Musings from Mark

Hiked around the summit of Marys Peak today at 34 degrees, with about 1-2″ of fresh slushy snow.  First snow of fall up there, with cool showers and sun breaks in the valley.  We also found my camera that was lost last week out at Jesse and Eva’s place.  Fell out of my pocket in tall grass.  A bit wet, but protected in its case and still working.

It’s been a beautiful weekend in Oregon after last week’s record-breaking storm, and we took advantage of the weather to do a thorough pre-winter inspection of our hives.  With one possible exception, they look very good, and all have enough stores for winter.

Hive #1.  Our original nuc from Ruhl Bee last year, still with their original queen.  Brood nest consolidated in the center of the lower box, with 70-80 lbs of honey up top and almost no empty comb.  Queen still laying, though we didn’t find her.

Hive #5.  I’ve been noticing less entrance activity and no pollen coming in over the last few weeks, so I was a bit worried.  We found small patches of capped brood, indicating the queen was last laying about three weeks ago.  We did, however, find a healthy-looking queen.  It’s possible that they superseded, in which case the new queen should start laying soon, or it’s possible the existing queen is simply taking an extended break from laying, which is not unheard of this time of year.  They overwintered in the smallest cluster last year and still built up fast in spring, so perhaps they will do it again.  I would place the odds of successful overwintering at 50% for this hive, and at 85% for all of the others.  Plenty of stores for winter.

Hive #6.  Our strongest summer hive, having overwintered in a single deep from a midsummer swarm, has consolidated their brood nest into the lower deep with brood raising slowing down for winter.  About 100 lbs of stores, mostly their own as we fed them very little.  Smart bees…

Hive #7.  Started as a three-frame nuc with an Old Sol queen in early June, this is our only hive going into winter with a first-year queen.  They are also the strongest at present, and they have a significant mite load though with no outward symptoms.  As they were below treatment threshold in August, they didn’t get our thymol treatment, but they will be getting oxalic acid in early December.  Plenty of stores, but still some solid frames of brood in the lower chamber.

Hive #8.  The tree bees had no stores to speak of in late August, as I trapped them out of their honey-filled tree in late June.  After over a month of feeding, they have about 60 lbs, which is probably enough but as they have four empty frames in the top box yet we will keep feeding for the next few weeks.  We found the queen, and they have somewhat less brood and bees than the other three strong hives so they should be frugal through the winter.

All except #8 (which we are still feeding) got their screened covers filled with cedar chips to absorb winter moisture.  With the exception of oxalic acid for mites, there is not much a beekeeper can do between now and March except watch and hope.  I am hopeful…

At the moment of the autumnal equinox, 1:44 pm yesterday, I was standing on the summit of Marys Peak in driving rain and 44 mph wind with gusts to 65.  Fifteen minutes later I leaned into the strongest gust, 76 mph, as the first Pacific storm of the rainy season pushed through right on schedule.

It’s a bit early for a storm of this strength, though down in the valley it was merely breezy.  Combined with around 2″ of rain from a late-summer thunderstorm earlier this month, we are well above normal.  That is a very good thing given that we had a dry spring and summer, and famously green Oregon is beginning to turn green again.

My apologies to those who watch my blog to read about bees – it’s been too long since I posted about them.  When last I posted, they were booming and swarming, and my five overwintered colonies had become 12.  Unfortunately with bees, the good times usually end.  In our case they ended around April 25th, when the bees got into something toxic.  My best guess is an insecticide inadvertently or ignorantly sprayed on flowers they were visiting.  Regardless of the cause, bees started dying.  At first we noticed twitching bees around the entrances, then piles of dead bees, then, in the worst cases, piles of dead bees in the hive with only a few sick-looking bees remaining.  In this way we lost all three of our swarms and three of our splits.  One died outright, and the other five we consolidated into one colony that proceeded to dwindle and die.  None of their virgin queens survived to lay eggs.

