Queenright

Without a laying queen, a hive cannot survive.

Although a hive might be filled with as many as 60,000 working females, only the queen can produce the precious eggs that are necessary to keep the hive going. Do the math: It takes about 21 days for a worker bee’s egg to develop into an adult. Worker bees who are born in the summer are expected to live only six short weeks. That means that an entire colony can die within two and half months if they are not renewed by a new generation of bees. A hive that has a queen who is laying well is a “queenright” hive.

Sometimes a hive loses its queen. If she is old and laying poorly, the hive may decide on its own to supersede her. They do this by selecting a few eggs and feeding them a special diet, extra rich in royal jelly. The special diet turns ordinary worker eggs into queen eggs. At the same time, the bees enlarge the cells of these special larvae because queens are big and need more room. The queen bee cells are easy to spot when a beekeeper is inspecting the nursery.

But sometimes hives don’t have a queen for other reasons. For example, a swarm, a cluster of bees , may decide to leave their hive because living quarters have become too cramped or are otherwise no longer suitable. Sometimes a queen might accompany them, but sometimes she might not. For example, a swarm I caught in July did not have a queen. But I didn’t know that at first.

After I captured the swarm, I placed it in an empty hive body and checked it periodically for a laying queen. Since I did not see the queen, I also looked for new eggs and larvae. After three weeks of no sign of a laying queen, I concluded that the hive needed help. Fortunately, at the same time, another hive was rearing several queen cells. I “borrowed” a couple of cells and placed them in the hive with the swarm. To my delight, within a few days the cells hatched and I spotted a new queen.

My new queen holds court.

“Congratulations, girls!” I chortled in the apiary. “You have a new queen and she’s a beauty!”

But the cycle was not yet complete. Now that I knew the queen had hatched, she still had to go on her maiden voyage to find the man – er, men – of her dreams. Queens usually mate with 15 to 25 male bees, called drones. Because the weather had turned exceptionally hot, I wasn’t sure that drones would be flying. But I underestimated the call of the wild. Of course they would fly if they sensed a new girl in the neighborhood.

And fly they did. I know because when I checked the hive a week later, I was rewarded with the sign I had been looking for, eggs in the nursery. At last! Now that swarm is back on track and growing fast. The queen, it seems, found her Prince Charmings. This hive is now a home.

Meals on Wheels (for bees)

Way back before the Ice Age, bees branched off from their carnivorous cousins, the wasps, and became flying vegetarians. Since it is widely thought that they evolved with the first flowers, bees are the original flower children. Like the flower children of the 60s, bees are peaceable creatures, preferring to look for flowers instead of fights.

Bees use their sting to defend the welfare of the hive only when they feel under threat. I ask myself how I would react if a giant pulled the roof off my house and went straight for the kitchen (the honey) or the nursery (where the bees care for their larvae). When I put myself in their six shoes, I realize that when I get stung, I deserve it.

Floral nectar provides energy that bees need to fly long distances, scoping the landscape for other nutritious floral sources. Nectar is necessary, but pollen is also necessary, providing protien to feed infant bees (larvae) so they can grow up big and strong, eventually joining the ranks of the field bees.

If flowers and nectar are scarce, beekeepers can compensate by feeding bees. The “food” that I provide is a solution of sugar syrup in quart canning bottles that I place upsidedown in holders at the entrance of the hive. The bees suck the syrup from the bottle through tiny hones that are punched in the lid of the jar. You can buy the lids pre-punched, but I feel that the holes are too big, so I do it myself.

I feed my new hives all summer, since they need lots of carbohydrates to produce wax for their new comb during the first year. The bees use wax comb to store honey, pollen, and provide brood comb in which the queen lays her eggs. The bees also convert the sugar syrup to honey, adding nutritious enzymes to it during the honey production process. I harvest no honey from first year hives, since they will need all the honey they can make to get them through the winter.

After a full year, when the bees have set up housekeeping and are ready to begin serious honey production, I usually consider them a mature hive. I cut back on feeding syrup to mature hives, since I want the bees to use natural floral sources to produce their surplus honey.

Lately, honeybees here in Illinois are having a tough time. Due to the considerable dryness, flowers are producing less nectar and honeybees have to fly longer and harder to find it. Meanwhile, my new hives are sucking down their syrup at a rapid rate. I find myself making frequent rounds to the beeyards, carrying crates of bottles filled with syrup in the back of my car. I call myself “meals on wheels”.

