Swarm Season Continues

I got a call from Rob on a Monday afternoon about a swarm that had landed in his tree earlier that day. After confirming that it was honey bees and that they were still there, I headed out to grab them. Rob and his family were eager onlookers and helpers (thanks for the camera work Cameron!). A few pics of the swarm in the tree...

It was a relatively easy capture and went perfectly. My usual swarm-catching helper Jonah was with me but he got distracted by his new friend Nate, a big backyard and a cool swing set! Here's a video.

Rooftop Revival

At the end of last summer we had some work done our roof and I had to move the one remaining rooftop hive elsewhere. I really missed being able to look out of the window every day and watch the bees. But, we are back in business on the roof. It has become my nuc yard where, at the moment, I have 4 nucs growing up. If you have seen old pictures of the roof, you'll notice that we used to have it white-coated. For now it is black, which makes it REALLY hot up there on a sunny day. I'll have it white coated again, but probably not until next year.

Two of the nucs were made from some of my multi-year survivor stock. I let the queens mate locally and they are both laying well. The other two nucs were made with queen cells from Jeff Eckel of Instar Apiaries. Jeff has been raising queens in Philly for the past few years. I got two queen cells from him and installed them in queenless nucs that I had prepared. These queen cells were special - they were from a "Purdue ankle-biter" breeder queen.  These bees have been bred with a special hygienic behavior, they bite the legs of varroa mites off, which kills the mites (click the Purdue link to see pictures of the mites with their itty bitty legs bitten off). Both queens mated despite our wet and cool May and they are both laying strong. Here are a couple of different views of the nuc yard, including into Center City.

 

Comcast Center and Tower in the distance

Climbing out of the window to get to my rooftop hives is a bit of a pain (actually more of a pain every year!), but having these mini hives out there is relatively manageable because at least I didn't have to haul full size boxes out of the window. I plan on moving these to my other yards when it is time to put them in full size hives (well, maybe I will keep one out there for my viewing pleasure!).

Swarmus Interruptus

Well, sometimes you get to a swarm removal only to find the bees have already left. And sometimes you get to a swarm and you watch the bees leave! I got a phone call earlier today about a swarm in Center City and after confirming that the bees were still there, I headed over. When I arrived there they were, clinging to a wall. I saw a fair amount of activity but nothing crazy, I figured it was scout bees coming and going. Within about 3 minutes of arriving, it became abundantly clear that it was more than just ordinary scout bee traffic - they were taking off. Here is what it looked like (sorry the Blogspot video quality is so bad, some day I'll transfer to Wordpress!) -

It's always great to see a swarm in flight, but not as great as catching one! Oh well, easy come, easy go! Jonah enjoyed watching it! We watched the bees as they settled in the tall cypress(?) tree. I guess they didn't like their spot on the wall.

Swarm 2016...and away we go for another season!

Hi all, hope you had a great winter! We had a mild one in Philadelphia. I went into winter with 7 hives and 5 of them survived. Now they are all building up as the weather has really warmed up in the past week and there are tons of flowers in bloom.

The other day there was a post on the Philly Bee Keepers Facebook page about a swarm in Northeast Philly. I jumped at the chance to grab it. The car was packed with swarm catchin' gear and I headed up to my old stomping grounds to go capture the swarm. But, I broke one of the cardinal rules of swarm catching - I didn't get last minute confirmation that the swarm was still there (I tried but couldn't get a hold of anyone). Lo and behold, got there and the bees had left already! Damn - no free bees today! Fortunately, I got a call from the same guy the next day and there was another swarm in the same exact place! I had told him they might throw a secondary swarm and if they did to call me. The parent colony is living in the building not 25 feet from where the swarms landed.

So I headed out again, this time with my trusty assistant Jonah and we captured that swarm! And we even saw the queen. Here are some pics and video.

A lovely little swarm!

My assistant saying hi to the girls!

In this video you can see when I found the queen. After removing a small branch, there she was - right in front of my face. I managed to get her on my pruners.

What was that I said about queens being unlikely to fly away???

Fortunately she didn't get away. She went back into the swarm to the safety of her daughters! It is nice to be able to contain the queen, because that really ensures that the swarm won't go anywhere once you set them up in a new hive. Sometimes a swarm will leave a new hive once it is set up and opened. I have had that happen only once. If you keep the queen contained for a day or two while the bees get settled in, it greatly improves the chances that they will stay.

Jonah being very brave

We got all of the bees into the box and sealed them up. All in all it was a very easy swarm capture and the bees were super gentle. It was great to have Jonah there helping, he was into it. According to the guy who called me, the bees have been living there at least 4 years, so it seems like they will be good genetic stock. We'll see how they do!

