Musings from Mark

I think we finally have the right number of beehives – enough that we can manage them as a self-sustaining unit, keeping extra queens in reserve in nucs and using bees and brood from nucs to build up weak colonies.

A brief summary…

Jefferson hives:

The two strong hives we took to Goosefoot Farm are in good shape with adequate stores in the brood chambers, but they have no honey in the supers at this point.  There must not be enough maple trees within foraging range.

#1 (Ruhl nuc 2012).  Original two-year-old queen still going strong, unless they superseded at some point and we missed it.  Demaree method worked to head off swarming, and during that time we pulled some queen cells and bees (along with frames from #7 next door) to make up two nucs.  Two brood boxes and activity in two supers.  Probably our strongest hive, though #5 may have that claim when we put it back together.

#7 (Old Sol queen, June 2013, superseded in the fall).  Weaker than #1, but still in good shape.  Demaree shuffles set back broodnest development for a time.  Starting to see some scattered drone larvae, so will be watching this queen for failure and possible replacement.

#9 (Nuc, queen from #1 or #7, just mated).  We pulled queen cells from both hives, so we’re not sure which is the parent.  Laying pattern looks very good, large golden queen.  Combined the new-queen nuc with another nuc that failed to raise a queen in a double-deep hive; may be adding brood from neighboring hives to accelerate buildup.

Homestead hives (at our house in the forest bordering the Corvallis Watershed):

We brought three hives to the Watershed Homestead.  Two built up explosively and the third has been working on superseding a failing queen.  In contrast to the Jefferson hives, these have lots of honey from the maple flow despite limited good weather.

#5 (Old Sol nuc 2012):  Demaree method failed to stop swarm impulse, likely due to too much backfilling during the maple flow.  These bees are housed in our only semi-deep brood chambers, which greatly limits our ability to pull frames out for nucs or swap in empty foundation frames.  Three weeks ago I had no spare equipment for splits, so I moved the queen up top above a double-screen board and left the swarm cells down below.  Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately as the queen was aging) I moved one swarm cell up top with the queen, and the old queen was killed.  Her replacement just started laying, and it appears that the bees down below tore down their queen cells.  A bit of luck here, but the outcome is that the hive didn’t swarm, has a laying queen, and got a brood break to set back the mites.  They also collected a lot of maple honey – close to 1 1/2 supers or about 40 lbs.  A taste test tells us it will be delicious – we plan to extract around May 31.

The plan is to wait a week for the new queen to establish a broodnest up top, check the bottom again to make sure there is truly no queen, and then do a newspaper combine to reunite the hive.  We might also shake out some bees into #6 next door which is hurting for population.

#6 (Small caught afterswarm, 2012).  This hive has an unstoppable swarm impulse, perhaps not surprising given that they started as an afterswarm.  Last year they swarmed twice even after an artificial swarm split to take the queen away.  I tried the same trick as with #5, moving the queen up top, but the bees proceeded to kill her and swarm twice, both times to an uncatchable 50 feet up in a maple tree, and both times on bad weather days.  The remaining queen mated and just started laying, but their population is only about 1/4 of what it was.  They made about 1/3 of a super of maple honey before swarming, which we will add to the extraction.  We will be strengthening this hive when possible over the coming weeks.

#8 (Trapout from oak tree, summer 2013).  Had signs of failing queen and supercedure cells three weeks ago.  Now has a mix of bad and reasonably good brood pattern.  There is a queen, but I’m not sure at this point if she is new and if she will be good.  If not, we have plenty of other queens to choose from.

#10 (Nuc, swarm caught four weeks ago).  An easy afterswarm catch from a coworkers hive, the new queen is mated and laying well.  Not sure what will happen with these yet – might keep them as a backup nuc, feeding frames of brood into #6 to rebuild.  I suspect swarmy genetics here, so I’m not sure we want to give the queen charge of an overwintering colony.

#11 (Nuc, queen raised from #6 queen cells).  Our latest addition, with a queen raised from the ever-swarmy #6.  Still figuring out where they will go.  Last year we had very poor success with queen mating.  This year it seems we ended up with more queens than we need…

We have an Old Sol queen arriving next Thursday, ordered before I knew we would have so many queens.  I do like the idea of bringing in some “professionally raised” queens for good genetics, so she will be going into a nuc pulled from strong hives #1 and #7 at Goosefoot.  Might then requeen #7 or #8 if things are still not looking good.

