive, about 50 yards away. It overwintered, has three mediums of honey on it, and seems pretty strong. We didn't open that one; it's less likely to be infected, and I'm going to pull the honey soon anyway. I'll check it then.

Because they were started from packages this spring, either the foul brood was on the frames I used or they robbed out a weaker hive and caught it. He found scale on one of the frames, indicating at least one round of brood that died in that frame. The frame was plastic, and I only use wood, and so it must be from a nuc I bought before I switched to packages. So--did the foul brood come from a nuc a few years ago? And the bees didn't show symptoms because they had been dosed with antibiotics? Or did my bees pick it up, and the scale is from a round of brood that I missed? Seems unlikely that I've ever had an active case in the apiary before without noticing. The smell, the sunken and perforated caps, and the ropy, liquid brood were unmistakable. I don't see how I could have missed it in a previous year, even the year Baby Bee was born, and I wasn't as vigilant.

How depressing. Once I'm sure the bees are dead (it only takes minutes; they're gone already, I'm sure), I'll bag up the hives and take them to the dump. I can't burn here, so bagging is my only option.

First Harvest of the Season

We pulled about 65 pounds from the hive that overwintered. Considering how poky they were last year, I think they're doing really nicely. The honey is a very light. slightly greenish black locust, with apple and mint undertones. My favorite thing about the honey harvest is how different every batch is. It's always a surprise.

The Hot Hive, Conclusion

So--back to last summer's hot hive. I had a few choices: kill it, split it, or move it to the country. I decided to split it. A friend came over to help watch my toddler and view the process. She's a new beekeeper, and I was a little worried about putting her off beekeeping.

I suited up: gloves, boots, full suit. I checked the zippers and hook-and-loop fasteners to make sure I was sealed up. I don't mind being stung, but this hive gave me an unpleasant feeling I'd never had around bees before. They were attacking me in force from the moment the lid came off. They were mad, and they were determined.

Of course, I'm anthropomorphizing. Bees don't get mad. They respond to stimuli. So let me phrase it this way: these bees seemed to ignore smoke, and responded to the lid coming off defensively. Whereas some hives will send one or two bees over to ping off the veil, these bees moved in a group, and didn't bother with warning pings. The moment the lid was off, I was enveloped in a cloud of bees, many of whom were trying with what seemed like desperation to get into my veil. Others were stinging my gloves over and over. They weren't warning me. They were straight on trying to get rid of me. After it was over, my friend did say that it was intimidating to watch: there was a constant swirl of bees around me, a cloud that followed me a good 50 yards or more.

I knew I would never be able to find the queen in such a huge hive. The original queen had been marked, but I was pretty sure this change in attitude had come about due to supercedure. The hive had come through all of the previous season and part of this one as a calm, productive, well-mannered hive. The relatively sudden change had to mean a new queen--one who had mated with drones who had attitude.

Since I wouldn't be able to go through the hive to find the queen (especially with a tornado of bees swirling around my head), I decided to split the hive into three parts, then return in a few days to see who  had eggs. Find the queen then, in a smaller hive, squish her, and replace. There was also a chance that without honey and broken into smaller hives, the bees would settle down.

The split went without particular incident. I put down a stand and new bottom board, pulled the top brood box, and put it on the stand. Then I got a nuc box, and pulled frames to fill it from both top and bottom brood boxes. I didn't worry about balancing the boxes' stores and bees; I hoped to reunite the whole thing in a couple of weeks with a new queen.

I put drawn comb in the brood boxes to make up for the frames in the nuc. I now had one nuc and two deeps. I knew that foragers would likely go back to the original hive, and hoped that they would take the bad attitude with them. Maybe the nuc and the box at the new location would be sweet without the mean old bees.

In the meantime, I had two nice queens on order. I figured I would introduce a queen into the nuc and one brood box, in hopes that one would take. Smaller hives usually accept a queen more easily, so my bet was on the nuc. I figured if one queen survived, she would head up the new, reunited hive. If both survived, I could just go with the split. It was late in the season--August already--but most years we have a good fall flow, and I could always feed.

I lucked out. The queen was in the nuc. What was less lucky is that the hives' attitude hadn't sweetened one iota for having been split. Even the nuc was mean, all five frames of it, with bees coming out to meet me the moment the hive tool went under the lid.

One queen went into the nuc, one into a hive body. I waited a week, the queens were laying eggs, and so I recombined the nuc with the queenless hive body. I have to admit I didn't check it for queen cells, though there must have been by then. I assumed my replacement queen would take care of that. I added a second hive body to the other requeened box. And called it good.

They both did manage to work a goldenrod flow and do ok, but I didn't open them again that season. One had plenty of stores (the one on the original stand). The second seemed light. I will admit, though, that I was done with them. I had another hive that had made a nice 30 lb surplus on the fall flow, so I had that to extract and bottle, as well as a toddler to take care of. They would make it or they wouldn't, but they'd had all the attention I was going to give them.

I will say that I requeened with a small bit of regret. This hive had boomed and make a 60 lb surplus in a season when no one was getting much honey at all, due to overcast, cool weather. I loved their honey making genes. I loathed their attitude.

Neither requeened hive made it. The light one starved, the second apparently started raising brood too early, and choose to keep it warn rather than move up to the 40 pounds above their heads.

In the end, I could have saved myself the trouble and expense of requeening by putting a trash bag over the hive. But I'm still glad I did it. It was a heck of an experience, and I feel like I'll know what to do when (if?) it happens again.

