Inspecting Dead Colonies

This weekend, Wren and I had the sad, unpleasant, and yes, fascinating task of trying to ascertain what caused the death of two of our three colonies.

I'll be posting a detailed description, plus many photos, of what we found, but the two key findings were mold (in Green Hive) and mites (in Rebel Rebel hive).

I strongly suspect ventilation problems killed Green Hive. The situation in Rebel Rebel seems a bit more confusing for reasons I'll get into later.

Here's one picture from Rebel Rebel hive. The comb is upside down; I turned the comb over so I could rest the top bar on the hive in order to take the shot. Even in the sad context of "autopsying" a failed colony, it was impossible not to admire the beauty of the bees' cosmopolis.More details on all this coming soon.

Checking on the Hives—Good News and Bad News

This weekend I checked on the hives using the observation windows—still too cold and wet to open them up. Hive Orange appears to be trucking along, but it seems clear that both the Rebel Rebel and Green Hive colonies have died. We had a lot of adventures together, and I'll miss them.

On our next trip up in two weeks, I plan to do a careful assessment/investigation of both of the lost hives and try to figure out what did them in. From what I can see through the observation windows, both colonies have unused, capped honeycomb. Rebel Rebel showed visual evidence of dysentery and some of the combs in the rear of the hive body looked a bit moldy—a sign of ventilation problems, perhaps.

I'll report in a couple of weeks on everything I find in doing the "autopsies" on both hives. If any experienced beekeepers are reading this and wish to comment or share observations, I welcome them.

Here are a couple of shots of what's going on inside Hive Orange. The cluster of bees begins eight bars/combs back from the hive entrance, and extends over a total of 4 combs.The bees were moving around vigorously within the cluster area. There appear to be several capped honeycombs in the middle and rear of the hive.

I want to get in there soon and assess this colony's feeding needs. I can probably transfer some honeycombs from the dead hives to help Hive Orange through until bloom-time. But I don't want to transmit disease from hive to hive, so I need to do a little homework before deciding how best to proceed.

This year, a friend has built larger top bar hive bodies for us to try out; I hope this will allow the bees to save larger stores of honey for wintertime.

In entering Year 2 of my excursion into the manifold wonders of beekeeping, I am awed by how much there is to learn and am eager to "start again" (in the words of Leonard Cohen), letting the bees (and books, and cyber-mentors) teach me what I need to know.

That's what spring is all about, isn't it? Beginning anew and listening closely to Mother Nature's illuminating communiques.

Honeybee vs. Bumblebee

There was quite a fracas in front of Green Hive the other day. This bumblebee must have wandered too close to the honey-filled hive. The honeybee hung on to the bumblebee and wouldn't let go. The fuzzy interloper's larger sized didn't deter the honeybee one bit. Based on the honeybee's position in the shot below, I suspect it was stinging, or trying to sting, the bumblebee. When a honeybee stings a mammal, its stinger dislodges in the victim's skin, causing the bee to die. But when a honeybee stings another insect, it can sting multiple times without losing its stinger (and its life)—or so I've read....In any case, the battle was a dramatic one, with much buzzing, struggling, frantic rolling about in the grass, and several failed attempts at escape by the bumblebee.
(Note the bits of yellow pollen on both insects. The bumblebee should have stuck with pollen-gathering, and steered clear of the honey cache.)

Finally, after much tussling, the bumblebee managed to fly off, with honeybee in tow. In the blurry shot below, the bumblebee is flying out of the frame with the intrepid honeybee hanging on upside down for the ride of its life. (You can also see the bumblebee's pollen basket stuffed with yellow pollen. It's impressive that the bee could fly off carrying the weight of both the pollen load and the mad honeybee.)

Stinging Insights

They say bee stings are more painful in the fall, and without having the slightest ideas why that might be, I'm beginning to think it's true. Got a couple of stings on my hand while checking the very crowded Green Hive the other day and couldn't believe how different these stings felt from those received earlier in the summer.

My experience throughout the summer has been that the sting "zaps" for a moment, then subsides. The real problem comes the next day, with heavy-duty itching and minor swelling. My stings have typically bothered me, itch-wise, for 2-3 days, but never actually hurt. It's been surprising to find the bee sting is more about annoyance than pain.

The stings I got the other day were a different story. My hand swelled up in a major way and really bothered me for 24 hours—not only itching me to the point of insanity, but somewhat painful and "hot" as well. Then, in hour 26, nada. A completely different pattern from the previous stings.

Either my bio reactions are changing as my body begins responding to periodic low doses of venom or there's something different about bee stings in autumn or something was different about the way these particular stings were delivered.

Could it be that as autumn comes and the fruits of the bees' labor accrue, the bees develop an ability to inflict more pain on those who would tamper with their precious winter stores? The beeyard is now redolent with the scent of honey. It is intoxicating and magical to smell from 10-15 feet away the warm, wafting aroma that just a few weeks ago could only be discerned by standing directly beside the hive. The aroma is an attractant to be sure. Perhaps the bees somehow know it and have enhanced their defense mechanisms accordingly.

A Tour of the Hive

Two weeks ago, I paid a visit to the bee yard to confirm that the (previously) virgin queens had mated and were laying "the next generation" in Hive Orange and Green Hive, both of which swarmed on June 21, taking with them the old queens and leaving newly raised, virgin queens behind. I was pleased to find plenty of evidence that all was well, reproduction-wise, in both hives. Here's a quick tour of what I found. (Click the photos to view them in a larger format.)

In these two combs, you see just what a beekeeper hopes to find: plenty of capped worker brood—the cells covered by the tan-colored, porous-looking caps in the middle of the comb. Notice that these capped cells form a nice pattern filling in the majority of cells in the the comb. This is suggestive of a good queen who has laid each of her eggs in a efficient pattern along the comb. Bordering the top of the comb, the bees store nectar (note the pale or yellowish uncapped cells) and capped honey (whitish caps).

