"Oh Doom and Disaster, What Absence of Mind!"

The title of this post is taken from a favorite children's book that we read in our house, Schnitzel Von Krumm - Forget Me Not and it succinctly sums up how I felt when I discovered the disaster in my bee yards this winter.  In the story, a family is packing their car to go on vacation while their little weiner dog, Schnitzel Von Krumm, excitedly runs around getting in the way of everything as they continually shoo him out of the way, too busy to mind him. Turns out that the family is so busy getting ready to leave that when they actually do leave, they forget to bring the dog with them. The following is the story of how I was so busy that I forgot some very basic beekeeping rules. I have been putting off writing this post because it still hurts when I think about what happened this winter with some of my bees; something that could have been prevented with a little less "Absence of Mind". If you are a beekeeper, please learn from my mistake! Well, here goes nothing...

On one of the warmish days in late February, I took the opportunity to make a quick check on my hives. I went to Woodford House first to check on the Honda swarm hive and the Conshy swarm hive. I pulled up and saw that the Conshy hive was flying but the Honda hive was not, which was a little strange because Honda had been the stronger hive and was heading into its 3rd summer. As I inspected the Honda hive, I didn't see any bees until I got to the 2nd to last box and I came upon a small cluster of dead bees. Hmm, OK, not the first hive of bees to have died under my watch, let's take it apart and see what happened this time. I go into the bottom box and I see an absolute mess. I see the rest of the cluster of dead bees, many of them decapitated. And I see comb that has been destroyed and chewed up, small wax flakes all over the place.

I'm thinking, what the hell could have done this? I have never seen this kind of destruction in a hive. Takes me a minute to realize the answer - Ohhh, I know, this must be what mouse damage looks like! Upon closer inspection, the tell-tale sign of mouse poop confirms my suspicion. I look down at the entrance to the hive and the entrance reducer, the little piece of wood that limits the size of the entrance, is not set on the smallest setting, which is what I usually do heading into winter to keep the mice out. A big mistake! Do I know for sure that the mouse was the reason this hive died? No, and it is even possible that the bees were already dead when the mouse moved in. But in this case I am going to assume that the mouse was at least part of the problem, if not all of the problem. There was plenty of honey in the hive, so that wasn't an issue. If a mouse takes up residence in a hive when the weather is still pretty cold, the bees won't break their cluster to try to drive the mouse out or kill it. So as long as the mouse stays away from the cluster of bees, it can have its way in the rest of the hive. DAMN, very stupid mistake!

I took a box of honey from this dead hive and put it on top of the hive next door, which was doing just fine (no mouse problem because the entrance was reduced to the smallest possible size - about the width of a few bees). So the tiny silver lining is that I have plenty of honey to donate to the remaining bees and maybe even enough for a small spring harvest. Here are some pictures...

Dead cluster of bees around the middle frame

Damaged frames, comb is chewed out

Top frame has wood damage in bottom left corner. Bottom frame has no comb left at all.

Bottom Board full of debris, dead bees and wax

Still kicking and cursing myself, I left Woodford and figured I should go check on my other Francisville hives just to take a quick look. Both of the hives in Francisville have been strong and healthy for the past few years. One of them was from a Wolf Creek Apiaries package and the other was from the removal job at Oakland Cemetery.

When I get to the apiary, I don't see any bees flying - not a good sign. I quickly open up one hive, taking off box by box and I am not finding a single bee inside the hive! Nothing, nada, zilch, zip, totally empty! As I get to the bottom two boxes, I see the same type of mouse damage I saw at Woodford, double DAMN! Now I am really upset. I move over to the next hive and repeat the same woeful experience - zero bees to be found, mouse damage for a third time! I am beside myself. My guess is that the mouse moved in and was somehow disturbing the bees so much that they said "We're outta here" and they just up and left, in the middle of winter, leaving behind pounds and pounds of honey!

Oh doom and disaster! A perfectly preventable disaster, assuming the mice were the cause. This was my worst day of beekeeping since I started this whole endeavor. The thought occurs to me that I am going to quit this beekeeping thing and the thought stays with me until I get home and pick up the phone to order some new bees for the summer. Is that a sure indicator that I am a full-fledged bee junkie? Wait, don't answer that...

Winter Recap and a Fresh Start

And what a winter it has been, snowy and cold like last year. Bee-wise it has been flat-out depressing. Following the debacle of the Francisville stolen honey frames, things only went downhill. Two more of my hives died, making a total of 4 dead and only one colony remaining. Those are some bad numbers - if I was a baseball player I'd be hitting .200 and riding the bench! As far as I can tell, these two hives met their demise because their populations were too small - both of these hives were queenless for a long period of time last summer and this hurt their numbers going into winter. One of the hives had zero pollen in it, which probably isn't enough to kill them but it certainly didn't help.