I am seeing some mites on bees, suspect mite loads are above treatment thresholds in some cases but am planning to wait until August for treatment.

The Demaree method is working at least in terms of swarm prevention.  The bees do end up making a few queen cells up top, and in two hives also a couple of queen cells in the lower box with the queen.  There aren’t as many I as I would expect to see during swarm prep, so I’m guessing that the complete brood nest rearrangement is triggering a supersedure response as the open brood and queen pheromone become separated and the bees perhaps suspect the queen is failing.  So far I’ve been either destroying these cells or moving them into nucs.

I re-implemented the Demaree method 12-13 days after the first shuffle, moving mostly-empty frames and emerging brood down with the queen and moving all of the open and capped brood from the lower box up top away from the queen.

Goosefoot Bees: #1 and #7

These colonies are more or less identical, right down to the colors of the bees and queens, despite one having a two-year-old queen from a Ruhl nuc and the other and one-year-old queen from Old Sol.  They are still booming and have enough new pollen and nectar stored to be “over the hump” in terms of starvation risk.  Not sure yet if we will get early-spring honey.

I found two capped queen cells in the top of #1 that I missed on an earlier inspection.  These went into a nuc with three frames from #1 and two frames from #7.

Homestead Bees: #5, #6, #8

Colony #5 is winning the honey race, and I am kicking myself for not giving them a second super earlier.  Their super is about half filled, and they have been backfilling brood cells in the top brood chamber as soon as the brood emerges.  That means that the frames moving back down with the queen have limited space to lay, which could prove problematic though I’m hoping the bees will opt to move the ripening nectar up to the supers.  The maple nectar resource is essentially unlimited in the surrounding forest, so if the weather holds for the next couple of weeks we should definitely have some to extract.  I really need to pull some bees and frames out of this hive, but it has the unfortunate 3/4-deep brood chambers for which I have no spare frames.  Will have to settle for shaking bees into a nuc next week.

Colony #6 is in good shape, though with somewhat less fresh honey compared to #5.

Colony #8, the tree bees, has a failing queen.  They are still not building up, and the brood pattern is somewhat erratic with drones mixed in with worker brood.  They are starting supersedure, and I plan to leave them to it in the hope of perpetuating the feral bee genetics.  A bit disappointing to see the queen give out after so much trouble trapping them out of the oak, but with one dink and four booming hives I won’t complain too much.

Time to make some plywood nuc boxes…

I feel like I have graduated from beginner to intermediate beekeeper, after spending nearly three hours completely disassembling, reshuffling, and reassembling four booming hives to implement the Demaree method.  I found all four unmarked queens without having to examine any frame twice.  All without gloves.  Four stings.

The Demaree swarm-prevention method was originally published in the American Bee Journal by George Demaree in 1884.  The idea is to separate the queen from most of the brood, giving her room to lay, splitting the cluster in two, and convincing the lower cluster (with the queen) that they have swarmed already.

The instructions go something like this:

1. Start with a strong hive in a single deep, with at least eight frames of brood.

(Diagrams are same as always:  yellow = capped honey, green = uncapped nectar, gray = brood, white = empty.  Q = the queen.  Solid black line = queen excluder.)

2. Find an empty deep and an empty super with drawn comb.  Remove two frames from the center of the deep

3. Find the queen and insert her along with two frames of mostly-capped brood in center of the empty deep.

4. Consolidate the brood nest in the original deep and place the two extra empty frames on the outside.

5. Reassemble the hive with the most-empty deep with the queen on the bottom, followed by a queen excluder, 1 or 2 empty supers, and the original brood box on top.

Hive after Demaree method

The problem is that none of my hives looked anything like a single deep full of brood.  Instead they looked like this:

Double deeps with 12 frames of brood and a few frames of residual winter stores, filling the super above the broodnest with eggs, young larvae, pollen, and nectar.  The two strongest hives had built at least 25 queen cups at the bottom edges of frames in anticipation of swarming, but they hadn’t yet laid any eggs in these cups.