From 12, we were down to 6.  Two of these were nucs with virgin queens that we had promised to friends.  Those queens made it, and although they both suffered from high forager attrition during the pesticide kill, they both went on to build up.  From the reports we hear, one is now a booming, healthy hive heading into winter and the other sadly got robbed to oblivion last week.  So we were back to four in the middle of May, and all of these had some amount of dead bees in front from the pesticide impact.  In the best shape were two artificial swarm splits, which at the time of the pesticide exposure had a queen, brood, and lots of nurse bees but almost no foragers.  Hive #1, the only one that we managed to keep from building swarm cells, had a full super of honey already, but over half of the foragers died leaving it at half-strength heading into the main flow.  That leaves only #2, which had a failing queen undergoing supercedure.  Thanks in part to excessive drone brood, we had mite problems in #1, #6, and #2 which we addressed with Mite-away Quick Strips.  These are known to kill queens, and while the established queens in #1 and #6 pulled through fine, the just-started-laying supercedure queen in #2 perished.

In early June, Karessa announced that she had an Old Sol queen for me – one that I had ordered and then later thought I cancelled though it turned out I needed her anyway.  I didn’t have many bees to spare though, so I took one frame of brood and nurse bees each from #1 and #6, a couple of frames of stores, and a frame feeder, and introduced her to this little nuc.  Then when she had been accepted for a week and #2 was definitely queenless, I combined them in with the newspaper method.  This also gave them a fair amount of honey and pollen stores left from Hive #2.  They built up well through the flow, and with help of some fall feeding will be going into winter as a strong double deep.  They are Hive #7.

Hive #8 came to be as a trap-out from a tree, which is a separate story already told on this blog.  They will also be going into winter as a strong double deep, though they had very little honey as I captured them after the main flow.  I am feeding them as much as they will take and am hopeful that by the end of September they will have enough for winter.

If all of that was a bit confusing, here is an equally confusing ancestry diagram for our hives.  Red ones died (or at least the queen died), blue ones were sold, and green ones are alive and well at our home apiary.

Honey:

When the spring swarms and splits crashed, we were left with two supers partially filled in good April weather.  We extracted these, yielding 15 pounds of tasty maple-and-other-things honey.  The three surviving hives built up well into and through the main flow, filling one super each.  On July 28, we extracted 84 lbs of honey from these, with an extra 6 lbs or so saved as cut-comb honey.  That’s a total of 100 lbs of extracted honey, most of which is going into mead.

Lessons learned this year:

1. Opening the broodnest with foundationless frames to prevent swarming is a bad idea, because they will draw 100% drone comb and breed mites.  I still like the idea of opening the broodnest, but will try doing it with foundation or empty drawn comb next year instead.
2. Candy-plug queen introduction does not work well in booming, swarm-ready hives.  We lost two $25 queens in a week this way.  In the future we will keep the candy covered until the bees show signs of accepting the queen, or else we will introduce the queen to a nuc and then do a newspaper combine.
3. Heating the honey shed to 95 degrees to help the honey flow is a good idea, but only if it is aired out BEFORE beginning extraction.  Once extraction begins, the cloud of bees at the door means the door must remain closed.  If the room is still 95, it stays that way until you are done.  We might also try extracting at night when the bees are not flying.
4. Shaking out a three-box hive of laying workers during swarm season is a bad idea.  The recipient hives will be overpopulated and swarm, and the laying workers might kill the emerging virgins.  Next time we will try just giving them a frame of eggs weekly until they raise a queen.
5. Outyards are a good idea.  Not only do you diversify your honey flavors (very important when your primary goal is a creative variety of meads), but you eliminate the possibility of a single pesticide incident hitting all of your bees.  Next year we will have bees in two or possibly three yards.
6. Trap-outs are a good way to get feral bees.  I hope to do one or two next spring now that I have the gear.
7. Bees really don’t like ApiLife Var.  My first application to four out of five hives in August had most of the bees vacating the hive during the day, with some remaining clustered outside even at night.  Because of this excessive disturbance I used two rather than the recommended three treatments.  Mite drops were not particularly impressive compared to Apiguard and especially MAQS.
8. MAQS (Mite-away Quick Strips) really work.  Over a thousand dead mites on the bottom board in two days, and almost no mites in the hive thereafter.  They also kill nearly all of the open brood.  Next year I will use them, if necessary, in late March/early April rather than late May, giving the bees ample time to recover from the setback and possibly helping to prevent swarming.  I might also use them in the fall, as the thymol treatments have been disappointing.

The bottom line:  we started the year with five healthy hives, and after a great deal of kerfuffle we are going into the winter with five healthy hives.  All in all not too bad, I would say…

Update:  Albany rain total now up to 3.73″.  That may well be an all-time summer season record for them.  Still only 1.60″ here.

