Swarm Chasers

This May, we've had very good luck catching swarms. So far, we've caught and hived four, and we're always looking for more. Whitney joked today maybe we could get a show on cable TV: "Swarm Chasers"!


A beautiful May honey bee swarm in an apple tree

With all this talk about swarms lately, people have been asking us a couple of questions again and again:

1) Why are your bees swarming?

2) How do you catch a swarm anyway?

 

Nice honey bee swarm on pine branch.

1) Swarms are simply honey bee reproduction. Healthy vigorous honey bee colonies with plenty to eat swarm, just like birds hatch eggs, horses foal and elk calve. The difference is of course you don't consider each bee's reproduction, but the reproduction of the colony. In the wild, healthy honey bees would swarm every spring in order to spread their kind. This is why many of the older generations remember finding "honey trees" in the woods. These were swarms from some beekeeper that had gone wild (feral). Today, unfortunately with colony collapse disorder and all the other threats to honey bees, wild honey bees are pretty uncommon.

Swarming is a sign you have robust colonies that wintered with good numbers and plenty of honey to eat.

Catching a swarm

2) catching a swarm is not actually as hard as it may seem - usually. Assuming the swarm is in a nice location (like the picture above) it's pretty simple to hold a hive box under the clump of bees and give the branch a firm knock. The bees will fall into the box and if you got the queen, you can then just leave the box near by and all the bees will file in.  You can then go back in the evening and take the box where ever you want the hive.

God Save the Queen!

Unless you saw the queen, you may not know if you got her. If you did get the queen, all the workers will point towards her and fan. This is how they spread the message of where the queen is, and is a very good sign.

I like to picture them all saying "God save the Queen"!

A more difficult swarm on a W. larch tree

Some swarms are more difficult to catch, like the swarm above. In this case the swarm was on the stem of a larch tree, with lots of branches to contend with. Whitney caught this one while I was out of town. With more than a little patience she was able to hive it by gently lifting the swarm in her hands and setting it in the box.

In the most difficult settings, a customized vacuum can be used to suck the bees out of a tight space and get them into a box. We did this a few years ago  when we found a swarm in our ceiling. Check out: Blog Post: A bee adventure

That's all for now, thanks for stopping by.

KJ

 

Bees in the City, Part 3: Where to put your bees

I recently had the honor of writing a guest piece on my sister April's blog I [Heart] My Life.

In the first segment Bees in the City, Part 1: Are You Ready for a New Hobby? I wrote about beekeeping as a fun hobby, and share my thoughts keeping bees in the urban environment.

In the second segment Part 2: 4 Steps for Getting Started With Beekeeping I wrote about how a person could get bees and start beekeeping.

This post is written as a third installment:

Part 3: Where to put your bees.

Before you actually take the leap and start beekeeping, take a second and consider you're going to put your bees.

My Langstroth hives

Of course the bees themselves will fly where they want to, but where you put the hives is pretty important. Hives should be placed in a sunny, well ventilated spot, with the hive entrance facing away from the prevailing wind. Sunny locations with good air flow reduce moisture and mold in the hive, keeping the bees dry and closer to their optimal temperature (about 90 degrees F). Facing the entrance away from the wind will help the bees come and go without getting blown off course. Also, if you live in a windy spot like I do, don’t forget to put a weight on the hive lid, or strap them down. I once had a lid blow off in a spring storm, and my bees were subjected to a wet cold night in the open air – Bad News!

 Since I have backyard space, my hives are placed away from the trees, in a spot that gets lots of sun, facing east. My hives sit on stands approximately 6 inches off the ground, to allow air to move under the hive, but not too high to make working the hive difficult.

Full honey bee hives are heavy, and taking a moment to consider that before housing your bees is a very good idea. Langstroth hives consist of one or two deep deep boxes for the bees to live in and several medium or shallow depth “supers” on top for the honey. The term “super” refers to the upper boxes superseding the main hive body. In an established colony, the main hive body will weigh well over a hundred pounds and each super weighs about 40 or more pounds depending on how much honey is in there.

While you hopefully would not be moving the main hive boxes very often, if you are successful in bee keeping and get lots honey, you will be moving the supers.  A healthy colony can fill 3 or more medium depth supers in a season.