Google's Hiveplex

Official Google Blog: Hello from the Hiveplex

The people at Google have decide to start a little apiary--The Hiveplex--on Google property in California. They feel like Google is structured a lot like a honey bee community (who's the queen?!!), and they want to bring attention to CCD. Google employees volunteer to care for the bees, and will share in the results of the bees' efforts.

Beekeeping Art

The story of a piece of beekeeping art may interest some of you. The finished piece is amazing. The artist, Mary Shelly, carves and paints her work. She also blogs a lot of it, and you can see this piece from sketch to done step by step.

Click here to go to Mary's amazing blog of her amazing work.

Baby Bee Growing Up

Hot Hive, continued

Once I realized I had a problem on my hands, I did the sensible thing: I called in a pro. I have 5 years of experience--he has more like 40. We'll call him P.B. He's been an apiary inspector, and has worked in beekeeping forever. I figured he'd seen it all.

He came out and visited, and confirmed my suspicions (and took about 20 stings in the process): hot hive. Now to decide what to do.

Option one: Move it to the country. I have friends who are still out in the middle of nowhere. I could put the hive on their land, and let it continue to do its marvelous honey gathering.

Option two: break it up into two or three smaller hives, requeen all of them. Smaller hives are less defensive. They wouldn't make anymore honey this year, but...

Option three: Kill them.

Option one was really tempting. Let them do their thing where they wouldn't bother anyone. The downside of this was... moving the hive. I've done it before, but those were small, early spring hives that didn't have attitude. I moved them in Cherokee. Now, I have a Subaru wagon with much less room, utterly unsuitable for a two-story hive. Frankly, any enclosed vehicle is unsuitable, though. This isn't just a hive--it's a mean, mean hive.

More later.

Sorry for the hiatus...

Baby Bee kept me busy last year, as did a hot hive. My daughter grew, and her dad and I figured out parenthood as best we could to a good-natured child who ate a lot--about every 3 hours. Around the clock. That finally changed in January of this year, and I'm feeling far, far better, now that I get a good night's sleep nearly every night. For a while, typing a coherent sentence was an iffy proposition.

Back to beekeeping!

Last year, a hive that overwintered came into spring bursting with bees. The queen was a Buckfast, and I hadn't taken honey from them the previous year--after Avital was born at the end of June, there was just too much to do, and we didn't pull honey until October. By that time, the bees had moved honey from the supers into the brood chambers, and our temporary extracting area in the garage was so chill that getting the honey out of the comb was hard, even with heaters going full blast. So we got a measly 30 lbs or so.

The colony obviously didn't suffer from the previous summer's lack of attention. They didn't swarm, though I didn't have the time or inclination to prevent them, had they wanted to. I did manage to put a couple of medium supers on early, and at the time, they were a happy, gentle hive--just as they had been the previous summer.

As the summer of 2009 went on, that hive seemed to do well, while the other, a new package also with a Buckfast queen, was kind of dinky. They never really got their numbers up, and if I hadn't been busy with a one-year-old and the hot hive, I would have squished the queen and replaced her, or combined the colony. But the weather may have been partly at fault. The summer of 2009 was bad, simply bad. It was cool and rainy, and everyone at the bee club complained that they were getting no honey. Well, I was. I hefted those medium supers occasionally, and knew they were filling up. So I figured I had a great queen. Woo-hoo! Lucky me!

Or so I thought. Until, on a slightly sunny, far-from-perfect weekend day, I opened the booming hive. I really wanted to give them a thorough check, and Hubby was home to watch Baby Bee. The vagaries of our weather, combined with the need for childcare meant that I hadn't looked into the hive in quite a while. Puff of smoke at the entrance, puff of smoke under the hood... Open her up, and... five bees come out like fighter pilots with the enemy in their sights. All of them tag my right hand, the one holding the smoker. One right after another, they drop their payload and go on to their reward. I, of course, do not wear gloves. That day, I was glad I wore my veil--something I haven't always done in the past.

I closed the hive up and walked around to the back of the house, where Hubby and Baby Bee were playing in the not-really-sunshine. I lamented that the overcast, coolish weather had put my girls in a foul mood, and five had died for the cause. I looked down at my right hand. The knuckles were barely swollen. I have a pretty high tolerance for bee venom (apparently a natural advantage, since I've never reacted much to honey bee stings), but even my system notices five in the same place.

A couple of weeks later, the weather was perfect: 80s, sunny, just what the beekeeper ordered for a trouble-free inspection. I opened the same hive again, after dousing it liberally with smoke, and was promptly met by bees pinging off my veil and heading for my smoker hand again. I didn't persist for long. I smoked them down, put on the lid, and got well away from the hive before I took my veil and jacket combo off. One or two followed me for 30 yards or so--unheard of behavior in my experience. Of course, in my few years of beekeeping, I'd never had a hot hive. But I had to face the fact: now I did.

Back when I had ten acres in the middle of even more unpopulated acres, the hot hive would have been a problem, but only for me and passing wildlife incautious enough to poke their nose in the hive. Now, in the 'burbs, with neighbors (though not close neighbors) and a walkway 30 yards from the hive, and a soon-to-be-toddler scooting all over the place, I had a potential problem.

I let them settle down, donned my jacket again, and checked the front of the hive, looking for signs of a skunk or other animal that might be irritating the hive. Nope. The bees were completely uninterested in me, as long as I was just near the hive. Only when I opened it did they go ballistic. That was some comfort, anyway.

Baby Bee is up from her nap. More later!