Beekeepers in club meetings throughout Illinois are raising the possibility of honeybee starvation later this summer. I am not yet feeding my mature hives, but I am watching them carefully. While floral sources are best, we may have a long, hot summer ahead and I will feed my bees if necerssary. But if I include my mature hives in my meals on wheels program, I will not harvest any honey they make from syrup. The problem with feeding mature hives with syrup is that honey made from foral sources, not sugar, has better nutrition for both bees and humans.

Watering bees

Water bottle on left, color coded blue. Feeder bottle on right.

The Illinois State Water Survey (ISWS) has issued a drought advisory. They say that there is a 50% likelihood that the hot, dry weather we are currently experiencing will develop into a full –blown drought. The signs that bees are already suffering from thirst, both in city and on farm, are manifest at birdbaths, irrigation pumps and the swimming pools, common collection points for bees who are desperate for water.

Bees need water for many reasons. Like us humans, hydration helps bees metabolize food and maintain bodily functions. But it goes way beyond that for apis melifera. Several authorities (Crane, Atkins ) suggest that lack of sufficient water is linked to inadequate brood rearing. Bees use water to cool the hive in hot weather, fanning miniscule droplets with their wings to keep their brood safely comfortable at 95 F with a relative humidity of 90%. The larval diet is composed of around 60% water. I have noticed that in several of my hives, the queens appear to have cut back on egg laying, possibly in response to the lack of moisture.

Moffitt, Stone and Wardecker also suggest that adequate water supply improves honey production. Certainly, there is more time for foraging if field bees are not wasting time flying long distances to find water.

I want my bees to be welcome on their farms, not buzzing around water sources intended for other purposes. After some deliberation, I decided to equip my hives with hive entrance water bottles in addition to their feeder bottles. Since bees like to return to a favored source, I realize that I may have trouble diverting them from the birdbaths and irrigation joints that they have found on their own. I intend to follow the advice of one wise beekeeper in the Kankakee Beekeeping Club who suggested adding a pinch of sugar to the water to make it more appealing.

If the ISWS prediction is correct, and a drought is headed our way, my bees will have a clean, reliable water source that will not make them insecta non grata among my farmers and neighbors.

Splitting bees

I got a surprise as I hoisted a frame of brood from a hive in my apiary on the Sola Gratia Farm. (Sola Gratia Farm is attached to St. Matthew’s Lutheran Church in Urbana IL. ) At least six queen cells were attached along the bottom.

Queen cells are distinctive in appearance, looking a bit like peanuts hanging from the frame. The presence of queen cells is a strong indication that the hive was preparing to swarm.

Hives usually decide to swarm when the population runs out of room. The reigning queen takes off to search for a roomier home with a good part of the hive in tow. But before she goes, she lays eggs in those peanut shaped queen cells so that the bees that are left behind have a queen, too. Every hive must have a queen to survive, since the queen alone is responsible for laying the eggs.

My hive was taking no chances. They had ensured the succession by growing at least six new baby queens in their special cells. There can be only one queen per hive, so when the first healthy queen emerges, she will quickly kill the others. If two or more hatch simultaneously there will be a dramatic fight to the death.

But I was perplexed. I did not want my hive to swarm. One way to try to stop a swarm from taking place is to kill the nascent queen cells. No queen, no swarm. I was discussing this with the Sola Gratia farmer, Dex, when out of nowhere, a car drove up and a stranger poked his head out.

“I heard you talking,” he said. “I used to be a beekeeper until this happened.” He gestured to crutches on the passenger seat. He looked at the frame of queen cells and pronounced, “I think you should split the hive.”

Splitting a hive is a sort of controlled swarm. Instead of letting the bees just take off in search of a new home, a beekeeper helps them start a new hive under controlled conditions by “splitting”, removing the queen cells from the old hive and placing them in a new hive, thus reducing the pressure to swarm. The result is the same as swarming, two smaller hives are formed where you formerly had one big one. Except with swarming, the second hive could end up anywhere, in a tree, a garage or someone’s attic. With splitting, the beekeeper decides where the second hive resides.

“You’re right,” I said. “Splitting is a great idea. I will do it.” I looked more closely at the man in the car. “Are you a member of the church?”

He shook his head. “No, I’m just someone who likes beekeeping. My name is Larry.” With that, he turned the car out of the parking lot and drove away.