For neighborhood beekeepers with limited space, roof top locations can be the answer. The roof top is a generally unused space, with good sunlight and airflow. For many beekeepers rooftops also afford a nice amount of privacy – the only people who know about your bees are the ones you tell. It still seems a bit odd to me, but rooftop beekeeping is becoming common in big cities like San Francisco, Chicago and New York.

Since I don’t have any personal knowledge of rooftop bee keeping, I’ll just mention a few considerations to keep in mind. Access – don’t place your bees in a spot that is hard to get at. Weight – remember bee hives are very heavy and the last thing you need is to crash through the roof with your bees. Heat – bees don’t mind the heat, but working a hive on a blazing rooftop may be pretty uncomfortable.

Finally, one last point on hive placement: In the spring, when the bees leave the hive for the first time months, they have not relieved themselves since the previous winter. For me the first warm 50 degree days of spring are quite a sight with the bees emerging from the hive and cleansing. Cleansing is a beekeeper’s term for pooping.  Yes, the bees fly out and poop. About a quarter of their body mass. That means anything near the hive, especially in front of the hive will get spotted with bright orange bee waste. This is funny at first, until it’s all over your car. Or your neighbor’s car. Or their living room windows. I have actually heard of law suits stemming from this very thing, so it’s worth thinking about before it happens.

Honey bees returning from a spring cleansing flight.

I could go on, but in the interest of keeping things simple I’ll end here. 

I encourage anybody interested in bees and beekeeping to give it a try, but be warned. Beekeeping is fascinating and if your not careful you might get hooked!

KJ

one weekend, two swarms

This weekend, two of our hives swarmed. I walked out of the house on saturday morning and instantly heard them. Walking over by the hives there were bees everywere. Hives swarm for several reasons, but it usually comes down to either the bees are healthy and reproducing, or they are leaving to find a new location. The good news for us is that these swarms belong to the first group. I know that because while the swarms were forming, the parent hive continued on with business.  In the picture below, you can see the two swarms: one in front of me and one on the far left (below the farthest hive). Beekeepers try to reduce swarming because it means a loss of population and a reduction in potential pollination and honey. But on the other hand, if your hives are healthy enough to swarm, then you are doing something right and the bees are doing what they naturally want to do: Reproduce! So I take it as a good sign. In the book Natual Beekeeping, the author Ross Conrad refers to swarming as "the miracle of life" since it really is bee reproduction.  

 So, now what to do about this rampant reproduction. My first idea was to simply place hive boxes near the swarms and allow them to hive themselves. This is a technique that some swear by, so I thought I'd give it a try. But after leaving them there for several hours, the bees had yet to move into the boxes so I decided to catch them manually.

Here is a good look at one of the swarms. The bees leave the colony and ball around the queen. While they are in the ball, scouts are out searching for a new home. The scouts could return at any time and communicate to the swarm it was time to leave, so I decided to hive them before they had a chance to leave. I have read that bees will remain balled for as little as fifteen minutes, and these had already been here for several hours.

When you are hiving a swarm, you physically take the swarm and place them into the hive. The sensation of picking up the bees is pretty amazing, they feel like a warm spongy mass of about a couple of pounds. The most important thing is to make sure you get the queen. Here (above) on my finger tips you can see the queen of one of the swarms. Once the queen is secure in the new hive, all the workers follow her right in, guided by her pheromones.

Here is a swarm placed into the new hive. This is the deep box that I had prepared in case I got a chance to catch a swarm this summer. The other swarm got placed into a super ( or medium box) because I don't have any other deep boxes on hand. This will work just fine, but will require more equipment because I'll have to give them two supers to equal one deep box.

So here we are this evening. I successfully captured both swarms, upping our count to five colonies! I'm glad that I didn't lose any of my bees, but I need to get better at anticipating and preventing swarming. In the mean time I need to get to work building frames so that all these bees have somewhere to store their honey! More on that later.

KJ 

Mid December - Part 2: Emergency feeding

As promised, here is my mid December update on the honey bees.

Like I mentioned in the last post: Mid December part 1, I was looking into my options for feeding the bees to keep them from starving. Both of our colonies came from swarms this summer ( Blog post: A Bee Adventure ) one being vacuumed out of the ceiling and the other captured from a neighbor's fence post. Which meant we had very little time for them to build up their honey stores for this winter. Since then I have fed them sugar syrup to help them get this far, but now that it's winter the time for syrup has passed. I  learned about two emergency feeding options: sugar cakes and dry sugar. I was leaning towards the dry sugar option because it sounded easier and I liked the notion that the sugar would help absorb the condensation in the hive. So armed with my 25# bag of sugar, some newspaper and hive tools I headed out today to check the hives.    