Girls are all sealed up ready to go home

Update - Here they are settling in to their new home at Woodford Mansion...

And one final update - I checked on them one week after installing them at Woodford. Saw the queen and she is laying eggs nicely. So far so, good...

A New Season Bee-gins

Wow, it's been almost a year since I last wrote. Life is busy and between the family, running a business, writing a book and of course, tending the bees, there isn't much time for me to keep this blog updated. Anyway, another winter is in the books and it was not a kind one! Sustained cold temps  were very hard on the bees (and the people!). We didn't get a ton of snow here in Philly, but it was below freezing for much of the winter and the bees didn't have many chances to come out and relieve themselves. Bottom line for me was that I went into winter with 7 hives and only 3 survived. Not very good odds. One hive disappeared, gone without a trace. The other deceased hives died from a combination of varroa problems, small populations and some nosema.

One of the hives that survived this past winter and looks amazing right now is a swarm that was given to me last May. A beekeeper friend called me one day (thanks Stuart A.) and asked if I wanted to capture a swarm. I said "Of course, I'll be there ASAP." By the time I had mobilized myself, he called back and asked me if I wanted him to bring the bees to me. "Uh, yes please!" He showed up at my door with a box 'o bees. One swarm delivered, no extra charge!

This hive is now known affectionately known as "WB Mason"

I moved the bees into my handy dandy Bushkill bee vac setup so that I could easily leave them confined in there for a day or two. This confinement decreases the likelihood that they will swarm again and it also allows the queen to start laying eggs immediately in the empty comb I provided.

Dumping bees into bee vac box

Sealed up and ready for transport

I installed this hive at my Francisville apiary and they made it through winter in great shape. The queen is now laying strong, they have plenty of honey and already have begun to store fresh nectar.

I once again broke my resolution not to buy any bees this season and I purchased a package from Sam Comfort of Anarchy Apiaries. Sam is a great guy and a great beekeeper, known for his singing and for his natural approach to keeping bees by getting out of the way and letting them do what they do best, be bees! Sam stopped in Philly during his wanderings and brought some packages for me and another beekeeper. I met him in a parking lot and there he was standing at the back of his little hatchback Honda with about 15 bees buzzing around his head. In a lovable and most admirable way, Sam reminds me a bit of Pigpen from the Peanuts, but instead of being trailed by a cloud of dirt and dust, Sam's constantly surrounded by a cloud of bees! Last year's bees from Sam didn't make it, they were the hive that totally disappeared without a trace some time between October and February. But I will try again and see how it goes. Below is a video of installing the bees at my Woodford Mansion apiary (video by my 6 year-old son and assistant, Jonah). Nothing too exciting in this video, although for me, it reminds me of how much anxiety I used to feel when installing a package of bees like this, but these days, it ain't no big deal at all.

That's the latest and greatest from Philly. See you soon and may the Force Bee with you!

Winter Recap and SWARM!

Well, it's been almost a year since I wrote, wow! I wrote lots of posts in my head, but they never quite made it to the screen! 2013 was a good year for the bees, until winter hit! I went into winter with 9 hives, most of them looking pretty strong. We had a brutal winter, with lots of snow (3rd snowiest ever I believe) and sustained cold temperatures. It was really hard on the bees (and on most people I know!) and I ended up losing 6/9 hives! One hive just up and left in the fall, a couple of others had a population crash and were too small to survive the cold. One hive died in late winter/early spring due to a cold snap that lasted almost a week. The Birthday Swarm hive didn't survive, but the Oscar the Grouch hive did! All-in-all it wasn't quite as disheartening as last winter's mouse debacle, but still pretty upsetting. The silver lining was that all of those dead hives left me LOTS of honey!

I had resolved not to  purchase any bees in 2014 and I was doing alright until I learned that Sam Comfort of Anarchy Apiaries was bringing a load of his bees to Philly. I have always wanted some of Sam's bees but had never made the drive to his place in the Hudson Valley to pick some up. But now that he was bringing bees to us, well, I decided to buy one little ol' package of bees. This brought my total going into this spring to 4 hives. I had also resolved to consolidate my apiaries because having 5 sites was too much for me. So, I am no longer keeping bees at The Spring Gardens or at Strawberry Mansion. Now I have one hive at my house, 2 at Field Street and 2 at Woodford Mansion.

That brings us to the first swarm of 2014. I got a call at 5pm on May 12th about a swarm in South Philadelphia (thanks to Lynn for calling!). I loaded up the V-dub and arrived to see this -

Swarm hanging out, nice and low!