Summer weather here can be pretty boring.  Either the wind blows off the land, in which case we have hot days, cool nights, lots of sun, and no rain; or the wind blows off the sea, in which case we have cooler days, milder nights, partly cloudy skies, and still no rain.  That is all a function of the ocean being cooler than the land and the air above it.  (In the winter, when the ocean is warmer than the land and the air, we see lots of evaporation and convection, with rain becoming the dominant pattern.)

There are two ways we can get rain in the summer, and they are about equally common.  First, we can get an unseasonably cool air mass dropping down over the ocean from the north, which essentially revives the winter pattern in a half-assed way.  This brings cool, gentle rains with little to no thunder, and we last saw this happen in the summer in July of 2011.

Second, we can have a low pressure system set up to our southwest over the ocean, which is pretty much the only way we get summer thunderstorms.  In the Midwest, there is a fairly frequent northward flow of moist air from the Gulf of Mexico.  In the Southwest, a similar pattern happens in the summer creating the monsoon season.  Here, because we are so close to the cold, non-storm-inspiring ocean, we need a very specific pattern to bring moist air up from the south or southeast.  With a low offshore to the southwest, moister air from over the ocean off California is pulled onshore and northward over the southern Oregon mountains.  There it is heated by the warm land, triggering convection and thunderstorms.  If the flow is just right, these storms then continue to move northwestward over the Willamette Valley.  The pattern itself occurs several times each summer, but usually the moisture is too limited and the storms peter out soon after drifting away from the mountains.

This time the flow over California tapped the remains of a tropical system, bringing moisture in the atmosphere to 2-3 standard deviations above normal.  A east-west band of storms developed, moving northward into our area and being stretched westward out over the ocean by the circular flow.  It arrived with a bang just after 2 pm, bringing more lightning than I’ve seen since a similar event on June 4, 2009.  That storm, which also came from the southeast, was stronger but passed over quickly, dropping a quick inch of rain.  In this storm, the lightning kept up for two hours, striking five times within a mile of the library where I was working and once just down the block (or possibly hitting the building itself).  The center of the low-pressure circulation moved overhead shortly after the rain arrived, essentially trapping the band in place.  Instead of moving, it began to rotate around us, keeping us under moderate to heavy rain for 4.5 hours.  It has finally stopped now, leaving us with 1.59″ for the day.  That is admittedly not high by Minnesota standards, but it is above our monthly average of 1.43″, more than double the daily record of 0.70″, and the third-highest one-day total in September since 1889.  Albany got hit by a stronger cell in addition to the stalled band, bringing totals there to around 2.5″ which is probably an all-time September record.

With the soil parched from three months of little to no rain, there was almost no runoff.  Just two hours of thunder to warm a Minnesotan’s heart and almost two inches of rain to moisten the earth and spark off fall mushroom season.

After losing most of my spring splits and swarms to a presumed pesticide incident (which I will write more about sometime), I found myself with a surplus of both hive boxes and drawn comb, and a need to fill those boxes with bees.  So in early June, when I heard about bees in a tree northeast of town, I decided to take a look.

The hive looked healthy, if a bit on the small side.  Based on entrance activity I would have guessed about one deep worth of bees.  Their entrance was on top of a major yoke of a five-foot diameter oak tree, about nine feet off the ground.  The landowner wanted the bees gone, as they were bothering her horses nearby, but she also didn’t want any harm done to her majestic 100+ year old oak.  Time to try a trap-out.

A trap-out is, to quote Rusty of Honey Bee Suite, “a not very satisfactory way of removing a colony of bees.”  In a traditional trap-out, a one-way exit cone is placed over the hive with a hive box nearby, and as foragers can’t get back in they accumulate in the box.  Eventually the hive dwindles as more bees leave and provisions run out, and the queen either dies inside or absconds with the last desperate cluster.  So yes, not very satisfactory.  But it so happens that I procrastinate by reading the BeeSource forums, and I had come across the writings of one Cleo C. Hogan, Jr. from Kentucky.  Cleo developed a trap-out technique that succeeds in drawing out nurse bees and in many cases even the queen.  Enough beekeepers have adopted it that it is (somewhat) widely known as a Hogan trap, and Walter T. Kelley even sells a version of his design.  I posted a question on the forum about the proper sequence of events, and Cleo quickly responded with his usual sound advice.  As the discussion attracted additional participants, a fellow named Joseph from South Carolina chimed in with his own design and technique for getting the queen.  Joseph has his trap for sale on eBay.  I ended up using some aspects of both methods, with ultimate success.

