Recent Things (Today)

The Queen of Serious Moonlight (& Other Delights)

We had a fun, sunny, and productive holiday weekend—nice change after a week of cold and rain.

Got a quick peek into the two new hives, Moss Garden and Serious Moonlight. Both hives are building comb nicely. Here you see the bees getting started on building comb on a new top bar.
During our "hive dives," we got a glimpse of the queen of Serious Moonlight. She's the big bee marked with the blue dot at center, left. (Click the photo below to enlarge it so you can see her.)
Found this beautiful striped spider on top of one of the hives.
Had to evict a wasp who was beginning to build a nest underneath the hive lid. Beehives seem to attract quite a little ecosystem; it's always interesting to see what turns up on and around the hives.

We had our first official guest of the season this weekend (Swarmcatcher Karen) and she, Wren, and I disbursed some free wildflower seeds kindly provided by Haagen Dazs as part of its Help the Honeybee campaign. More on that adventure—including (possibly) a little movie—soon.

Checking on (and Naming) the New Hives

On Saturday, Wren and I took a quick look inside the two new hives to make sure the queens had been released from their cages and that all was well in bee-ville.
In both cases, the queen had been released. Above, you see the cages with a couple of dead attendant bees.

Both colonies had built an impressive amount of comb in the week since we'd hived the packages. Interestingly, the bees in both hives were building along just one side of each of the top bars, rather than across the whole top bar.They seem to be using the vertical guide (intended to reinforce the combs so they don't break) as a brace for the comb. I hope that as time goes on, they'll start working the other sides too. But who knows with bees? In any case, they're just getting started—all will bee revealed in time.
By the way, thanks to all who suggested names for the two colonies in keeping with the David Bowie theme. Wren has decided to name the colony she hived last weekend SERIOUS MOONLIGHT, a phrase from the David Bowie song, Let's Dance. I've been debating about SUFRAGETTE CITY, but have decided on MOSS GARDEN—a favorite of mine from "Heroes". I like the calming influence of the phrase Moss Garden, and I hope the bees will too.

We need to get into Hive Orange (our surviving hive from last year), but the weather has been uncooperative. With luck, we'll get a look next week.

How to Build a Solar Wax Melter

If you keep bees with a top bar hive, you're likely to wind up with plenty of nice comb that can be melted down for beeswax.

I created a highly makeshift solar wax melter last summer, but will need something a little larger and more sturdy this year, since it looks like I'll soon be processing a fair amount of comb from my dead hives (sigh).

Here's a good article on harvesting honey and beeswax from a top bar hive. In addition, the government of Queensland has been good enough to provide this overview on beekeeping, beeswax, and solar wax melters, with some good tips, warnings and tricks.

Here's a roundup of instructions for making a solar wax melter.

• The always informative Linda's Bees blog has a nice video and pictures of how she made her solar wax melter.
• Ron Bennett's solar wax melter Plans.
• Beesource's downloadable plans for building a solar wax melter.
• Paul's ingenious solar wax melter. (This is the one I used last year. Couldn't be simpler.)
• This page has many do-it-yourself plans. Scroll down the page to see the solar wax melter.

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.

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...

Drone comb & drones

Drones are little bigger than worker bees, and the cells in which drones develop show the difference. Marked in black is some capped drone comb. Marked in blue is a drone. Drones have bigger eyes than workers (the better to spy the queen during mating flights, perhaps). Drones also lack stingers, so if you're trying to show off your beek coolness, you can pick up a drone with your bare hands.


Here's a better look. Inside the capped cells, the drone larvae are undergoing metamorphosis.

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.