This was a pretty large swarm. The bees were super calm and content just hanging out there. They had just arrived a few hours earlier. I had a big crowd of people watching me, cause hey, it's not every night that you see such a crazy sight on the streets of South Philly! One guy Robert, took a bunch of video (thanks Robert). Here I am shaking the bees into my swarm catching box -

Get in the box already girls!!

And one other video from Robert - this is after closing everything up and then discovering a large bunch of stragglers clinging to the underside of my swarm box that I needed to get inside the box; you'll see me dumping them in. As I mentioned before, this was a large swarm -

I got 99% of the bees into the box and drove them home (no, they didn't get out this time!). They spent the night in the swarm box in my yard and in the morning I took them to my Woodford Mansion apiary and set them up.

All sealed up, ready for placement

Removed bottom of swarm box and placed on hive stand

Top of swarm box is off

Getting comfy in the new digs

Sittin' on the stoop, just like in Southie!

So there you have it - a recap and a new start. Looking forward to a great year in 2014 - I'm actually happy to have fewer hives to manage, it feels more relaxed to me and I can take my sweet old time with the bees.

"I Love Trash..."

I think that most of us probably remember this...

Well, this past week I met some bees who also love trash. Got a call from a woman who had been away for 2 weeks and returned home to find some bees living in her trash can. This is what I found when I arrived...

Bees attached comb to trash can lid

Well, I'll be! I guess the bees don't care too much about where they make their home! You can see the trash bag in the can, the can was practically full of trash and the bees had very little space. But that didn't stop them from settling in. Makes me laugh when I think about how people will argue over which kind of bee hive is best for the bees - Langstroth hive, Top Bar hive, Warre hive, Golden Mean hive - well, I think I'm gonna start marketing the "Rubbermaid Trash Can Hive" (comes with trash)!

I decided that instead of doing the removal in this little courtyard, I would take the entire trash can lid, comb and all, and bring it to one of my apiaries so that I could relax and take my time and set the hive up immediately. Here's how I transported the lid (what else would I use in this case, but a trash bag)...

The second part of the video shows me placing a nuc on top of the trash can in order to collect all of the foragers that were out working when I relocated their home. I went back the following night and collected the nuc. It worked beautifully.

I brought the bees to my apiary in Francisville where I had an empty hive looking for some new bees. I turned the lid upside down and started to gently remove the fragile comb.

Most of the comb removed

My work station, on top of an empty top bar hive

Placing comb in the hive

My queen luck has been very good lately and that trend continued. I was able to find and cage the queen in this hair clip style queen cage. There are a few workers in with her. Caging the queen helps to ensure that the bees won't up and leave their new home. I will leave her in the cage for a day or two and then let her out so she can get to work.

Queen at the bottom, the one with long slender abdomen

Queen cage is under that mass of bees

Here I moved the queen cage down in between the frames

So that was basically it. I closed up the bees and left them alone. That was the quickest and easiest removal job I have ever done! I'm lovin' it!

First Swarm of the Year, North Philly

I got an early birthday gift (the day before my bday) from the Queen Bee Goddess. She sent me a beautiful swarm. Thanks to Alison for reaching out to the Philadelphia Beekeepers Guild about the swarm in her yard (and for taking video). And thanks to Russ for helping me catch the swarm. I was able to find and cage the queen, which helped make the swarm capture very easy because the workers all followed the scent of the queen whom was placed in the swarm box. After catching the swarm I took it home and set it up on the roof. Have a look...
 

UPDATE: I released the queen today (May 20th) and the worker bees quickly proceeded to kill her! I believe that she was the old queen and she was probably well past her prime. I was able to find another queen in the hive and she appeared to be younger and maybe even a virgin. I will give them a few weeks and check for signs of a laying queen. It is not that unusual for a swarm to have more than one queen, like an insurance policy until they get settled into a new home.

Honey Bees, Wasps and Hornets - Oh My! Or, What kind of "bees" are these?

Since I started doing bee removal jobs in the Philadelphia region, I have fielded tons of calls that end up being about stinging insects other than honey bees. I don't deal with these other insects, I refer them out to someone else. I wanted to create a quick guide that will help people to learn about whether their bees are honey bees or not, because even though we like to call everything that flies and stings a "bee", that is surely not the truth.

Is it a Honey Bee Hive?

Is it hanging from a tree or from the eaves of your house or your window? Does it look grayish and kind of papery? Does it look like clay or mud? Does it look like any of these? Did you just notice it in July as it started to grow larger?

Images from Google Search for "Wasp Nest"

If the answer to any of these questions is "Yes", then we are not dealing with honey bees. In fact, chances are, if the hive is out in the open and you can see it, they are not honey bees.