The theory behind a Hogan-style trap-out is that the trap becomes an additional brood chamber.  This is accomplished by connecting the trap directly to the hive via a sealed tunnel or passage and then adding a frame (or several frames) of brood (with no attending bees) taken from another hive.  The brood draws out nurse bees to care for it, and if the queen is short on space to lay or wants to see who else is laying eggs in her hive she will come into the trap box.  Joseph’s two additional suggestions were to add some emerging brood (because the queen prefers to lay in recently-emerged, cleaned cells) and to perform cycles of activating the one-way exit for three days before opening the passage for one day.  The effect of the latter is to concentrate the majority of the population in the box, where the foragers will deposit nectar and pollen in the usual pattern around the brood.  With brood and most of her workers elsewhere, the queen will begin to feel abandoned and move to where the bees are.

I modeled my tunnel and one-way exit on a design by T’s Bees, and integrated it into one of my swarm traps.

Tunnel design inside box, tunnel open.

Tunnel closed, bees must use one-way funnel. Bee demonstrating inability to get through.

The tunnel is built from 1×4 lumber, square with 3 1/2″ outside dimensions, and 7″ long to extend both inside and outside the box .  I chose this size to match my swarm traps, which are built from a medium super on top of a 1×4 rim.  It so happens that a medium plus a 1×4 is very close to a deep, and this allows me to use surplus honey supers as swarm traps (with deep frames) prior to the main flow, at which point I retrieve them and deploy them as supers.  The tunnel closure is a square block of 1×4, and the funnel is shaped from #8 hardware cloth.  The funnel tip could perhaps be a tad smaller.  I never saw a bee go through it “backwards” but it certainly looked possible.

With the tunnel in place the box holds seven frames.

Tree side of trap box.

The outer tunnel, which attaches to the tree, has 3 1/2″ inside dimensions so as to fit snugly over the inner tunnel.  I made it 16″ long with the idea that I would cut it to fit the geometry of the tree.

Large tunnel, cut on site to fit hive entrance.

Front of trap, bee entrance is 1 1/8" diameter.

The bees were emerging from a vertical crack at a major yoke in the tree.  I was glad I cut the tunnel as long as I did, as I needed the length to extend out to where I could place the box.  The bracket is built from more 1x4s, three hinges, and one piece of plywood.  The angle brace has overlapping boards and can be adjusted 12″ in either direction, allowing the platform to be level despite mounting to a non-level tree trunk.  Lag screws would be more secure, but in the interest of doing no harm to the tree I opted for ratchet straps, eventually using four of them to give the platform a capacity of 100 lbs or so without slipping.

Sealing gaps around the tunnel is an art.  Initially I tried duct tape, which doesn’t stick well to tree bark.  Then I stuffed the remaining cracks with paper.  Finally I settled on landscape foam, which works great.  I do, however, recommend stuffing paper towels in the gaps first and applying the foam at night or when the bees are not active.  For the first 10 minutes or so after application the foam is sticky and traps bees that land on it.

I installed the tunnel on June 9 and gave the bees two days to get used to it before returning to install the box.

Tunnel installed on tree.

Gaps sealed with expanding foam.

Trap in place, right before I took it down. 5:00 am, June 30, 2013.

Trap from the other side.

Strategy time.  I installed the box with a single frame of eggs and open brood, leaving the tunnel open.  For the next six days I checked it occasionally, looking for the queen.  I found the brood frame covered with nurse bees and the field force packing nectar into the other frames, but no sign of the queen or new eggs.  By this point Joseph had joined the online discussion, and his ideas made sense to me so I decided to try them.  On June 18 I brought out two more frames of brood, one capped and soon to emerge and one of eggs and young larvae.  I then closed the tunnel and left it for three days.

On June 21 I returned to open the tunnel, finding all three brood frames now covered in nurse bees.  The next day, on the way to my birthday party, I returned hoping to find an early present of the queen.  No such luck, though as it turns out she may have been there and I just missed her.  In any case I didn’t see new eggs yet, and I closed the tunnel for another three-day stint.