And as usual the silver lining is that I have lots of honey, pollen and drawn comb from my 4 dead-outs. After cleaning out the hives of bees I piled the equipment in my backyard - must have at least 80 pounds of honey sitting back there. Most, if not all, of that honey will go towards feeding my new colonies this spring (I'll get to that in a minute). My remaining living hive looks really strong and they should hopefully pull through the rest of this cold spring with no problem. If this hive is strong and the weather warms up a bit, I will split it into two hives in a few weeks.

Contrary to my beekeeping, this has been an awesome winter for me and the Philadelphia Beekeepers Guild. In January I was elected President of the Guild. Then in February we had a hugely successful event when Ross Conrad came to speak to us. We had over 100 attendees come to Penn Charter School to see Ross and everyone was extremely happy with how the day went. After Ross gave his two talks, we had a showing of a documentary called Vanishing of the Bees. It was a great event which we hope to replicate in some form next winter.

In March the Guild held its first Beginner Beekeepers Course. Four of the Guild officers, myself included, planned and taught the course. We had 20 "students" and this day also went really well. For me it felt great to be teaching again, something I haven't done for quite a few years. We plan to offer more and longer courses in the future.

OK, back to the bees. To make up for my losses this winter I ordered 4 small cell packages from the Seaborns at Wolf Creek Apiaries. I have already installed two of the packages at one of my new apiary locations. Woodford Mansion is located in East Fairmount Park and was built in 1756. I want to say a quick thank you to Bruce Schimmel and Martha Moffat for helping this apiary location happen (Martha also took some of the pictures of me below). Here is the front of the house...

This site should be a great home for the bees - in addition to tons of nearby red maple trees (an important source of early spring pollen), there is a new orchard that was recently planted around the grounds of the house. And the bees will have the run of the entire East Park, they should find plenty of food. Here are some more pics...

 A new home

Two packages in trunk of my car

Beautiful frame of pollen from one of my other hives

Queen cage with attendant bees

When bee "packages" such as these are made up by suppliers, they take a queen from one hive and worker bees from multiple other hives. So the workers and queen don't "know each other" yet and if the queen was not caged, the workers would likely kill her. So when you are setting up a new hive from a package, you generally give the workers a few extra days to ensure that they accept the queen. The workers will release the queen by eating the candy (the white stuff on the left side of the cage) and revealing a hole which she can crawl out of and then get to work. There are many ways to introduce the queen and I tried a new technique this time. I attached a small piece of wood to the queen cage and slipped it under the front door, with the end of the wood sticking out of the front door for easy retrieval. The most typical way of introducing the queen is to stick the cage in between frames inside the hive. One problem with this method is that in a few days when you go back to check if the queen has been released, you have to disturb the bees and frames in the new hive. The "front door method" allows me to just pull the stick and queen cage out of the front door with minimal disruption to the hive. We'll see how it goes when I check on the hive in a few days.

Queen cage slipped under front door and into hive

Workers dumped on top of queen cage

Frames are in, dumping the stragglers into the hive

I installed two packages and everything went very smoothly, no problems. I will go back in a few days to check on the queen and see how the bees are taking to their new home. Here's hoping this year is better than last for the bees!

CSI: Francisville

Well, unfortunately my suspicions were confirmed. Someone was indeed meddling with at least one of the hives that recently died. How do I know, you may ask?  Well, I broke down the hives in order to do a post-mortem and to see if I could determine the cause of their demise. As I was taking down one of the hives at the park, I quickly noticed that one frame was missing from one of the boxes - hmmm, I thought, it is unlikely that I neglected to replace a frame during my inspections, but hey, anything is possible.  When I got everything home and took a closer look, I saw that it was actually two frames that were missing.  Now, I might be forgetful sometimes, but there is no way that I put a hive back together with two whole frames missing.  Then, as I continue to examine the hive, I see this -

The honeycomb from this frame was cut out - look closely and you can see the thin vertical wire from the foundation in the middle of the frame. Someone just went and cut out the comb - amazing!
When I saw the frame with the comb cut out of it, I was kind of in shock.  It took me a few seconds to figure out what I was looking at, because I never expected to see something like this.  So, this confirmed it beyond the shadow of a doubt. There's a honey thief in my 'hood!! More important than the pilfered honey is that I will never know how often this person was messing with the hives and I'll never know how much of a role that played in the death of these hives.  So I don't stand to learn much about beekeeping from this, except that I need to be much more careful about hive placement in the future.  Here is a picture of part of the tiny cluster that I found in the robbed-out hive, there were so few bees in there it was sad -

The other hive had quite a bit more bees in it (though not a ton) and no obvious signs of tampering, so who knows what killed them.  There was still a lot of honey and pollen left in both hives, so the thieves did not take it all.  The drawn comb and all of that surplus honey (about 3 medium supers full) will give my new bees a great head start in the spring.  And if necessary, I can feed this honey to my other existing hives if they are running low.