As I carried the queen cells back to the apiary, I mused on how close these new queens had come to an early demise. Thanks to Larry, at least one of them would now lead a new hive into the future.

Larry’s appearance from out of nowhere at precisely the tipping point moment for the queen cells was one of several coincidences that I have witnessed while beekeeping in the Sola Gratia apiary.The author Stephen King remarks in his new book, 11/22/63, “Coincidences happen, but I’ve come to believe they are actually quite rare. Something is at work, okay? Somewhere in the universe (or behind it), a great machine is ticking and turning its fabulous gears (p. 271).” If Mr. King is right, perhaps something or Someone is paying special attention to the bees at Sola Gratia.

New hive created from a split.

Swarms and stings

I was already on the road when the call came in.

The swarm in Marcello’s tree

The male voice explained that a colony of bees had taken up residence in the side of his house in Mahomet IL and he feared for the safety of his young daughter. He identified himself as Marcello and asked if I could stop by.

Suddenly the tone of Marcello’s voice turned to alarm. “The tree!” he exclaimed. “They’re in the tree!”

“I’m coming!” I said, turning my red Prius towards Mahomet. I knew he had just spied a swarm.

Ten minutes later I was in Marcello’s backyard. A swarm of bees the size of a large basketball was hanging from the branch of a tree, about 12 feet in the air. There were also bees inside and outside a corner of Marcello’s house, busily bustling from an opening under his roof.

Since home construction is not in my purview, I concentrated on the swarm in the tree. Marcello kindly set up a ladder for me. Prior to mounting the ladder, I donned a hat and coat, but no veil. “They won’t sting,” I explained in an authoritative voice. “They are concentrating on looking for a new home and they won’t sting.”

I teetered on top of the ladder and positioned a styrofoam “nuc” box, a nucleus hive box made to temporarily hold small colonies of bees. Then I pulled the branch with the swarm towards me.

Well, I’ve got news, if you get nose to nose with a swarm of bees, they will sting. To be fair, out of a possible 5,000 bees, only one flew onto my cheek and stung me. Wincing, I carefully climbed down the ladder with the swarm in the nuc.

“You didn’t panic,” Marcello said with wonder. “You were so calm when you got stung.”

Honey bees are defensive insects. They don’t go looking for trouble. When she stings, a honey bee feels threatened. I say “she” because in the bee world, only the girls sting. The boys don’t even have stingers.

I panicked only one time, when a
bee got caught in my hair. The bee panicked first, and the loud, angry buzz right next to my ear pushed my own panic button. I beat at my hair and surprise, surprise, I got stung. Since then, when confronted with a scared or angry bee, I move in slow motion and hope for the best. Sometimes I get stung, sometimes I don’t.

When I got down from the ladder, the swarm climbed obedienty over the edges of the nuc and I drove home to add them to my growing apiary. (I now have almost 40 hives located in three counties in Illinois!)

The mother colony that spawned Marcello’s swarm is still in his house. I’m working on getting some help for that from my beekeeping friends. Marcello doesn’t want to kill his honey bees because he heard that they are endangered. He is right.

<;img class="size-thumbnail wp-image-354" title="macello and me" src="https://viewfromthehive.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/macello-and-me.jpg?w=150" alt="" width

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New bees arrive

The author installing a package of bees

25 “packages” of bees arrived on Monday.  A package is a cage the size of a shoebox containing a few thousand bees and their queen.  Over the summer, I expect these packages to set up shop (built with wax), have lots of children and prosper.   My packages came from Mississippi.  They were shipped by a semi truck to a bee supplier, then trucked here to Urbana, Illinois. 

I knew the bees were coming, and had been preparing for months.  First I found farm and city homes for the bees that were not too far from my own home in Urbana IL so that I could check on them easily.  Next,  I ordered wooden boxes and other bee equipment from Kelley Bee Supply, a major bee supplier located in Kentucky.  Accompanied by my beekeeping friend, Kim Campbell (and my two shih tzu dogs), I then travelled to Kentucky to pick up the order.   Next, Kim and I spent months  making bee hive stands and  assembling the hive boxes and frames in which the queens will  lay their eggs.   I also cooked up gallons of sugar syrup to help the bees feed while they were learning where to find nectar in their new environment. 

