Bees at Marathon Farm

In addition to Woodford Mansion, I am super excited about my other new apiary location this year.  Thanks to friend and fellow acupuncturist Laura Hawley, I learned about the Marathon Farm project a few months ago. It's a project of the mini-chain of Marathon restaurants in Philly. In a nutshell, they are taking a big vacant lot at 27th and Master in the Brewerytown neighborhood and transforming it into an urban farm. The food grown at the farm will be bought by the restaurants and also sold to the community via a small farmers market near the site. You can read more about the farm and their progress here. When I learned about the project I immediately emailed farmer Patrick and asked if they would be interested in having bees at the farm. He spoke with the owner of Marathon and everyone was really excited about it, so it was a go.

With the support of an incredible array of volunteers, the farm has come together quickly and seeds have already been sown. There are a bunch of raised beds and a small greenhouse. There are plans for a picnic area and a small play area for kids. These are the kinds of projects that we need more of, especially with the ridiculous number of vacant lots in our fair city!

Since my packages of bees for this site came earlier than I expected, we had to scramble to get the site ready. Including myself, there are now 3 Adams involved in the Marathon Farm project - the farm manager and the education director are both Adam too. Farmer Adam, the owner of the Marathon Grill, Cary and I cleared a spot for the hives in a location where they should receive nice early morning sun. We plan on putting some kind of low barrier around the hives to discourage people from getting too close.

Checking out the queen with farmer Adam.

I meant to do the same type of front door queen introduction that I did at Woodford, but I forgot to bring a little stick to attach to the queen cage and I couldn't find anything on site. So instead I just laid the queen cage on the bottom board.

Dumping the bees in on top of the queen

Check out the "hive stands", rounds of tree from some of the weed trees that they cut down as they were clearing the lot (remember that if you click on images, you can see them full size).

 

First hive set up, getting ready for the second

 

Second hive

In the next picture you can see the raised beds of the farm and the greenhouse. Across the street from the farm is a recreation center with some ball fields.

Both hives set up, view of the farm and greenhouse

This is the view looking in the opposite direction. You can see this is an oddly shaped lot, triangular, with long brick walls that must have been part of a large building. The lot just goes back into a corner. This is where they plan to put in a kids play area.

Future site of kids play area

The weather last week after installing all 4 of my packages was pretty nasty, cold and rainy. The bees didn't have much chance to forage, but they should be fine with all of the honey and pollen that I gave them. I was able to look in the hives this weekend to check on things. One of the hives was bringing in bright yellow pollen, it didn't take them long to find food! Mainly I wanted to see if the queens had been released from their cages and three out of four of them were released. One of the queens at Woodford was still in her cage, all of the attendant bees in her cage were dead but she was fine. The bees in the hive didn't release her for some reason, it actually kind of looked like they were ignoring her. I am learning that you can tell a lot about a hive by observing the activity in front of it and the bees in front of this hive were acting weird, they were not aggressive but they looked disorganized. I opened the queen cage and gently placed her on top of the frames and watched her scoot down into the hive. Hopefully everything will be fine, but only time will tell. Once the weather warms up a bit, I'll do a more thorough inspection of all hives to see if I can see signs of healthy, laying queens.

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!

Support a Great Project!

Friend and fellow Guild officer Daniel Duffy is starting a project in West Philly that will train youth how to keep bees.  They will also sell their beehive products at farmers markets in Philly.  Watch the video below and if you are so inclined, make a donation to this project by clicking on the "KICKSTARTER" link in the lower right-hand corner of the video -

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...

Interview, Video and Pics from Honey Fest

I recently did an interview with Bradd DelMuto for his Philly based blog 22nd and Philly.  Have a look at the interview and the rest of Bradd's blog here.

Also, Philadelphia Honey Fest happened last weekend and it was a huge success.  Here are some pictures and a video montage of the weekend events.  And here is a great story from a Temple journalism student.

Get Outta My Bedroom!

Earlier this summer I got a call about some bees living in a house in Southwest Philadelphia.  I went to check out the situation and what I saw was hundreds of dead bees (and some live ones) in what used to be a 6 year-old's bedroom (he hadn't stayed in his room for 6 months because of the bees).  There was even honey dripping through the ceiling and landing in a honey puddle on the floor.  The bees were entering the house through the flashing of the exterior roof and they had made their home in the ceiling of the bedroom.  As far as we could tell, the bees had been there for at least one-and-a-half years.  In order to remove the bees we'd have to rip open the ceiling, cut out all of the honeycomb and get all of the bees out of there.

More hands make easier work so I enlisted the help of world famous president of The Philadelphia Beekeepers Guild, Joel Eckel.  We had a great time and everything went amazingly smooth.  The first order of business was to locate the hive exactly and determine how big it was, which meant opening up the ceiling (remember you can click on images to enlarge them).

