Oh, beehive!

[Rick]

I couldn't have an apiary if I wanted one. Being in town some of the folks around here would frown at me. And they know how fearful I am of frowns. Of course, bees don't mind traveling a small distance and since the edge of "civilization" is only a few blocks there may well be a new aviary nearby. I'll have to keep a sharp eye peeled.

No fear of Africanized bees either. We could have some Canadian bees, though. I'm sure I heard one the other day as it flew by....buzzzzz, eh. buzzzz, eh. Maybe it was French Canadian. (shrug)

[your_comforting_company]

LOL. I went to see Mr. Burke over in Dothan this weekend to get a dose of Bee-quick. He lives in a tight neighborhood, houses all around, and just about 150 yards from a school. He has 8 hives and no problems or complaints from the neighbors.
On a side note, he was averaging 3 pounds (a quart) of honey per super, and had 17 supers to do. Water weighs 8 pounds per gallon, and honey, 12.

Farmer called me on Saturday morning, said they were clearing land, knocked down a tree that was full of bees and wanted me to come get them. So I did. Sadly, I think the heat killed them before I got home. Heck.. I thought I was gonna die at one point. Sad, but they were going to be destroyed anyway. At least I tried... I had my bucket about half full of bees.. probably 6 or 8 pounds of bees... all dead now

[your_comforting_company]

Same guy called again on another tree they knocked down, not 300 yards from the first. I got there early, everything was exposed, and even though the ladies were quite mad, I got 80% of them in the bucket, got home by 10:30, and had them in a new hive by 11. So far they are still alive and doing well.

Did some more honey extracting yesterday. Got another gallon and a half. Probably another pound of wax. Some of the honey was in really old comb and had a scent reminiscent of lillies, or maybe gardenia. very pleasant smell and very good to eat.. almost gave myself a tummy-ache licking my fingers lol.

Today's project: BEE VAC. I still have two houses to remove bees from, but only about two weeks left to get them without the risk of them not being able to recover and overwinter. Farther north, the time has already come and gone and I wouldn't remove any more bees above the mason-dixon with the intention of starting a new hive with them, especially if you don't get the queen. Recent rain should get our clover and other goodies blooming again, and we still have a good 3 more months of growing season. If you do live farther north, it is unlikely they will start a new queen this late in your season. The first of August is generally the cut-off in my area. If the colony I just removed doesn't have a queen, I will merge them with one of the other suffering colonies, rather than letting those few weak hives die. Judging by the way the fliers clustered on the "swarm bucket" outlined earlier in this thread, I'd say the queen was in there, although I was unable to spot her among the 4-5 pounds of bees.

The removal from the lake should have hatched their queen on Tuesday (day 16 after extraction). I was going to inspect them yesterday, but it rained all day. I talked with two of my mentors, and they said it could take up to an additional 10 days for the queen to mate and start laying, so I'll do inspection next weekend. If all goes well, I'll find several queen cells opened from the side, and tiny eggs in clean cells, laid singly. hopefully I'll have plenty of pics to share.

The first queen to hatch aborts all the other queens. if two hatch at the same time (or thereabouts) the workers will determine the weaker queen and kill her or evict her. How the workers determine this weakness is still a sort of mystery that we may never understand. Bees are a fully functional multi-organism, with a unified consciousness. Cool stuff!

[Rick]

YCC - Since it's the middle of summer and we still have August to go....would it work if you put some ice in a five gallon bucket then sat your bee bucket right down on top of it? That would keep the bee bucket cool in the bottom and make it more likely the bees would get home in the heat. Maybe (?) The bees wouldn't be exposed to direct cold but the bee bucket might be kept cool.

[your_comforting_company]

It's worth a shot. Bees can handle quite a bit of cold and can get down to almost icicle stage before they die (relative, of course). heat is exactly opposite. If I get the opportunity to try again, I'll add an extra bucket of ice to the truck and try it.

[Rick]

I was thinking you could fill the bucket about a quarter to a third full then sit your bee bucket down in it. The bottom would stay cool but since there will be a gap between the sides of the buckets the sides of the bee bucket should be surrounded by cool air as well.