Finally the bees arrived.  As luck would have it, they arrived on one of the raniest, coldest days in recent history.  Kim

Kim with packages

and a friend, Brian, helped me install 19 bee hives on the first day, Monday.   Because we had prepared the apiaries beforehand, installation was largely a matter of opening the packages and shaking the humming contents into their comfy hive boxes.   That night Kim and I went to the local watering hole, the Black Dog, to celebrate.  As we headed for our table, a bee flew out of my clothes. (I caught it and set it free outside.)  I felt like Pig Pen in Snoopy.

The next day, yesterday, Kim headed to his home in Charleston IL to install his own 25 hives, and Brian and I finished our installation job as the sun was setting.  There is mud all over my clothes, boots and home, but I went to bed tired and happy, knowing that all my apiaries now have a good start on good farms and urban seettings with good people.

Brian helps with installation

My ISBA shirt

I purchased a shirt at the last annual meeting of the Illinois State Beekeepers Association to commemorate the

My magic ISBA shirt

Association’s 120th anniversary. It was a simple, light blue denim work shirt with a small image of a bee embroidered on the left side over the heart. Underneath, it modestly read, “ISBA 1892”. As humble as it is, that shirt is magical. It attracts attention and breaks the ice with strangers every time I wear it.

Many strangers talk to me out of the blue when they see my shirt. They usually ask if ISBA means “Illinois State Bee Association”. “Not Bee,” I gently correct. “Beekeepers. State Beekeepers Association.”

When I bought new tires for my red Prius at Sears, the mechanic saw the ISBA insignia and asked what it meant. When I told him, he reacted with enthusiasm. “Are you really a beekeeper? I have never met a beekeeper before.” I don’t know if I got better service, but he sure was friendly.

His enthusiasm is typical. Many people respond with the single syllable 21st-century expression for approval, “Cool”. Some confide, “I would love to be a beekeeper.” Thanks to my shirt, I know that almost everyone’s grandpa kept bees.

I’ve noticed that my shirt also provides me with helpful credibility. When I wear it, I become an expert. I happened to be wearing my ISBA shirt when I rescued a swarm of bees recently. The crowd stepped back and let me through. “Here comes the beekeeper,” I heard them say. Someone shouted from the crowd, “That ISBA on your shirt means you’re a member of the State Beekeepers, right?” I nodded reassuringly. Only later did I wonder if they mistook me for the Illinois State Beekeeper, a post that is already occupied in Springfield by Steve Chard.

But the most far-flung reaction to my ISBA shirt came from a lawyer. He narrowed his eyes when he saw the insignia and asked, “Illinois State Bar Association?”. I shook my head. I hope he needs my services more than I will ever need his.

Swarm

Thomasboro swarm climbs down off the hydrant.

Bees don’t like being crowded (who does?). When their hives grow too big for their britches, bees think about finding a new home. April and May are months when bees are likely to opt for new real estate because their hives get overfull with bustling baby bees.

Since a bee hive is not a home without a queen, the first thing bees do when preparing to swarm is raise a new queen. The old queen stays in the existing hive with part of the population, while another group follows the new queen in search of adventure. If you spy a cluster of several thousand bees hanging from a fence post, apple tree, eve of a house or even a fire hydrant, chances are very high that you are witnessing a swarm, and in the middle of the mass of bees a queen is holding court.

If you should be lucky enough to see a swarm of bees, don’t panic. Swarming bees are not likely to sting. The bees in a swarm are as gentle and non-aggressive as you will ever meet. They are homeless bees with no brood or stores of honey. They have nothing to defend and they know it.

When bees swarm, they usually pick a location for “hanging around” (literally) while they send out scouts to investigate hollows and cavities suitable for founding a new hive. The scout bees report back to the swarm through a dance and a wiggle. The swarm considers the choices, makes a decision and off they go.

I know it’s swarm season, but the call from Thomasboro IL to pick up a swarming mass of bees was unexpected. I did not know the man who called me, but he explained that he was a friend of someone who knew Dex Conaway, the farmer of Sola Gratia, the new farm of St. Matthews Lutheran Church (Urbana IL). Dex had given the man my name. I know Dex because I am the beekeeper for Sola Gratia Farm. The man on the phone asked if I would I please come to Thomasboro to remove a swarm clinging to a fire hydrant next to his house. His voice had the ring of urgency.

Would I come remove a swarm? I would love to! I grabbed my swarm tools, a beekeeping veil and a vacant hive box, and pointed my red Prius toward Thomasboro. Swarms can decide to move at a moment’s notice and the disappointment of losing a swarm is great. When you’re catching a swarm, it’s good to move fast.