Following the principles of the Demaree method, if not strictly the method itself, I reshuffled these hives to look like this:

Based on everything I have read about the swarm impulse, I think this will work.  It opens the broodnest, giving the queen space to lay.  The nurse bees mostly move up to the brood-filled upper deep, reducing crowding around the queen.  The queen ends up surrounded by older bees and not much brood, possibly making her think she has already swarmed.  It leaves empty space between the two brood clusters, encouraging the bees to bring in nectar to fill it.  It is, as noted by most descriptions, extremely time- and labor-intensive.  I’m not sure I would use it for 50 hives, certainly not for 500 or 5000.  But for five hives managed for maximum honey production, I think I may have found my swarm-prevention method of choice.  Of course I won’t know that for sure until a couple of months from now.

What next?

The bees up top end up isolated from the queen pheromone, and often will produce queen cells.  These can’t be allowed to emerge, or the pheromone from the new queens may inspire the old queen to swarm.  They should be well-fed queens, raised by strong hives, ideal for making nucs. So late next week (hopefully not too late as I will be away Saturday-Thursday) I will open the top boxes, moving some queen cells into nucs if the weather ahead looks decent for queen mating and destroying the rest.

Two weeks from Demaree, the brood up top will have mostly emerged, and the queen will have filled the bottom box with brood.  Brood production is limited if the queen can only lay in one box, and crowding around the queen can reignite the swarm impulse.  So I will reshuffle the frames, again moving most of the brood up and leaving the queen with the empty frames moved down from the top box.

The plan will go something like this:

April 2: Initial Demaree shuffle

April 10-11: Destroy queen cells, make nucs if weather looks good.

~April 16: Second Demaree shuffle

~April 23: Destroy queen cells, maybe make nucs?

~April 30: Third Demaree shuffle.

~May 7: Destroy queen cells and make nucs, or use my double screen board to split the strongest hive

~May 14:  Depending on weather, strength, and swarm reports, either do a fourth Demaree shuffle or else return the hive to normal configuration.

Of course this is beekeeping so plans will change in response to bee behavior and weather. I’ll report as the season progresses.  For now the bees look great, and with the bigleaf maples just entering full bloom and 70-degree weather predicted next week it is shaping up to be a good month.

I need some nuc boxes, and I found plans to make four nucs from a 4′ x 8′ sheet of plywood.  http://www.squidoo.com/6-easy-steps-to-make-a-nuc-box

I think I know what my next bee project will be…

This is the time of year in Oregon when, after a few 70-degree teasers, the weather is still mostly cool and rainy.  It is easy to spend too much time indoors and miss the rainbows.  On Tuesday night, right at sunset, the sun shone through a light shower producing a full double half-circle, complete with “supernumerary” colors on the inside.  Unfortunately we didn’t have a camera at the time, but it looked quite a bit like this: http://mgalligan.com/post/31014980601/san-francisco-double-rainbow

The Calypso orchids and other early flowers are still blooming in the woods behind our house, but they are being joined now by the next round.  These are all relatively uncommon.

Pacific bleeding heart, Dicentra formosa

There is only one bleeding heart that we have found, near the creek behind the house.

Oregon anemone, Anemone oregana

A few of these scattered about, mostly near the top of the property.

Bluebuttons, Cynoglossum grande

Only one plant that we know of, in a clearing near the top of the property.

Candy flower or Siberian miner's lettuce, Claytonia sibirica

Scattered throughout the woods.

Unknown tiny white flower

Quite common, easily overlooked.  Perhaps my botanist readers can tell me what it is.

Spring is teasing us this year.  The bees and flowers are ahead of schedule, and today felt like May at 70 degrees.  But we are heading into a week of cold rain, reminding us that March is not yet over.  Turned in final grades today, the last responsibility of my TA position, and will be working on cleaning out my lab and office space.  It is finally sinking in that my time as a Ph.D. student is coming to an end…

We moved two of our hives out to Goosefoot Farm two weeks ago, and today we headed out there for the first inspection of spring. Both colonies look very good – perhaps too good given that it is still March and we are headed into a stretch of cool rainy weather.  Both had drone brood packed into burr comb between the boxes and above the top box – we should have gotten a super on at least a week earlier.

Hive #1

Hive #1

Unless this colony superseded last year and we didn’t catch it, the queen of Hive #1 is heading into her third season and still going strong.  Ten frames with mainly brood, two frames worth of pollen, 3 1/2 frames of honey, 2 1/2 frames of uncapped nectar.  Will have to watch for swarm impulse, but at this point stores still appear adequate.  Gave them a pollen patty on top of their new super today.