[your_comforting_company]

Might get a chance to try it Friday. I'm planning to assist one of my mentors with a removal job on a house that's getting a make-over (good job because we can tear shtuff up!!). He has a bee-vac on a bucket, so I'll suggest it to him and see what he thinks. Only a few weeks left till the cut-off where workers will no longer raise a queen, so any removal jobs will have to be done before then or wait till next year in the spring.
Gonna be grabbing up all the bees I can in coming weeks to add to my weak colonies. It rained all weekend, so I didn't get to check if my queen hatched.. maybe this coming weekend will be better weather, and by then, she'll have mated and should be laying. I'll be looking for fresh eggs rather than a queen who is about the same size as the workers, and after a month or two, I can mark her and might even clip her wings.

Hoping to get lots of pics of this (since we'll have two sets of hands) to share. Stay tuned!

[your_comforting_company]

Been a while since I gave an update.
My original colony is doing SUPER GOOD. Two honey supers are wall-to-wall packed and must weigh 80 lbs or more each.
Colony I saved from the lake does not have a huge honey store, but they've cleaned the comb well, they have a laying queen who most likely mated with my gentle original colony drones. Got to see some hatchlings last saturday, so with some rain and nectar flow, and any luck at all, they'll recover and be able to make storage for winter. If not, I'll just feed them.
Neither of these two colonies have troubles with mites or beetles, although they both have a few. It's kinda like any other pet.. if you have a dog, you have fleas at some point, birds have mites, people get lice... so on and so forth. I could treat for these pests, but don't want that stuff getting in my honey, so as long as numbers are below a threshold, I won't have to.

The other hive, I took down the road to use as a trap for a colony in a porch pillar. Well... I let them sit a while, and when I checked two saturday's ago, they were wrapped up with beetles. The bees in the box were so pre-occupied with corralling beetles, they weren't foraging, or working the comb. They were doing a good job of keeping the beetles off the comb, considering their weak population. So I took everything apart and manually killed every beetle I could find, and put two top-traps, and a bottom trap in the box.
Checked again on Tuesday and had the assistance of one of my mentors. We reworked some of the tape and stuff on the exit trap for the porch. Beetles seem to be under control, but I might have to let this small colony "share" heat with a stronger colony over winter, and definately will have to feed them over winter. Yesterday's check revealed the queen still laying, no more beetles, and bees flying in with cotton pollen. Not making much progress on the porch tho.. Gonna have to evacuate them with some butyric acid and vacuum them up. With increased numbers there is still hope for this colony, but I don't have high hopes.

It's been a fun learning experience. Got a little honey and a lot of garden, and so did the neighbors.

Oh yeah.. got stung on Tuesday and had to work all week with a swollen hand. That was fun too haha.. It doesn't hurt as much as it itches. The itching will drive you crazy!

[your_comforting_company]

One of my mentors (who wishes to remain unnamed) came to help with the bee removal down the road. We made a small hole in the top of the brick column and juiced them up with some really rancid smelling stuff called Bee-Go. It smells a lot like rotten chicken poop and no doubt it would make me leave if someone spilled it in my house.

So I built myself a bee-vac, pictured here, and He also brought his, which is the bucket. One of us on one side and one on the other, as the bees exited we sucked them into our respective containers and now I have them all in a hive with my queen, happy as can bee.

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The vac consists of a removable inner cage which directly contains the bees, and the outer box is the one that holds the suction. It doesn't need to be airtight, but the more drafts it has, the harder it will be to regulate air-flow. You want just enough suction that the bees come off the surface they are on, but can almost hang on to the end of the hose. If you can feel them bumping the hose as they are sucked down, you are probably killing bees. My box only killed a few bees, and truthfully, I probably killed them with the working end of the hose.
I was wearing my gear, which was hot, and we were very busy, so I only got a couple pictures, but this one shows all the live bees in the box during the removal. I'd guess we added a thousand-or-so bees to my existing colony, between the two of us.