Believe it or not, the bees were pretty damn calm, especially given that we were completely destroying their home.  After getting an idea of how large the hive was and where its boundaries were, we began gathering the bees.  The easiest and best way to do that is with a vacuum - yes, a bee vacuum.  There are many different variations of the bee-vac out there, but the one I purchased is basically like a wooden hive body that gets hooked up to a shop vac.  The bees get sucked into the hive body and theoretically hang out in there until you take them to their new home (later you'll see why I say "theoretically") .  Unfortunately I didn't get a good picture of the bee vac but here's a little demo:

That huge chunk of honeycomb that you see in the beginning on top of the bucket was packed with a few pounds of honey.  After vacuuming a big bunch of bees, Joel began cutting the comb off of the ceiling and the walls.  If the comb was filled with honey, we put it in a bucket to deal with later.  We harvested about 40 pounds of honey from this hive, most of which will be fed back to these bees or to my other bees if they need it.  If the comb was filled with brood, we tried to preserve it by rubberbanding it into frames so that it could be placed into a hive body.  Here's how that went:

So we would vacuum some bees, cut out some comb and repeat.  It took us about 4 hours in total.  That included some help from the owners of the building, Alex (video below) and Chris (pic below).  They really got into it and were amazed by the bees and the process of removing them.

Once we cut out all of the comb and vacuumed as many bees as possible, we cleaned up and left.  We knew that many of the forager bees were out foraging and would return later in the day.  So I returned to the house after dusk and there were a few more softball-sized clusters of bees hanging out near the window.  I did one last vacuum job and then packed up for home.  After my traumatic swarm incident, I wanted to get these bees set up in a new hive ASAP.  I brought the hive body with the rubberbanded brood frames and I put it on my roof, where this hive would live for the time beeing.

I went to dump the bees out from the vacuum box into the new hive and was shocked and dismayed  to see that once again, a lot of the bees were dead.

So, bee carnage part 2?  Well, it wasn't quite as bad this time.  It seemed like there were enough living bees that this hive might have a fighting chance to re-establish itself.  But, in retrospect I do think that the bee vacuum box was just way too small and there were too many bees in there and it was too hot. Nonetheless, in the days following the relocation, the bees seemed to be adjusting to their new home.

Much to my delight, when I checked on the bees earlier this week, they had made some queen cells in an effort to replace their deceased queen.  They had also begun to secure the comb into the frames.  You can see a video of me checking on this hive and an excellent article on urban beekeeping right here.  I am also feeding their honey back to them.

The chances that this hive will make it through the winter are still slim - mainly because their population was so decimated and they will lose a few weeks of growth due to the fact that they needed to make a queen from one of the existing larvae.  But, you never know and worst case scenario is that I have 40 pounds of surplus, chemical-free honey to feed my other bees AND most importantly, the little boy who lost his bedroom to the bees can now have it back!

From Bee Hero to Bee Zero

It hurts to write this post but I feel obliged to report it.  The excitement of last week's swarm capture quickly disappeared when I went to set up the swarm in its new home the day after catching it. 

At about 11 AM the next day I went to get the nuc box and bring it to one of my apiaries to set up a new hive and install the swarm. When I grabbed the nuc box I saw something that kind of didn't look right - there were a bunch of lifeless looking bees hanging out near the screened entrance.  I took a quick peak inside and I saw a mass of soggy-looking, lifeless bees on the floor of the nuc.  I rushed to try to take them to the apiary, not knowing that at that point, 95% of the bees were already dead.

When I got to the apiary I finally opened the box totally and saw for sure what I had feared - I had killed the bees, basically cooked them.  I thought that they would be OK in the little nuc box for one night and I thought that there was enough ventilation, but apparently I was wrong. Sorry girls :(

This is what the bees looked like when I dumped them out -

I was really bummed and pissed at myself for making such a stupid mistake.  I should have either put them in a bigger box immediately or maybe kept them in the air-conditioned house for the night.  Like everything in this beekeeping adventure, I chalk it up to a lesson learned - one I will not forget.

Fortunately there was a bit of good news - earlier this summer a bunch of us from the Philadelphia Beekeepers Guild were interviewed by a reporter for United Airlines Hemispheres Magazine.  They were doing a feature article on urban beekeeping in Philadelphia.  The article was published in the August issue and you can read it here. It is a great article with amazing photos that were taken by Keliy Anderson-Staley with an old view camera and processed on glass plate negatives.  You can read more about the camera and the developing process here and also see some of the photographers other work.

So goes life, so goes beekeeping - gotta take the good with the bad.

Swarm!

A swarm in May is worth a load of hay, a swarm in June is worth a silver spoon, but a swarm in July isn't worth a fly - so the saying goes.  Well, I just got myself a fly!  Yesterday while I was at work I got a call from Abigail about a swarm of bees on her block near 21st and Fitzwater.  I couldn't leave work until 7:00 so I was hoping the bees stayed put and fortunately they did.  My first chance for a swarm capture - I was pretty damn excited.