Just another day in the wacky world of beekeeping in the city, I am undeterred...

Winter is Here

So it looks like this winter is shaping up to be just like last year, lots of snow.  We've already had 3 little storms, nothing like last year's blizzards but still Philadelphia has already surpassed it's average annual snowfall of 20".

So much has happened since last I wrote, I'm not sure where to start.  I guess the bad news first.  The two hives in the little park where the tree was cut down have already died (these were the awesome bees from Vermont).  I was worried about them being kind of small in population and I guess I was right. There was still honey in the hive so they didn't starve. I am pretty sure some unknown person/people were messing with the hives. There were several times when I went to check on these hives and I could tell that things were not as I left them.  I also got reports from others that they saw people "leaning on the hives" - hard to imagine but stranger things have happened. This situation was not helped by the fact that the chain-link fence surrounding this park was destroyed by the tree removal and this allowed anyone to just walk right up to the hives.

I was pretty bummed by the loss of these bees and by the overall failure of this site but the silver lining to the dead bees is that they made lots of nice, drawn-out honeycomb last year.  This drawn comb is a valuable resource and it will help my new bees to get a quick start on building their new home. I was planning on moving these 2 hives to Woodford Mansion in East Fairmount Park, but since they didn't make it, instead I have ordered 2 new packages of bees from the Seaborns and will install them at Woodford in early April.

My 3 other hives appear to be doing well.  On a recent warmish day in December the bees in my home hive were busy cleaning house.  They were dragging out the dead and relieving themselves in the snow.  When we were out on the roof one little bee landed on Jolie and proceeded to poop right on her shirt! Hopefully these 3 hives survive the winter.

This spring I am hoping to do more bee removals and swarm captures.  This will help me to either grow my apiary or be able to provide other beekeepers with some bees.

As a follow-up to the the Langstroth celebration and Honey Fest, which was a huge success, the Guild is bringing Ross Conrad to speak in Philadelphia in February.  Ross is the author of Natural Beekeeping, which is a book on keeping bees using organic management techniques. Registration has already begun and it looks like it is going to be a great turnout.

There's more to write but I just wanted to get a quick update written.   Stay tuned...

Spring is here!

A lot has happened since my last post - all of the snow has melted, the sun came out and the trees are blooming.  In other words, the winter that wouldn't end has finally ended.  I wish I could say that all of the bees survived and are thriving but that is not the case - one of my hives didn't make it.

Shortly after my last post I went to check on the hive at The Spring Gardens and they were doing well - I was actually surprised to see that.  This was the hive that was really weak going into the winter and I had been feeding them honey all winter.   A month later on a warm sunny day I went to check on that hive again and this time the news wasn't so good - no activity at all in front of the hive and when I looked inside, all of the bees were dead.  They still had ample honey in there so they didn't starve.  Being that there was no obvious sign of disease, the most likely explanation is that the colony was too small to maintain the proper temperature inside the hive.  When a hive doesn't make it through the winter, beekeepers call it a "dead-out".  I was pretty bummed but not totally surprised. Here are some pics -

This is the view when I opened the cover, big pile of dead bees -                                  

After removing all the boxes, lots of dead bees -

I tried to find the queen in this mess but I couldn't.  Dead queens can be soaked in alcohol to make "eau-du-queen" - basically a tincture that can be used to attract swarms or wild bees to an empty hive.

A few of the frames looked like this:

This pretty much confirms that the bees were too cold - they climb into the cells in order to try to get warm.  All those little bee butts sticking out - a sad sight.

There is a silver lining to the loss of this hive.  All of the comb - some of which contained honey and pollen - can be used when I set up my new hives (oh yeah, I am getting 4 new hives this spring!).  The energy that this colony used to draw the honeycomb and collect nectar and pollen will not be totally wasted.  Using this drawn comb in the new hives will save them time and energy - they will have a nice head start.  The honey in these combs should also be enough so that I won't have to feed my new colonies any additional honey.  So I cleaned out this hive and separated all of the comb into 3 groups - comb with honey, comb with pollen and empty drawn comb.  Even the empty comb is helpful as it takes the bees significant time and energy to build the wax combs.  Here is a great shot of the start of some empty comb -

In honor of the fallen bees, I decided to take one of the frames of honey and harvest it for the family.  I used the simplest method for harvesting honey - crush and strain - pretty self-explanatory.  Cut some comb, mash it up and strain it - 

There was over one pound of honey in that frame and it was only partially full.  And let me tell you, that honey is AWESOME tasting - so flavorful.  Hopefully there will be lots more of that this year - so far the weather this spring is shaping up to be a much better year for honey than last year.  We shall see...