Hive #7

Started from a multi-colony split last summer, Hive #7 has our youngest queen heading into 2014.  We started with a marked hygienic queen from Old Sol, but it appears they superseded last fall as the current queen has no sign of a mark.  Judging from the number of mites that dropped during oxalic acid treatment in December (around 1000), the hygienic trait did not survive supersedure.

This colony has us worried.  Eleven frames of mainly brood, 2 1/2 frames of pollen, two frames of honey, and two frames of uncapped nectar.  By my best estimate they have a two-week food supply if they are unable to bring in new nectar, so we will have to keep an eye on them and feed if necessary.  They are backfilling the broodnest – mainly with pollen – and I would not be surprised to see them getting ready to swarm in 1-2 weeks.

Swarm Control

Spring is the most difficult season to keep bees, in my opinion.  It is the one time of year when the best interests of the bees differ from the best interests of the beekeepers.  The bees want to burn through their remaining stores, quadruple their populations, and prepare to send 1-2 swarms off to start new colonies.  The beekeepers want the bees to build up in concert with resource availability, stay put, and focus on honey production.  Timing is of the essence, and perhaps more than any other aspect of beekeeping this is an area where knowledge is no substitute for experience.

My plan this year is to try the Demaree method, essentially splitting the broodnest in half separated by a honey super and a queen excluder, with most of the brood (and all of the open brood) above and the queen below with some of the capped brood.  The question then is when do I do it?  No colonies are preparing to swarm yet.  Three out of five now have 10+ frames of brood, and #7 in particular is starting to get overcrowded and backfilling.  That would suggest I could do it now.  On the other hand, it is still March, there is no flow on to speak of, and there isn’t much in the way of good bee-flying weather in the forecast.  Splitting the broodnest would increase the rate of food consumption at a time when that may not be wise.  If there is anything I have learned so far in beekeeping, it’s that when uncertain whether to drastically rearrange a hive or to do nothing, doing nothing is usually the better course.

The bees are about 1-2 weeks ahead of last year’s schedule in terms of spring buildup, and four of the five hives will almost certainly swarm in April if I leave them alone.  My current plan is to implement the Demaree method around April 1-5, weather permitting, then repeat the shuffling 1-2 more times during swarm season.  I do need to make one split, but I would like to wait until at least mid-April when queen mating weather is better and purchased queens are available.

After last year’s fiasco of queen rejection, laying workers, and acute (presumed pesticide) poisoning, I’m hoping this April will be better for the bees.

For the second year in a row all five of our hives successfully overwintered.  There is some degree of luck involved, as queen loss or disease can affect any hive at any time.  Even so, we are beating the odds (nationwide hobbyist average of 30% winter loss) by enough that I think we are doing something right.

Our strategy:

1. Control moisture.  We built moisture quilts two years ago: screen-bottomed inner covers filled with 2″ of cedar chips that absorb moisture rising to the top.  The chips get wet and the bees stay dry.  The quilts also allow us to keep tabs on the populations in the winter: the wetter the chips and the larger the wet area, the larger the cluster below.
2. Manage mites.  Thymol (from thyme or oregano) in August after honey harvest, oxalic acid (present in rhubarb and spinach) in early December.  We treat only colonies that need it; the oxalic acid in particular is highly effective on mites with minimal effect on bees.  We keep purchasing hygienic queens and hope to need fewer treatments going forward, but we have so far found it essential to keep mites in check.
3. Plenty of food.  Most hives have ~40-60 lbs of honey in the upper brood box after honey harvest, but with no good fall nectar sources in our climate a fair amount of this is consumed in September and empty cells remain as the brood nest contracts to winter size.  We feed 2:1 sugar syrup in September until there are almost no empty cells in the hive.  With that amount of stores we don’t need to worry about feeding in winter or spring.

Last weekend we moved the hives: three to the Watershed Homestead and two to Goosefoot Farm north of Albany.  Yesterday, at 60 degrees, we inspected the watershed hives.  The diagrams are the same as last year: yellow = honey, green = uncapped stores or uncured nectar, red = pollen, gray = brood, white = empty.