On June 25th I returned to open the tunnel and found the trap nearly filled with bees, and new eggs!  Given that the one-way exit was activated I figured that the queen couldn’t get back in the tree so she must be in the box.  It took a bit of searching but I soon found her – a rich dark brown and not particularly large as queens go but certainly healthy.

I moved her and all of the bees into an empty deep to bring home and refilled the trap with more drawn frames.  As it turns out this may have been a mistake, and the wiser course may have been to leave the queen in the trap for another 5-6 weeks, adding a super, and allowing all of the brood still in the tree to emerge and join the queen in the trap.  But that would require absolute faith in my one-way funnel, lest the queen find her way back through and my opportunity be lost.  This being my first trap-out, I decided to take the queen while I had her in sight.  I set the ~six frames of bees up in my home apiary where they soon reoriented and resumed normal bee life.

These feral bees have all colors in their ranks from yellow to brown, likely the result of the queen mating with a diverse collection of drones.  They are also remarkably gentle to work with, so long as they have their queen.  Queenless bees are often angry bees, and three days after I removed the queen I got a message from the landowner that the bees were buzzing her and would I please remove more of them.  So I returned after sunset, opened the box, and quickly collected 15 stings on my wrists and ankles despite a full suit and gloves.  I duct-taped the stingable parts and went back at them, moving about 2 1/2 frames of very unhappy bees into a nuc and replacing the frames in the trap.  Lesson learned:  don’t work angry bees at night without smoke.

The next morning I reunited the angry bees with their queen and found another message from the landowner:  bees still angry.  too angry.  can’t work horses.  can I put out poisoned honey?  Now any beekeeper knows that pesticides kill far too many bees these days, and poisoned honey is a good way to kill or or at least weaken any hives within two miles.  At this point I had the queen and probably 75% of the bees:  all of the foragers, a majority of the house bees, and enough nurse bees to tend three full frames of brood.  I couldn’t come up with a good way to make the bees less angry short of giving them their queen back, and it would still be another four weeks before all of the nurse bees and still-to-emerge brood in the tree entered the trap, leaving the tree empty of bees.

Four weeks of bee aggression was too much to ask of the landowner for an extra pound or so of bees, so I reluctantly agreed to exterminate.  Before sunrise this morning, I removed the trap (with another frame of bees collected in it), emptied a can of non-synthetic hymenopteran killer down the hole, and sealed the entrance with another can of landscape foam.  I feel bad for the dead bees and the unknown amount of honey now permanently sealed inside (I had hoped to bring another hive to rob it out after completing the trap-out), but I got 75% of the colony, including the queen, and the landowner got rid of her bees.

So…trap-outs are fun!  One Kentucky fellow on BeeSource said getting the queen felt just like shooting a ten-point buck, and I know what he means though I have never hunted myself.  A few things I will remember for next time:

1. Trap-outs require a lot of visits and are best done within 10 miles of home.  This one was right about at the 10-mile cutoff.
2. Trap-outs are likely to make bees more aggressive for a time, particularly if the queen is removed.  In the future if aggression is a concern I may try to leave the queen in the trap until the trap-out is complete, thus keeping the colony intact and (hopefully) docile.
3. Don’t work bees in the dark.  This is one of those warnings you hear from experienced beekeepers with a little smirk that says “try it, you’ll see.”  Bees in the dark don’t fly around and head-butt and try to get at your face only to be stopped by the veil.  They simply fly directly to the first soft surface they can find and plant their stingers, stinging straight through fabric that has never been stung through before.
4. It’s a myth that you can’t get the queen.  There are probably some cases, especially in buildings, where the distance from the entrance to the combs is too far for the queen to ever move, but judging from the writings of Cleo and Joseph and from my own very limited experience, getting the queen is not just possible but quite likely and with patience nearly guaranteed.

I wrote this on Facebook in response to a recent proposal to ban all GMO crops in Oregon, and thought it was worth posting here.

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What bothers me is the powerful, irrational fear that grips some people upon any mention of genetic modification. Like whoever drew the GMO cancer-riddled man on the OSU sidewalks last week. I think this represents a failure of science to communicate well to the public. People don’t understand it, and what they see is not rational, minor genome modifications with a specific goal but rather mad, shot-in-the-dark scientists with good intentions producing Frankenstein.