What I found was that both hives are alive but in need of help. This (above) is the stronger of the two colonies, what you are looking at is the top of the ball of bees that makes up the colony in the frames of comb. The weather on this day was cloudy, about 30 degrees F. and calm. The bees were active but not flying.

Honey bees can't survive long when exposed to the direct cold so I tried to work quickly. I removed the old syrup feeders since they aren't able to make use of them any more (the bees can't move far enough away from the colony to get at it).  I also took off the upper deep boxes and replaced them with medium boxes. It would have been even better to use shallow boxes, but I don't have any.  Then I placed newspaper over the frames and piled on the sugar.

This is what it looked like after I piled on as much sugar as I could without it dumping over the edges. Like I mentioned, the moisture in the hive will get absorbed by the sugar creating a large cake that the bees can eat for months. The idea is that the sugar is close enough to the colony that the bees can get at it without getting too cold.

That's my hope anyway, because opening the hive is stressful on the bees so I don't plan on opening them again for quite a while. While I was scooping the sugar in, one bee took the opportunity for a "cleansing flight". She flew up in the air to pee/poop and returned to the hive. I was reminded of the amazing ability of the honey bee to hold their waste for months at a time.    

This is what our hives look like now. The bees are living totally in the bottom brood boxes, the medium boxes on top are there only to make room for the sugar (we painted the boxes with left over paint from the chicken coop, but I kind of like the color scheme). The entrance reducers have been on in the middle position for a while now. I may have reduced them to the smallest opening today, but the reducers were swelled by moisture and frozen firmly in place. The only other winter prep I have been considering is a wind break, but haven't gotten to it. Luckily we've had a mild winter and no big wind storms so far.

I read in one of my bee books that the first step to successful beekeeping is keeping the bees. So with that in mind, I am doing my best to not be a bee looser. I just hope my best is enough.

I'll leave you with a view of the lower Clark Fork Valley and Plains, that I took today while hiking with our dogs. This was after I accidentally spooked a herd of Bighorn Sheep. Some days I am in awe of the beauty surrounding us.

Merry Christmas and Happy new Year!

KJ

Becoming Bee Keepers

We've now headed down the road of amateur Bee Keeping. As you know, this summer a swarm of honey bees invaded our house and set up shop in our ceiling. I built a bee vac and removed the bees, with the hope of establishing them in a hive. Despite my very clumsy handling of the bees, they accepted the new hive and have continued to thrive.

A few days after our first colony capturing adventure, we got a call about a honey bee swarm near a friend's house. Apparently we were now considered experienced in capturing bees (news travels fast in a small town). So after a little debate, we were headed out to capture a swarm for the second time. This swarm was on a fence post so there was no need for the bee vac. All we had to do was get the majority of the swarm in a box (queen included) and then wait for the workers to find her. It actually worked, and that night we were headed home with a bee swarm in a box. The only trouble was that we had no more hives, so Whitney ran over to the nearest bee supply place an hour away and got us outfitted with everything we needed for our new bee keeping endeavour.

As luck would have it, we had an experienced bee keeper coming to visit us. My Dad has been keeping bees for many years on his farm, and was more than happy to help us get started. Dad helped us put together our new hive boxes and was full of good advice about bees.

We got the new swarm established and with Dad's help have been able to keep them happy.

In this photo (above) my Dad shows Whitney how to move frames into a new hive box and inspect the frames.

While he was here, Dad showed us how to check the bees and tell the difference from brood comb and honey comb. He also helped us figure out what equipment and supplies we needed, and put together a plan to help the bees survive the winter. We even got to see one of our queens while he was were, a real thrill to new bee keepers.

As of this post, we have two hives with healthy colonies busily building brood and storing honey for the coming winter. Our plan will be to help them get strong this year, and hope for honey about a year from now.

Dad and I standing by our two busy hives enjoying the evening.