Hive #5

Hive #5

Hive #5 started as a nuc from Old Sol two years ago, picked up from John Jacob himself at a freeway rest stop in Eugene at 1 in the morning.  After producing a full super of honey last summer, the queen stopped laying in early September.  Six weeks later, in our last fall inspection, there were still no new eggs to be found and we feared that the hive was queenless.  We’re not sure if they superceded in the fall or if Her Majesty simply took a long vacation, but we were heartened to see them still alive and bringing in pollen in late winter, and we assumed they must have a laying queen.

We found a beautiful big queen in the middle of 12 frames (!) of brood, building up fast with honey remaining on the outer edges.  This colony is our best bet for getting some maple honey when the trees bloom in a couple of weeks.  Of some concern, this hive had almost no pollen stores.  Usually our philosophy is to avoid supplementing pollen so that the bees adjust to natural availability, but in this case we will be adding a pollen patty as soon as we can find one.

Hive #6

Hive #6

Hive #6 started as a virgin swarm that took up residence in one of our bait hives around the summer solstice of 2012.  The queen, going on two years old now, is still laying a beautiful brood pattern.  With brood on eight frames, this colony is building up well and has much more pollen stored than #5.  Our most defensive hive, this colony needs a bit more smoke and has been known to send out stinging guards if we stand too close to the entrance.

Hive #8

Hive #8: Tree Bees

Trapped out of a huge oak tree along the Willamette near Albany, these dark, docile bees seem to be able to keep mites under control without much help from us.  With brood on only four frames they are 2-4 weeks behind the other hives in terms of spring build-up, and it will be interesting to see if they remain small or if they are simply late bloomers.  Aside from the smaller population, the colony and queen appear healthy.

Spring has come early to Oregon this year, after a record-breaking February snow and ice storm.  It has a been a strange winter in many ways, with the most snow in Corvallis in at least 20 years but very little snow in the mountains.  We have seen far more of the sun than is typical – an anomaly for which I and many others are most grateful.  After fears of drought, the rains arrived in force last month, bringing rivers to just shy of flood stage, replenishing reservoirs, and building snowpack in the high Cascades.

March is often a cool, showery month with temperatures in the 40s and low 50s.  This March we have seen plenty of high 50s and a number of 60-degree days.  The frogs are singing full force, and a few wrens and song sparrows sense the coming of spring.  The days ahead will bring more typical March weather, but the ephemeral flowers have sensed their cue and are bursting forth to grow and pollinate before the canopy leaves emerge to block their sunlight.

In past years we have hiked to find these flowers; now that we live on 25 acres of coast range forest they are right in our backyard – not so different from the trout lilies, bloodroots, and Dutchman’s breeches behind Valley House in Minnesota.

Western Wakerobin, Trillium ovatum

Snow Queen, Synthyris reniformis

Calypso Orchid, Calypso bulbosa

Stream Violet, Viola glabella

Spring Beauty, Cardamine nuttallii

A new path…

In a literal sense, I have been working for the past couple of weeks on clearing a path at the spot we call the Watershed Homestead.  In the winter we mostly satisfied our need to experience the woods by walking up and down the road, but we were yearning for a longer route and a more immersive experience.  First came the chainsawing, clearing old deadfall and a number of trees that came down beneath the recent snow and ice.  Then last Friday Jesse and Eva helped me place two log bridges where the path crosses a spring-fed creek.  It is a loop covering about 12 acres behind the house and crossing through a variety of plant communities.  All of the flower photos above were taken along the path this morning.

Upper bridge

Housemate Basho on the lower bridge

In a figurative sense, I am embarking on a new path in life.  My graduate-school experience of 5 1/2 years draws to a close this week as I submit my revised dissertation and grade the last assignments for the classes I am TAing.  Before I spent my days in the lab manipulating nanometer-scale metabolic pathways inside micrometer-scale cyanobacterial cells, I spent days in the field identifying birds and plants, observing tropical beetles, cataloging marmot behavior, and delineating lynx habitat.  There was a time when I thought ecology was too messy with too many confounding variables and I envied my molecular biologist friends for their simplified systems and concrete results.  But after spending five years in a lab examining the very tiny, I have come to the conclusion that it is not my home.  At first I thought I would get used to it, become comfortable there as I gained proficiency with protocols and techniques.  Somehow that never happened.  I learned, planned, struggled, succeeded, and ultimately defended my Ph.D. last month, but I never came to identify myself as a microbiologist or a molecular biologist.  The lab always seemed too artificial, too isolated from the reality of organisms in context.