I play with genes as a major part of my research, with the goal of directing more solar energy toward hydrogen production in cyanobacteria. One of the things that occurs to me is that we need a council of non-industry geneticists and scientifically educated risk managers overseeing regulation and approval of GMOs. Certainly it is possible to produce a human-toxic, ecosystem-toxic, or otherwise problematic (i.e. roundup-ready weeds) crop using genetic engineering. But it is equally possible to perform genetic changes that carry no more risk than varieties produced using conventional breeding. In my opinion there needs to be a fast-track allowing universities and small businesses to bring risk-free GMOs to market without spending millions on regulatory approvals.

If you’re wondering how risk can be so easily evaluated, it would depend on the nature of the modification. Deleting or downregulating a native gene carries essentially zero risk. Insertion of a gene from another food crop carries minimal risk, and any toxic effects are easily tested. Insertion of a gene from a non-food species (e.g. golden rice, roundup ready) should be evaluated a bit more thoroughly in case the proteins produced have negative or allergenic effects upon consumption. Insertion of a toxin-producing gene (e.g. Bt corn), even if the toxin is not harmful to humans, should be evaluated very carefully or perhaps banned completely given potential ecosystem-level effects.

I really wish that the GMO movement had started with Arctic Apples from Okanagan rather than Roundup Ready and Bt corn from Monsanto. Okanagan is a small company with seven employees based in British Columbia. Their product is an apple with the polyphenol oxidase gene turned off, causing it not to turn brown when cut or bruised. The mutation can be easily introduced into any existing apple variety. Now I agree that this won’t save lives a la Golden Rice, but it is simple, cool, and has zero potential to hurt any people, insects, ecosystems, etc. Furthermore Okanagan’s CEO is doing his level best to maintain transparency and open communication with the public, and he fully supports labeling of their apples as genetically modified – because they worked really hard on the modification and want people to know that.  I look forward to trying these apples when they appear in 2016 or so, and would even like to be able to buy organic Arctic Apples. The absolute opposition of the organic movement to anything GMO is proving to be a huge liability to organic farmers as the prevalence of GMOs increases, and while both banning GMOs and allowing GMO organics would both solve the issue, I think allowing GMO organics would ultimately be the better option.

Finally, a bit about proprietary genes and labeling. Genetic engineering used to require more work than conventional breeding, but given the rapid pace of advances in molecular biology it is now actually a good bit easier. It remains more expensive only because of the lengthy regulatory approval process specific to GMOs. Therefore there is no reason for enhanced patent protection. In my vision genes could be patented, but only as protection against other companies re-creating the product. Gene patents should not affect farmers or prevent farmers from saving and re-planting GMO seed. I fully support labeling, though I think there should be some cutoff like 5% or 10% of the final product below which labeling is not required. Otherwise it becomes a major materials tracking headache and potential liability if, say, the soybeans used to make the lecithin in a chocolate bar turn out to be GMO. I also think the labels should say not just GMO but be required to state some specifics, i.e. “made with corn genetically modified for insect and herbicide resistance.” This would help with the healthy development of shades of gray rather than the stark black and white that defines the GMO debate these days.  In conclusion I’m not convinced that genetic engineering is necessary to save the world, but I do think it is a technology with a lot of positive potential that can be compatible with a community-centric, sustainable, small-farms vision of agriculture.

Here in our beloved America we have 2.4 million people in prison.  That’s about the population of Portland and all of its suburbs, or nearly one in 100.  Keeping someone in jail costs about $40,000 per year, which is about the median wage.  Are there really 2.4 million dangerous people in this country who must be kept apart from society at any cost?

This has come to my attention recently as I’ve been following the case of Kaitlyn Hunt, a Florida senior who is facing felony rape charges and up to 15 years in prison for having consensual sex with her girlfriend, who happens to be four years younger.  The media focus has been mainly on her being targeted as a lesbian by her girlfriend’s bigoted parents.  That’s a problem, and one that needs to be addressed, but the bigger problem here is that a senior can end up in prison and labeled a child abuser for life for dating a freshman.  (And yes, high schoolers often have sex when they’re dating.)  What the hell?