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A beekeeper that intends to do removals should build one of these boxes. $35 for the shop-vac, which I can still use around the shop, and about $15 worth of wood and accessories (hinges, screen, etc), it's invaluable and extremely effective.

[crashdive123]

Outstanding! Really well done.

[Rick]

If bees could only know the work and trouble you go to just to care for them. Great job. Thanks for the pics.

[your_comforting_company]

If you have beekeeping equipment.. wear it.

As Cody Lundin says, "If you make dumb@ss choices, you suffer dumb@ss consequences".

.. Got stung in the face yesterday.. Standing in the flight path of some very busy bees. yeah.. I know...

[crashdive123]

Is your veil attached to your suit? I was working with a guy that rarely wears more than a veil - sometime the top if he is working the hive. With my normal encounters with them - full body armor.

[your_comforting_company]

Long story short, I was just watching.. the bees were going to the squash blooms in the garden and apparently I stopped in just the wrong spot to watch. Was looking at pollen color, and how many foragers had pollen vs. empty baskets, which would indicate more nectar foraging.

I don't really have a "suit". I just wear longsleeves when going into the hive, regular pants, just make sure my shirt is tucked in. Hat/veil is the tie-down type and I have the mid-length slip on gloves.
It was a little on the cool side, and I was a little too close, AND directly in the way. totally my fault.
I haven't seen my mentor wear gloves yet, even when going inside the hives. He likes the slip on veil/hat like I have, but he does have some of that body armor for tougher jobs (remember we do have africanized bees here!) with gloves and veil attached to a pullover top. We had a bee removal job that turned out to be yellow jackets so he suited up for that!

So far this year, only two people have been killed nearby by africanized bees, but they are confirmed in Albany (North) and Bainbridge (22 miles East from here). Ultimately, everyone, even non-apiarists, are going to have to learn about africanized bees. Soon it will be taught in schools.
I will be attending a seminar on the 14th and 15th on this subject and some others down in FL where I got my sweet, gentle bees. I really want to learn more about them now before populations and attacks increase.

Don't remember if I mentioned, but now I'm up to 4 hives. One super healthy colony, which I just did mite treatment on a few weeks ago, and 3 small "saved" colonies from removal jobs. If I get many more, I'll have to put up a fence so that the bee traffic will be overhead.

Glad I opted for bees this year instead of chickens. They are very interesting little things! One of my friends got chickens so we will do some horsetrading for this and that.

[erunkiswldrnssurvival]

yum honey! i am alergic to honey bees,(stings that is) but love to eat thier sweet treat! i have a friend in Fla that forages for wild honey . i have gone with him a few time to open a honey tree. good EXP.

[rwc1969]

I had a honeybee come buzzing in my car window the other day. It just kept flying right up into my face and every where else. I just did my best to keep my mouth closed and ignore it. After about 10 or so minutes it finally left.

[your_comforting_company]

RWC, I'm told and have read that they are attracted to the CO2 in your breath, so if one persists on getting in your face, try holding your breath. Just not for too long LOL.

Looking forward to Friday and Saturday. Hope to have some good info to share with all you guys.

A primitive method for finding feral hives (@ Gene) was to find some bees foraging on flowers, take a hollow reed, and catch a few bees and put them in the reed. Holding the open end closed with your thumb, you could walk a bit, and let one out. Noticing which way it flies, you could follow that direction to it's hive. This is supposedly still practiced today in Africa. If you're allergic, you might want to let your friend hold the reed and do the catching, but would be lots of fun to see if it works. We do not fully understand how bees navigate, but we do know that if you move the hive, the bee will be lost forever, but if you take a foraging bee away from it's flower and into another area, somehow they can still find their way home. Amazing!