KJ

We got the Queen! (and chicken update)

We got the queen!!
I went out to the hive this morning to check the bees and remove the cardboard box. My Dad and bee advisor had suggested that I go ahead and check on them to make sure they were adjusting well to the hive. When I lifted the cardboard box off the hive, I was happy to see bees working in the frames and I noticed that the old comb seemed to be abandoned. The next job was to open up the cardboard box and dump out any remaining bees into the hive. When I opened the card board box I was totally blown away by the bees, for the second time this week. They had nearly filled the box with new comb! There was a complete functioning hive in the cardboard box. After my initial surprise, I turned the box over and dumped comb bees and all into the hive. The bees got some what upset by this, so now I am just hoping they don't pickup and leave because of my messing with them. But right now I am just so happy that we got the queen and she's taken to the new location! Here are some long over due pictures of the chickens and garden. This beauty of a Buff Orpington is one we call Colonel Sanders. We're pretty certain that he's a rooster, but he's super friendly and had quite the personality.

Here is last night's harvest. The garden is in full production and we are enjoying the bounty every day. Part of the fun is giving all the scraps to the chickens. They go nuts for lettuce leaves and beet tops. Also in the bowl not seen are sugar snap peas. Mmm!

Some times in the evenings we open up to coop and let the chickens roam the backyard. They like to nap in the shade on the east side of the coop out of the hot afternoon sun, and so does Rosco.

Under the willow is another favorite scratching and foraging place. And the post pile makes a great place for the hens to nap.

Here again is the Colonel, our friendliest chicken by far. The flock is now nine weeks old and doing very well. Although we lost one to un supervised dogs, the rest seem very happy and healthy. Whitney is expecting our first eggs in about three weeks. I can't wait for that, but it really is a lot of fun feeding them scraps and watching them become chickens. One of our favorite ways to relax now is to sit in the shade with the chickens in the evening.

KJ

A Bee Adventure

Last weekend we noticed there were honey bees moving into our porch ceiling. I had wanted a hive (at some point) and so at first was pretty excited. Then I learned this was potentially very bad. After doing some reading it became clear we needed to act quickly before the bees established themselves. We tried to find help from other beekeepers but everyone was busy, so we were on our own. The time for action had come.

I borrowed some equipment and made ready to remove the bees. The plan was to smoke the bees, open up the ceiling and relocate the bees to a box. From the box, I hoped to establish the bees in a hive in the back yard. I prepared by building a bee vac, donning the suit, and lighting the smoker.

As I opened up the eave, I smoked the bees so that they were not worried about me and were busy trying to save the honey. When I finally got the eave opened up, I was amazed by what I found.

It was now time for the Bee Vac. This is a simple device which uses a shop vac to suck up bees, but does not kill them. This was key since the idea was to relocate them to a hive in the back yard. My bee vac consisted of: a cardboard box with a small shop vac on one side and a hose on the other. Inside the box was a wire screen to keep the bees in the box, and not let them go into the vacuum. The box was duck taped up to make it more or less air tight.

As I vacuumed, I was also collecting the comb and putting it in a bucket. The comb needed to be saved and put into the bee hive so that the bees would know that was home. Most of the comb was white and empty, but some of it had honey. When the bees are filling the comb with honey it means they are established, and reproducing.

One of the tips I read about the bee vac was not to apply too much suction or you would kill them all. So, I was not able to suck up every bee, but tried to get the majority of the colony. The key was to get the queen. Without the queen there is no colony. So I did my best to get all the bees and comb, and then we headed out to the destination bee box.

I removed the center four frames and put the comb from the house into the box. Next I took the cardboard box and cut a hole in the bottom and placed it on top of the bee box. Then I tied it down, to secure it from the wind.

The idea is that the bees will find their way out of the cardboard box and into the bee box. There they will find the comb, decide that's home and then carry on with their business.

We are still waiting to see what the out come of all this will be because there are four possible out comes. I'll list them from best to worst. 1) The queen is in the box, decides she likes it and I have a bee hive in the back yard. (honey!!) 2) The queen is in the box, decides that it sucks and moves out. 3) The queen died in the move and the workers will wander around until they die in a few days. 4) the queen is still in the house and will rebuild her colony in a harder to access place (very bad).

It's too early to tell, but I am very hopeful we'll have a hive in the yard. When I checked today there seemed to be good orderly bee business taking place out there. However there are still quite a few bees buzzing around the porch. Truthfully I'd take any outcome but number four. More on this later when we know more.

PS. Sorry for the lack of chicken posts, but the girls are doing well and growing a lot. They are very chicken like now and nearly egg laying age. They have a large run, and have had access to the entire backyard on more than one occasion. On a sad note, we are morning the first loss: a barred rock hen died last night, and Sheridan lost our trust.

KJ