Honey bees usually build their colonies inside of structures (whether those "structures" are walls, eaves, roofs, trees, planters, birdhouses, fire hydrants, etc - doesn't matter too much to the bees). And remember that honeycomb is made out of beeswax, not mud or twigs or papery substances. There are rare occasions when honey bees will start building their hive from a tree limb out in the open, but that doesn't happen too often in our climate (Philadelphia, PA, USA). And if it did, the comb would look white and waxy, not gray and papery or muddy and you would see many, many bees on the comb. Here is what honeycomb looks like...

Large sheets of honeycomb

Comb in a wall

Wavy comb in the ceiling

One other important point is that a honey bee hive will have LOTS of activity and traffic on a nice summer day. You will see tens, if not hundreds, of bees coming and going every minute. If it is a nice warm summer day and you are only seeing a few insects here and there every few minutes, chances are they are not honey bees. A mature honey bee colony will have tens of thousands of bees in it, while most social wasp and hornet colonies will have hundreds (or less) to maybe a few thousand.

Is it a Honey Bee Swarm?

I also get calls about a "humungous swarm of bees" flying all over our yard and attacking our children - only to find out that its 10 yellow-jackets eating a lollipop that one of the kids threw on the ground. A swarm of Honeybees has THOUSANDS and THOUSANDS of bees in it. If they are flying, they will fill the air like a scene from a hollywood movie. If the swarm has landed, it will be in a cluster the size of a grapefruit at the minimum and a beachball or larger at the maximum. No other stinging insect swarms and clusters like this, so if you are seeing this phenomenon, it is most assuredly honey bees that you are seeing. Swarming is the natural way that honey bee colonies reproduce and it is a totally normal and typical event for honey bees.

One other important thing to remember is that honey bees that are in swarm mode are very docile. So even though it looks scary, there is nothing to worry about. Before leaving their previous home, they all gorged on honey in order to have some resources on hand when they set up their new home, so all of the bees have that post-Thanksgiving dinner tryptophan feeling. If they could be sitting on the couch watching football, they would be! While the swarm is gathered on the tree/fence post/fire hydrant/wherever, they are scouting for a new home (hopefully not in the walls of your house) and most swarms will move on in a day or two if left alone. But, if you see a swarm, definitely call or email me. Beekeepers love to catch swarms and it is pretty cool to watch. If you can't get a hold of me, try this list of beekeepers willing to pick up swarms. Here are some photos of honey bee swarms to help...

Swarm on bleachers

Swarm on tree limb

Swarm on ground in bush

Swarm on tree limb

And a (grainy!) video of a swarm in progress (turn up the volume!)...

And finally, I know it can be tough to differentiate between a honey bee and a yellow-jacket and a bumblebee and a hornet or one of the many other flying, stinging insects. Here is a decent guide. And here is an adorable picture of a honey bee, notice the fuzzy mid-section, which wasps and hornets do not have (photo courtesy of Amy Hsu)...

You can always call me to help you identify the insect, but hopefully this little guide has helped!

A Bevy of Bumbles

Well, we here a lot of news these days about bee die-offs, pollinator shortages, pesticide poisonings and other doomsday proclamations but things are looking just peachy in our little neighborhood. I went out in the yard about 10 days ago and what I saw made my jaw drop open. I saw a bumblebee bacchanalia on the sedum that has rapidly spread in our yard from one plant that I inherited from my dad's container garden collection. 

You can see a few honeybees on the sedum too in the video. Bees always love this plant and its nice because it is a late season bloomer. But I have never seen anything like this. The kids and I were petting the bumblebees and they were so nectar-drunk that they didn't care a wink. Here are a few stills - you can even see pollen grains on their fuzzy little backs (click on the photos to enlarge them).

Oh, and here's another picture from earlier in the summer. I put out one of the filters I use for cleaning beeswax and it's lovely smell attracted a plethora of pollinators. Here you can see some honey bees, a red wasp, some yellow-jackets and a teensy wittle itty bitty fly in the upper left all happily co-existing (well, there was a little jousting, but they were hanging out on this together all morning that day).

Strange Removals Part II

I know you have been waiting with bated breath, so here is the rest of the story of my Summer of Strange Removals. After the Conshohocken job, the next bee removal job was in Northeast Philly at Disston Precision, a company that dates back to 1850 and is still functioning as a manufacturer of custom steel supplies, including saw blades. The bees were living in a window cavity, where the window had been removed and the space boarded up. 

View From Outside

View From Inside

We felt that this would be a fairly straightforward job - we'd just remove the large piece of plywood on the inside of the window, expose the hive and remove the bees and comb. And this is pretty much how things went. Although, when we opened the cavity, once again we saw very few bees in the hive. But have a look at these huge, gorgeous sheets of comb.