Below that are some dark, uncapped cells in which pollen is being stored. Both food sources—honey for carbs, pollen for protein—are conveniently located above the brood cells to make it easier for the nurse bees to mix "bee bread" (pollen + nectar/honey) to feed the larvae numerous times a day over a period of several days. During this time, the larvae grow at a rapid rate. Once they are ready to morph into the winged creature we know as the honeybee, the cell is capped and the magical rearrangement of the bee's molecular biology begins.

Here you see larvae being fed and attended to by nurse bees. You also see some capped cells inside of which are larvae undergoing metamorphosis.

Once the bees have built out enough combs for a nice, big broodnest, they start building honeycombs—combs with larger cells for storing honey and pollen that will be used during times of dearth and, of course, during wintertime when nothing's blooming and it's too cold for the bees to fly. The dark cells in this lovely bee-composition contain pollen. Along the top and upper-middle right is capped honey. There are also some as-yet empty cells and cells containing uncapped nectar.

After the bees bring nectar into the hive and deposit it in the cells, it takes some time (and effort on the bees' part—mainly through the fanning of their wings) to reduce the moisture level to the point where it becomes honey. Once it does, the bees cap the cell with wax, keeping the precious substance clean and protected for future use. As William Longgood observes in his great book The Queen Must Die, "To the bee, honey is the ultimate reality."

Here's a closeup of the pollen, capped honey, and open cells. By the way, the pollen colors vary enormously as different plants come into bloom and are visited by the bees. I can't be sure, but I suspect this pollen is from white clover.

When I look at a closeup like this—and every time I visit the hive and watch how hard the bees are working—I can't help but think about how many dozens of trips by dozens of bees it takes to fill a single cell with honey or pollen. Truly, every teaspoon of honey and every grain of pollen represents a herculean effort on the part of the honeybees.
And that's leaving aside the genius of the comb itself...

Comb Inspections

By May 11 (the bees' fourth week in the hive), the size and number of the combs being built in Hive Orange and Green Hive had doubled from the previous week. We briefly removed and examined each comb in each hive to check that both queens were alive and laying eggs. The darker, burnt-orange portions of the comb are where pollen is being stored. In some of the cells above, where you see shimmery white, that's curled up larvae: bees-to-be.

Here's a closer look:

We were pleased to see evidence of a laying queen in both hives and to actually glimpse the Hive Orange queen during our inspection.

Inside the Hive

It was impressive to see how much comb-building the bees had done in just 3 weeks. Such elegant, pristine work!


Here you see the combs built in Hive Orange. A week after these pics were taken, another 6 or 7 new combs had been built here, and Green Hive was building up comb even more quickly.

The cells in these combs are being filled with nectar, honey, pollen and eggs. The queen lays about 1,500-2,000 eggs each day; as these eggs hatch into larvae and then metamorphose into bees, they replace the elder workers who have reached the end of their short lifespan. Over time, if all goes well, the colony will grow in size from its original 3-lb. package size of about 10,000 bees to 60,000 or more. The bees will work hard to gather enough nectar to enable the colony to survive the winter, though most of the gatherers will never live to see the spring.

On the hive floor you can see crystalized sugar from our syrup-feeding, along with pollen gathered by the bees. The pollen colors are sorbet-like: soft and fiery orange, rose-red, grey, bluish-purple, and yellow. Below, at left, you can see a bee with some pinkish pollen on her hind leg, which is fitted with neat little structured called a pollen basket.

Feeding Frenzy (Duh! Doh! Double-Doh!)

The bees were hived during a time when it was way too cold for them to fly. Even if they could fly, nothing had blossomed yet to provide the nectar flow on which they depend for sustenance.

So the bees had to be fed until conditions changed for the better. I'd started out using the allegedly foolproof "baggy method" wherein a Ziploc bag is filled partway with syrup, laid on the floor of the hive, and slit open a bit to allow the bees to perch on it and gather syrup with their proboscises—a bucolic image in a plastic-laden-21st-century sort of way.

Unfortunately, when I dumped the three-pound package of bees into the hive where I'd placed the baggy, the weight of the falling swarm caused a small tsunami of syrup to soak the Green Hive, engulfing what seemed like a thousand bees. Bees died, I cried, and lessons were painfully learned.

Lesson 1: The word "foolproof" should be banned from the English language.

Lesson 2: Even if you think you have thought through every possible outcome of a seemingly innocent action, you haven’t.

Lesson 3: Book-learnin’ doesn't hold a candle to experience.

The soaked swarm of distraught, demoralized bees was not a pretty sight. Fortunately, the death toll was much lower than it initially appeared. (I’m traumatized for life; the bees seem to have moved on). Which brings me to Lesson 4:

There’s a good reason why honeybees are considered a "superorganism."

Hive Orange, needless to say, was not subjected to the foolproof baggy method. There, I first tried a little bowl of syrup with sticks on the surface to serve as a landing pad. But the bees polished that off too quickly to keep up, and in the cold weather I did not want to keep opening the hive every three hours. (Plus, I needed some sleep after all the Ziploc-related emotional upheaval.)

I finally settled on quart-sized Mason jars, inverted, with little nail-holes in the lid (sharp side in, so the bees wouldn't be injured). The jars were set on top of a pair of squared-off chopsticks to create a nice crawl space for the bees. That's worked very well, been easy to deal with, delivered plenty of food for days at a time, and so far has not resulted in mass deaths. The bees have emptied as many as two such jars per week per hive.

Here you see a bit of comb the ever-vigilant bees started building on one of the mason jars.