Ed Sexton scoops bees into hive.

As I pulled into Thomasboro, I could tell from the crowd of on-lookers and policemen that the swarm was still there. I set up an empty hive box and gently scooped a few of the bees onto the top of the frames, hoping the others would follow. While I was working, Ed Sexton, another beekeeper drew up. Ed slipped into his bee suit and together we coaxed the buzzing cluster into the hive box. Within very little time about two thousand bees were humming happily in a hive box in the back of my red Prius.

The road from Thomasboro to Sola Gratia Farm is almost a straight beeline, and since a contact through the Church had led to my capturing this swarm, I decided that the appropriate location for the new hive would be on the rich earthen fields of the Church’s farm. It’s just a guess, but I think the Great Beekeeper would want it that way.

Black locust trees are blooming in Illinois

The author with black locust blossoms.

When black locust trees are in bloom, with their creamy, frothy blossoms, they are truly majestic. As a beekeeper, I am particularly drawn to black locust trees because of the wonderful honey they produce.

I discovered black locust honey last year. The frames in which my bees stored this delicious honey were capped with snowy white wax, and the distinctive yellow-green translucence of the honey gave it an eerie, unearthly appearance. The delicate floral flavor of the honey matched the color: it was out of this world.

All winter I had been dreaming of harvesting black locust honey again, but the unseasonably warm weather this spring completely destabilized my plans. The black locust trees, which usually bloom in May or early June, are blooming in April before my bees are ready!

Right now The hive us working hard in the nursery boxes, the “brood boxes”, to raise the next generation of baby bees. Because honey is needed for the kids, the bees are not yet filling the “honey supers”, the boxes in which they store surplus honey.

This year, most of the black locust honey will be used mainly to feed the bee progeny. However, I am still hoping there might be a small reserve of this fantastic honey in the honey supers for my human customers. It all depends on how long the blossoms last.

If I am lucky enough to harvest a small quantity of black locust honey honey, I will save it for my customers at the Downtown Bloomington Farmers Market, which opens on May 12 in Bloomington IL. First come, first served. But if you miss the black locust honey this year, you still have those gorgeous trees. Be sure not to miss the blossoms.

The majestic black locust tree (Urbana IL).

Queenright

The photo above is of two frames taken from two different honeybee hives.  Frames provide bees with a structure upon which they construct an inner city that is their hive.  Bees use frames as a foundation for storing  nectar, pollen and honey, and also for establishing a nursery where the queen lays her eggs.  The larvae from the eggs are cared for by nurse bees who watch over the tiny bee babies until they hatch from their cells as adult bees.   The frames here were taken from two nurseries and display cells that have been sealed with wax (“capped”) to protect  drone larvae, future male honeybees.

Unlike the female honeybees who work hard all their lives to maintain the functions of the hive, drones have it easy: their sole role is procreation. 

When a virgin queen takes off on her mating flight, usually in the spring, she is guided by pheromones (chemical smells that communicate messages to other bees) to clouds of male bees who are milling around in the air in “drone congregation” places.  The scene might be likened to a typical Friday night bar near a college campus.

In the spring, the young queens on their maiden voyage seek many boyfriends.  It is not unusual for a queen to mate in the air with between 15 to 25 drones. It is desirable for her to mate with many drones and store up semen. The future of the  hive depends on it because afterwards, she will return to her hive and spend the rest of her life laying eggs.

Beekeepers use many natural signs to monitor the health of a hive, and the laying pattern of the queen tells us a lot.  When we conduct our first hive inspection in the early spring, we search for signs from the laying pattern that the queen is alive and well, “queenright”.  In the photo above, the spotty pattern of the drone brood on the left indicates that the queen of that hive is not as efficient at laying eggs as the one on the right.  We deduce that either she is nearing the end of her laying life or was never well mated to begin with.  The queen on the right filled up the space in the comb by laying eggs with remarkable consistency, hardly skipping a cell.  This queenright pattern is what beekeepers like to see.

It is only spring, and the long summer lies ahead, filled with uncertainty.  Both hives may survive, but the hive on the right is stronger, better prepared to resist natural threats such as disease, drought or floods, repell pests such as wasps or beetles, or even discourage greedy critters such as skunks or mice.  Ultimately, the hive on the right is likely to produce more honey.  Whether a hive survives or thrives depends on many things, but a large part rests on the slim shoulders of a healthy, well-mated queen.