View from the bottom of the comb

We gradually removed sheet after sheet of comb and while we were seeing some bees, we were only seeing honey comb and no signs of any brood.

We got through the entire hive and there was absolutely no brood at all. No eggs, larvae or capped brood, no queen either.  With no brood comb to worry about and not too many bees, this was a quick and easy job. Because there were some bees in the hive, still working and gathering nectar, the honey was clean and there were no wax moths like there were at the job in Conshohocken. Joel saved the honey to use for making mead. We vacuumed up the bees that were there and Joel just set them free near his hives so they could join another colony.

So for the third time this summer, there were basically no new bees to add to my apiaries. Because there was no queen and no brood, the genetics of this hive would not be passed on and couldn't be preserved. My guess about this hive is that they swarmed some time in the early summer and were unsuccessful at making a new queen. They probably tried to make a new queen but if the new queen somehow got damaged or killed (eaten by a bird on her mating flight?) and there were no more eggs left in the hive, this hive would eventually die out because they wouldn't be able to make a new queen. Once all of the brood were hatched and there were no more young to care for, the remaining bees are left only to gather bunches and bunches of nectar and turn it into honey. And that's what they do, because that's what they know how to do!

Sometimes in this queenless situation, you will get what is called a "laying worker". This is when, in the absence of a viable queen and with no resources to make a new queen, one or more worker bees start to lay eggs. Problem is that the workers can only lay unfertilized eggs, which become male bees or drones. This is a last ditch effort to try to perpetuate the genetics of the hive, hoping that one of the drones will be able to mate with a queen somewhere and thus carry on the genes. There is a possible exception to this hopeless drone-laying worker situation called "thelytoky". Thelytoky is when a female is produced from an unfertilized egg. If the laying workers can create females bees, then the colony would be able to make a new queen with one of the female eggs that the laying worker lays. Confused yet? Dee Lusby, of Organic Beekeepers Yahoo Group fame, regularly insists that thelytoky is not as rare in honey bees as some would lead us to believe.

Ok, sorry for the biology lesson digression - back to the removal jobs. The final job of the summer was in West Philadelphia at a beautiful old Dominican Convent that is now an apartment building. The bees were entering the house through a third floor dormer and lots of bees were getting into other parts of the house via the attic and ductwork. The bees apparently had been there for several years and the owner had them sprayed earlier this summer. An unscrupulous exterminator told the homeowner that these were not honey bees so that he could spray them and make some money off of the job. Boo!!

Here we are getting things set up. The bees were entering the house near the little window to the left of the vacuum set-up. Little did we realize at this point that once again, we would not be needing the bee vac!

Finding the hive in the walls was challenging as the exterior and interior of the building were a mess of angles and weird compartments. We made a few holes in the walls and didn't find anything until our fourth attempt, the one that Jeff is working on in the picture below. 

 Here is what the inside of the wall looked like. But notice, once again, NO BEES!

Looking down into the cavity, some big sheets of comb...

There were a few bees coming and going, but we quickly realized that these were robber bees from another hive stealing the honey and that there were actually no bees living in this hive. One way to tell that the hive was being robbed was that the comb was all chewed up and raggedy with lots of capping wax on the floor.

As we proceeded to remove comb. At first all we were seeing was new, white honey comb and no brood comb. After we removed most of the honey comb, we saw that the comb kind of went around the corner down towards the bottom of the picture above. The rest of the hive ended up being under the little window. Here we found more honey and the dark brood comb and a bunch of wax moths, but still no bees, dead or alive.

We also soon realized that the few robber bees that were coming inside were quickly dying. It is normal for the bees to gather at a window during a removal job, going toward the light to try to get outside. But it is not normal for them to die within minutes. We figured that whatever had been sprayed in this hive was still killing the bees as they stole the honey. The bees that had been living here must have absconded once the insecticide was sprayed because there was no huge pile of dead bees inside the hive as one might expect when a hive is poisoned.

Poor dying bees on the window

Here is a big ol' bag of contaminated honey and comb, it weighed at least 40 pounds. Because it had been sprayed, neither of us wanted anything to do with this mess so we trashed it all.

At the end of the day and for the 4th time this summer, I did a removal job and didn't have any bees to show for it. But the summer wasn't a total loss - it is always great to see the feral hives and how the bees organize things. And all of the homeowners were happy to have the hives and comb out of their walls. And I also made a few bucks to help support this addictive hobby of mine. My next post will be about the Treatment Free Beekeeping Conference that I attended in Leominster, MA a few weeks ago.