Thus, Part 1 of Mark’s solution to our broken justice system is to get rid of a bunch of stupid laws.  Age of consent, for instance, could be defined as 16 OR less than six years younger than the older partner.  No one should be punished for doing drugs.  Selling drugs?  Yes.  Driving under the influence?  Yes.  But not for making a personal decision that harms no one.  On the other hand, some laws might need to be a bit stronger.  Predatory sex offenders, in particular, seem to get off far too easy if their victims are adults.  This change, particularly with regard to drugs, ought to cut the prison population by at least 30%.

Part 2 is a bit more involved.  If someone causes harm to another person or to society, what ought to happen?  Common sense would dictate that he/she must repay the debt to society.  What we have now though is more like the Christian vision of the afterlife.  If someone is convicted of a felony, he is Bad.  Bad people go to Hell, or in this case prison, and so in prison he sits, making no use of his faculties and doing nothing of value to society, until the parole board sees fit to set him free.  Furthermore, because he is Bad, he is forever labeled as a convicted felon and so finds it very hard to find gainful employment on release.  Thus it is very likely that he will end up back in Hell, or prison, where at least he will be housed and fed.

Sentences are currently defined as “a fine of X dollars plus X months/years in prison.”  I propose that we change this to “a fine of X percent of net worth plus X months/years of forced labor.”  This both equalizes the pain of punishment across social classes and provides a greater source of public income.  There is no sense in imposing a 200,000 dollar fine on someone with 20,000 in the bank, whereas a millionaire found guilty might need to be fined 500,000 to be dealt an equivalent psychological blow.  As for the labor, in place of prisons we would have high-security labor camps/factories, and incoming prisoners would be given a skills test after which they would be assigned to an appropriate position.  There they would work, and the proceeds of their labors, above those needed to cover room, board, and guards, would go into the public treasury or perhaps be assigned to support crime victims.  For those people deemed sane and yet too dangerous to ever be released, the sentence would be 100% of net worth plus a lifetime of forced labor.

Upon completion of their sentence and approval for release (and there would be no early release, only the possibility of delay due to poor behavior), prisoners would be given a place to rent with the first month paid, a guaranteed job (based on their skills/experience in prison), and their criminal history would be for most purposes erased.  That is not to say that it would be inaccessible, and certain employers such as schools would be able to access full background checks, but the stigma that a convicted criminal is forever Bad would be replaced by the consensus that once justice is served it is complete.

Would such a system be better for society, and create happier lives overall?  I certainly think so?  Could it happen?  Probably not in a country of our size, especially not one in which the Christian model of justice is so deeply embedded.  But it’s interesting to think about.

Just captured swarm #3 from our hives, as large as the first (basketball?).  Found a dead virgin queen that was being balled.  Hopefully that wasn’t their only queen…

And then there were 12.

Yesterday morning I was back tending to the big swarm from the previous post, moving the remaining clustered bees to near the box entrance.  Just as they were all going in, I noticed an unusual number of bees in the air by our other hives.  I wish I had taken a video, as I soon found a conveyor belt of bees pouring out of hive #2B. For a few short minutes they were all in the air, and I stood in the center of cloud of thousands of bees.  Then the queen must have landed on a branch, and they all followed, forming a cluster of about volleyball size.  I would say only about half to 2/3 the size of the swarm the previous day.

This was an easy capture, as they settled at eye level on a branch about 2″ in diameter.  I pulled the swarm trap off of our roof, trimmed off side branches, cut the main branch on both sides of the swarm, and got 75% of the bees in with one shake.  The rest followed quickly, and they seem to have accepted their new home.

And then there were 11.

This is not a hive I expected to swarm.  Hive 2 had an underperforming queen, so we split it, moving the box with the queen away and attempting to requeen the remaining box with a purchased queen.  They killed her and created emergency cells, and the new queens should be emerging right about now.  The population was perhaps a bit high for one box, as bees from the other half of the split drifted back to the original site, but it didn’t seem too packed and I had given them an empty frame in the center to keep the broodnest open.

I think, like #6B the day before, that a sudden influx of bees from the shaken-out laying worker hive pushed the population over the swarm threshold, which combined with multiple queens emerging allowed them to fly the coop.

With all of these splits, I have to temporarily retire my hive organization diagrams in favor of a different sort, tracing the lineage of our various colonies.

Only the green-filled hives have a laying queen at the moment; all of the yellow colonies have queen cells or virgins.  Here’s hoping for successful mating.  The weather couldn’t be better.