[your_comforting_company]

Not sure my brain has absorbed / procesed it all yet, but two days of hands-on bee education. People from all walks of life coming together with one common interest. Wrote down 2 1/2 pages just plants that bees use for honey and pollen, so now I have a HUGE list of wildflowers and shrubs to put in a small plot in the yard and around the apiary. Met folks who were entymologist, biologist, botanists.. And one really cool thing, Mr. Cutts (whom I got my first nuc from) Is going into the Florida Dept. of Agriculture Hall of Fame for all he's done with bees (He also developed the best beetle trap available).

We did queen grafting and learned how to set up hives or nucs to make splits AND rear queens and there was enough interest in this for them to organize a meeting in spring for several of us to actually help graft in queens, and come back 10 days later to watch them hatch!
Got to drive the loaders, help with some equipment, and witness how a commercial honey producer REALLY handles extracting. Good times with 3 generations of apiarists.

I definately learned that this is the time of year when the bees KNOW cold weather is coming. They all become much more agressively defensive over their honey stores. Now would be a good time of year to use smoke if you are going anywhere near a hive. This time of year it could be hard to tell if a feral colony was africanized or not. So Pay attention! What everyone needs to know, especially in the southern states:
Be aware of your surroundings. If you see stinging insects around this means "Heads UP!"
Look around to try to tell where exactly they are coming from. I do not mean "go hunting them".. I mean survey the area around you to try to locate where they are coming from, or going...
Listen for the buzz of the bees or other insects which will be a good indication of the direction you should not run.
Run away with your mouth and nose covered in the opposite direction of the threat, or at least in the direction you came from.

a 900 lb. horse killed by confirmed africanized bees. Horse was in a corral and could not run away to escape. It was not killed from envenomation, no. It was asphyxiation. Bees in the esophogus, trachea, lungs, nose and mouth and the swelling from the stings very much suffocated this horse. At this point I should say that it takes 10 stings per pound to be fatal. I could take about 1400 stings but I don't want even 1. If you walk into an area and hear buzzing or start getting stung, cover your mouth and nose and run away. If you open the door to the truck or whatever and 300 follow you inside, I can guarantee that you would rather be in the cab of the truck with those 300 than outside the truck with the other 30,000. A bee navigates and targets a percieved thread by the CO2 trail, since most predators are large mammals.

This was an actual situation we found ourselves in after the classes yesterday. We were called to a feral colony in a live oak. The bees seemed gentle enough until we started trying to remove them. The family, a woman and a man, and about 5 kids of various ages from teen to tot. We rushed them inside as the bees wrapped us up and one of our helpers (who wasn't wearing his gear) got stung a few times. He also ran to his truck, got in, and let the windows up. Smart move for all of them.
We dealt with the bees as best we could with our gear on, vacuuming up most of them, then treating the colony with sulfur, which is not so residual to affect any clean-up bees that come to raid, and went on our merry way.
If you live in the southern states with confirmed Africanized colonies, I strongly suggest you invest in a veil at the very least. They won't keep gnats off you, but I do guarantee that if you somehow walked right up on an africanized colony, it would prove invaluable. I saw first hand just how aggressive italian bees can be and if Africanized bees are meaner than that, then buddy, you don't want to be in that situation.

It is our duty as beekeepers to educate the public about bees (both africanized and european), so that's what I'm trying to do as I learn and I do hope that somebody learns from this thread. I hope none of you ever find yourself in the situation where this information saves your life, but if it does, then I'm very glad I took the time to share this.

Just a few numbers to throw out there: 1/3 of the food you eat every time you sit down at a table, is made possible by bees. For every $1 generated by the bees in honey/wax/other production, we follow with $150 in commerce. This is equivalent to $20million floating back into the economy... And this is ONLY the statistics for Florida!! Bees are environmentally AND economically important. I'm proud to be a small part of it.

[Rick]

Thanks, YCC. Good post and a little more rep your way. We don't stop to consider all the fruit trees and fruit bushes and all the veggies that bees pollinate year after year. But we rely on them none-the-less.

[your_comforting_company]

It's not really even so much the fruits as the basic commodities that we overlook. Mustards, for example are a bee superplant, providing lots of pollen throughout the winter, and the yellow spicy stuff we put on our ballpark franks at the game.

It's in those little things...