I loaded up the car with equipment and the family and headed across town.  We arrived and saw the smallish swarm about 12 feet up in a Callery Pear tree (it's the light brown colored mass at the top of the picture) -

 Here's a close-up -

I only had a 6 foot ladder which wouldn't be high enough.  My lovely wife had the idea of pulling the car underneath the swarm and putting the ladder on top of the car.  Then, helpful neighbors Abigail and Chad grabbed a perfect sized piece of plywood to put under the ladder to give it some extra stability.  Here's the set-up -

 The swarm was very mellow (as they usually are), it's an amazing site to see this roiling mass of bees hanging out on a tree limb.  Swarms are usually not aggressive because they have no home to defend and, before they leave their home hive they fill up their bellies with honey for the trip into the unknown and this helps keep them calm (like the post-Thanksgiving dinner kind of feel).   So all I had to do was clip the branch off and drop it into a nuc box that I had handy.  The scariest part wasn't the bees but being on the ladder, on top of the car.

Here are the girls in the nuc.  I would say that 95% of them stayed on the branch as I dropped it into the box.  The few that were flying eventually made their way into the box on their own.

 

Again, none of the bees were at all aggressive, they paid virtually no mind to any of the humans nearby.  I had about 50 on my hand at one point but they were just hanging out, not trying to sting me.

So my job for today is to get this swarm set up in a new home.  There is a good chance that they will not make it through the winter because they won't have enough time or population to build a strong colony but I figure it's worth a try.  Worst case scenario is that maybe they will draw some nice honeycomb for me that I can use in the future.


Here's helpful neighbor Chad, first time wearing a veil.  Thanks again for the help!

Growing Up

In the last week I have checked on all 5 hives and they are all doing well. I have added new boxes to all of the hives as they grow their population.  The queens need room to lay more eggs so that the colonies can expand and prepare for the rest of the nectar flow.  Some of the hives were stronger than others, some had better laying queens but we'll see how the hives progress through the rest of the summer.  There is a bunch of honey in the hive at my house and the larger two hives at the Field St site.  I am going to harvest some of it next week and bring it to the next meeting of the Beekeepers Guild.  We are going to do an extraction demo and I will be doing the crush and strain method.  We'll also demo how to use a honey extractor.

For the most part things were unremarkable when I checked on each hive, but one of the hives at Folsom St (this is the site where the tree was cut down) was sharing its home.  I opened the hive to see tens of thousands of little black ants and their eggs scurrying around on the inner cover of the hive (unfortunately I didn't get any pictures). It looked as though they were living in the outer cover - between the aluminum and wood. I quickly took the cover and dumped it off on the other side of the park.  The bees didn't seemed bothered by the ants but this hive did seem a little weaker than the one right next to it.  There are so many variables that it's hard to know if the ants were a problem.  (I have been back to check on this hive and it is fine.  The ants are gone and the bees are carrying on with their business.)

Here are a few other observations and pictures.

We had some really hot days in the past few weeks, some near 90 degrees. On one of those days I was watching the hive on the roof and I saw this -

Look closely at the front of the hive and you will see a bunch of the girls with their butts sticking up and facing outwards from the opening of the hive.  They move their wings while they are in this position in order to create a current of air to help keep the hive cool on really hot days. Basically, air conditioning!


In this shot you can see a new bee about to emerge from its cell.  On the left side of the photo look at the cell with the little hole in it.  The bee is chewing her way out the cell in order to join her sisters.  Pretty amazing to watch (I tried video but my little camera didn't do well with the close up).  The glistening liquid in the adjacent cells is nectar on its way to becoming honey - yum!!

 Here is some beautiful foundationless comb being drawn.  These are the Carniolan bees from Vermont - you can notice that some of the bees are much darker, almost grayish-black in color.

On this particular day of inspections, I did take a few stings.  You can see how I react - my left hand took one sting on the knuckle. 

 

This was about 24 hours after the sting, when the swelling was at its worst.  The itching wasn't too bad this time.  I am hoping that as time goes on and I get stung more that my reaction is not quite as severe.  From what I gather, it can go either way - you can become less sensitive or more sensitive. 

Thanks to fellow Guild member Dave Harrod, I found a book called Clan Apis - it is a graphic novel that basically describes in accurate detail what life is like inside of a honeybee colony, told through the eyes and mouth of "Nyuki" the honeybee.  It is an entertaining and informative read.  I am currently reading it to my daughter and she loves it.  To get a sense of his style, click on Clan Apis link above and then click the link on the right called "Killer Bee" and you can read a true story about the author (a bee researcher) rendered in his cartoon style.