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.

What A Summer!

Well it's been a long time since I wrote but that's not because there hasn't been anything interesting going on. Between family, work, being president of the Guild, caring for my 9 hives, editing a book and trying to have some fun, I haven't had much time to write. There is so much to tell that I split this entry into two - be sure to see the "Swarm!" entry for some great pictures and a hilarious story.

As I mentioned, I have 9 hives this year, the most I have ever had. Here's the breakdown of the hives and then I will update the status of each -

1. Overwintered hive from last year
2. Hive from Oakland cemetery bees
3. I ordered 4 packages from the Seaborns this spring - two were placed at Woodford Mansion
   and two at Marathon Farm.
4. I bought one nuc from Don Sausser in Delaware.
5. I caught 3 swarms this year.

(Yes, I know that adds up to 10 hives, but you'll see what happened!)

My over-wintered hive from last year did great this summer. They grew to 7 boxes tall and are as healthy as ever. I harvested about 60 pounds of honey from this hive in July. At a recent inspection I saw signs that this hive had swarmed - the population was smaller than usual, there wasn't as much honey in the hive and there were lots of hatched queen cells in the hive. I'm not too worried about them but the swarm and the loss of population and honey could be a potential problem heading into winter. There was a new queen present and she was laying well. And the nuc from Don Sausser has done well too, they are on my roof. I harvested about 35 lbs of honey from them. Although one thing I will say about these bees is that they are a bit feisty and they don't always take kindly to my bumbling inspections! My total honey harvest this summer was about 150 lbs - most of which is already gone (either sold or given away!).

The last time I wrote was way back in April and I was writing about the removal at Oakland cemetery. The bees from that removal have done quite well for themselves this summer. Unfortunately we did kill the queen in the removal process but the girls quickly made a new queen and therefore perpetuated the genetics of this feral hive. The colony proceeded to settle in to their new home in Francisville and they have built up nicely over the course of the summer. About 6 weeks after this removal job, I got another call from Jackie. It turned out that she hadn't had a chance to fix the window and roof and another swarm of bees moved in to the same exact spot!! So we went back to the cemetery and removed that colony. It was an easy job because the comb was being built right out in the open.

Woodford Hives with some great 'shrooms from all of the rain this summer

Another view of the 3 Woodford Hives

In late March when I installed my new packages at Woodford Mansion and Marathon Farm, I tried a new queen installation method where I placed the queen in the front door of the hive instead of placing her between frames inside of the hive. Well, that experiment was a TOTAL FAILURE!! I lost 3 out of 4 of those queens!! It turns out that the weather was too cold for that kind of queen introduction and the bees basically abandoned their queens to die on the bottom boards. At Woodford, one of the queens actually survived and the bees from the hive next door (who had lost their queen) all moved into the hive with the healthy queen! When I opened that hive it was bursting with bees (6 lbs worth) and the hive next door was empty! I was going to split this hive back into two hives but when I caught some swarms, I decided to leave this super hive alone. (This is why I only have 9 hives instead of 10.)

The other 2 hives at Marathon had no eggs to grow themselves a new queen, so this lead to a situation known as having a "laying worker". Basically this is when some of the worker bees start laying eggs because of a lack of a queen. Sounds great and pretty amazing, right? But the problem is that laying workers can only lay unfertilized eggs, which produce drones, the male bees. So if you don't remedy the situation, the hive will eventually die out. The solution for both of these hives was to donate frames of worker eggs from my other hives so that the queenless hives could make themselves a proper queen (this is when it really pays to have multiple hives). It took a few weeks but both hives eventually made themselves a new queen.

Because these hives lost so much time, they didn't grow to be big enough to make it through the winter, so I recently combined the two hives. I removed the queen from one hive and placed her in a nuc with some other bees as an insurance policy just in case something went wrong with the combine (the nuc is in my backyard, not sure what I will do with it). Then I simply stacked all of the boxes from both hives on top of each other with a sheet of newspaper between them. The newspaper helps to temporarily separate the hives from each other so they don't fight. In the time it takes the bees to chew through the newspaper, they will accept each other and not fight. It's a neat little trick.

Notice the bees flying around on the left, trying to figure out where their home went!

The next day - see the little green fuzzy stuff in the corner of the bottom board?

And a big pile of green fuzzy stuff on the ground next to the hive? That's chewed up newspaper!!

Combining these two hives greatly improves their chances of surviving the winter. We'll see how it goes. If they survive the winter I can split them back into 2 hives in the spring.

My 3 other new hives are made up of swarms that I caught this summer. In the interest of telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth, I made a separate blog post about my swarm stories from the summer, including the very funny story of "The Honda Swarm". Go read it!