I long now to return to the field, to the open road, to working with biological systems across geographic space.  I have discovered in my time in an engineering program that I aspire to the engineering approach – to using science to solve pressing problems rather than simply to better understand the world.  Honeybees in particular have become close to my heart over the past four years.  They are an interesting intermediary between the wild and the domestic.  They are ours:  we keep them in hives that we build, select for traits that we prefer, ship them across the country to pollinate our crops.  And yet they are wild:  they go where they please with no regard to fences or property lines, they swarm into trees and survive on their own, the queens mate with drones from any hives within several miles.  They depend for survival not only on their keepers’ lands, but also on the neighboring fields and wildlands, falling victim to neighbors’ sprays or collecting pollen and nectar from neighbors’ crops.  They facilitate conflict, cooperation, and a growing sense of a need for collective action to ensure their health and survival.  I have an interview this week for a university extension job working with commercial beekeepers to analyze colony health and to understand and ultimately reduce colony losses.  It is definitely a change from where I have been, and I am excited by the prospect!

Gunshots in the distance.  The air is perfectly still, a soft rain falling at 32 degrees.  More gunshots, closer this time, followed by a crash and a swishing sound, and then more silence.  These trees have seen ice before, but never have they seen 15″ of snow followed by a half inch of ice.  They are burdened up to five times their usual weight, the added strain far from the trunk, on every needle, every branch.  Wood fibers stretch to the absolute limit, carbon and oxygen atoms snapping apart in chains of cellulose.  Crack.  Crash.  A swish of snow.  And silence.  It is almost like a thunderstorm, wondering where the next lightning will strike, the next thunder will reverberate.  But storms are all wind and rain and sound, thunder only adding to the cacophony.  This is just a quiet, humid winter night, punctuated by the falling of trees.  Survival of the fittest.  Darwin’s ghost walks the forest like an invisible giant, here and there nudging a branch, a whole tree.  Those who have strayed too far from vertical, those who have stretched too high toward the sun while neglecting the strength of their trunk, those whose roots have a tenuous grasp on the soil.  All will fall tonight, leaving the forest stronger, creating gaps into which new trees will grow.  Violence is a part of nature’s repertoire, and I feel humbled to have borne witness to this spectacle.

It is melting this morning at 39 degrees, trees releasing their loads of snow and ice.  We have been without power since last evening, and it could well be a couple of days before we get it back, as there are trees down all over.  Eight inches of snow on Thursday, then freezing rain and sleet, then two more inches.  Another eight inches of peaceful snow on Friday, beautiful single flakes, each ephemeral shape unique in the universe.  First time chaining up the Subaru, still got stuck on the steep section, worked with our neighbor to clear out the hill.  Sloppy yesterday, rain at 32 degrees.  Somehow it was just the right temperature to melt on the ground and yet freeze on the trees.  Roads turned from snowpack into deep ruts of slush, tough going until our limited fleet of plows could push them clear.  Spinning out the driveway, losing chains, putting them back on, cutting fallen branches and trees out of our path.  It is over now, and soon we will set out to clear the road, heading into town for the day, returning tonight to the homestead in the woods tonight, to a land awakening from snow, straightening branches, and already thinking of spring.

It’s a warm (49 degrees) November night with a waxing moon and not a hint of wind.  Fog has settled in beautiful shallow patterns over dewey lawns and meadows, creating a glow beneath the streetlights and a halo around the moon.  With no air movement, scents accumulate where they are created, and it is possible to experience the world as a dog might.  We walk beneath a towering conifer and get a whiff of cedar air.  Piles of leaves exude an earthy richness, with bitter tannins under oaks or more spicy scents under trees we could not identify in the dark.  Some folks are eating popcorn, their evening snack poignantly announced in the nearby air.  Others are doing laundry, wafting out the sweet but artificial scents of various soaps.  Ebba and John have a fire going, leaving a hint of woodsmoke along Nash.  When there are no stronger smells, there is a soft conifery freshness, the signature smell of Oregon winter settling in from the mountain forests, perhaps with a tinge of the not-so-distant ocean.  We may tire of our rain and fog, but in moisture there is life.