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!

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!

From the Green Mountains to the Concrete Jungle

I promised more stories so here they are...

When I ordered bees way back in February, like last year I ordered two packages from the Seaborns in Tennessee and I ordered two small-cell nucs from Denny White in Williamsville, VT.  Small-cell nucs are not easy to find and Denny does not ship bees so I would need to drive to Vermont to pick them up - a bit of a long drive but I figured it would be a beautiful one.

So I left Philly on Saturday afternoon and drove to Pittsfield, MA where I spent the night with my friend Nicole (thanks Nicole!).  Then I woke up early and drove 2 more hours to get to Williamsville. I arrived and Denny was ready to pack up the nucs for the trip back to Philly. I was picking up two for me and two for another member of the Philadelphia Beekeeping Guild.  We drove a short distance from Denny's house to one of his beeyards. The setting was absolutely beautiful and idyllic - all I could think was "Wow, these bees are going to have a much different view when we get back home!"

Being up in the mountains presents different challenges than urban beekeeping.  Denny has had bears disturb his hives in the past. The white fence is electrified and that slab of meat on the fence is bacon - the idea being to get the bears to go after the bacon and touch the fence and ZAP!

As we packed up the nucs Denny and I had a little chance to talk about beekeeping and related topics.  He is a great guy and I could tell by the way he handled the bees and talked about them that he really cares deeply for the bees.  I think I could learn a ton from him and it's too bad we don't live closer - he would be a great mentor.  It is not easy to find people who have a lot of experience practicing small-cell, organic beekeeping and Denny is one of those people.

After packing up all of the bees and making sure there were no holes for the girls to escape from, we loaded them in the car. I drove home with 50,000 or so bees riding in the trunk behind me.  Fortunately we had done a good job sealing them up!

After about 5.5 hours driving, I was back in Philly.  I installed the bees in their new home right away - with some help from my assistant.  This site is a small abandoned park a few blocks from the other site.  Penny is planning on using it as a staging area for plants for her greening projects and also for raising cut flowers.

Here's a good shot of the queen - she is marked with a blue dot.  This makes her easier to find but also each year has a designated color so that you can know how old your queen is.

The installation went very smoothly.  The bees were mellow and no stings at all.  They were set up in their new city home.  I came back the next day to check on them and to feed them some honey to help get them started.  Much to my surprise, I arrived to a scene of destruction.  This was the view right outside the park.

Somehow, one day after I installed the bees, the owner of the vacant lot next to the park had decided he wanted to have the LARGE tree, which overhung the park, cut down.  I mean, give me a freakin' break - look at that tree, it has to be at least 15 years old if not more.  What are the chances that the day after the beehives were installed, the tree has to get cut down? I go inside the park and this is what I see - a large branch at least 6 inches in diameter is literally touching one of the hives.  The hive had moved a few inches but nothing was broken or damaged - unbelievable!  A few more inches and the hive could have been toast!

I was in complete shock.  I called Penny and she had no idea that this was going to happen.  The guys that were cutting down the tree had no idea there were bees in the park, just a few feet from the tree they were cutting down.  I showed them and they came in and cleaned up the area and were more careful with finishing their job.

So, the Green Mountain bees got a rude introduction to city life, but I think it will just make them tougher!  The plan for now is to keep them in this spot, but as I have quickly learned, with beekeeping you never know what will happen next!!

Bees That Way Sometimes

My stepdad has all these crazy sayings that he spouts when he wants to succintly comment on some absurdity of life (actually, usually he just says them because he likes to say them).  Last week he busted one out that I hadn't heard in a while "Be(e)s that way sometimes" - now with my new hobby, that saying has taken on new meaning!  (One of my other favorites is: "It's not so oft the cough that takes you off, it's more often the coffin they take you off in.)

What a spring we are having - the bees are loving it - the pollen and nectar are flowing and they are busy working. We have had some really hot days already - this past weekend it felt like July.  We've also had some good rain, which will ensure that a good nectar flow continues for the bees.

With all of the crazy snow we had this winter, our roof sprang a few small leaks.  I enlisted the help of Cory Suter, from BioNeighbors, to repair our roof. We agreed on him installing an environmentally friendly white roof coating. Other than Cory deciding to move the beehive by himself and getting stung on the head, everything went smoothly! The bees are happy with their new, cooler roof -

Unfortunately I will no longer be keeping bees at The Spring Gardens community garden.  After the hive there died, I decided that I didn't want to keep trudging up to the top of that shipping container where the hive was.  It was a pain in the ass and I didn't feel very safe up there either.  I asked them if we could find a new spot within the garden for the hive but they were unwilling to allow the bees to be anywhere but up on the shipping container.  It's kind of a shame because the garden is a great place and I would love to be able to keep bees there and use the hive as an educational tool.  Oh well, their loss.

The good news is that I have made a great contact in our neighborhood who is totally supportive of the bees.  Her name is Penny Giles - community activist, environmentalist, general go-getter and I would say, unofficial mayor of Francisville (this is the name of the neighborhood where I live).  Penny has found me two sites where I can keep hives and I have already set up two hives at each of the new sites for a total of 4 new hives.

Here are some shots of the first spot. Penny is planning on putting in a bunch of grapevines and other garden beds in this lot -

 

 While I was cleaning up the site, I saw a couple of these little guys - kind of cool to see them in the city.  As totem animals, snakes are a sign of change - and change is coming to this run-down lot - so I saw it as a good sign.

 Here are the two hives -

While installing the packages of bees, I royally screwed up the entire process.  I lost one of the queens (she flew away!) and almost lost the other (so I had to order one replacement queen).  In addition to that, I was stung 8 times on the head and face, which was tons 'o fun - here's a look -

Speaking of stings - here is a great article on remedies for bee stings - the winner for best drug remedy was caladryl and the best home remedy, toothpaste!

Something interesting happened while I was waiting for the replacement queen to arrive.  I went back to check on the hives one week after installing them and I saw that the hives were incredibly unequal in terms of population.  About 2/3 of the bees from the queenless hive had migrated to the queenright hive.  This left the queenless hive very weak and low in population.  But, because the queenright hive had so many bees, they were able to fill ten frames of comb with nectar and brood in just one week (that is fast!).  Once the new queen arrived, I did a little switcheroo to try to equalize the populations of the hives.  I installed the new queen and then swapped the positions of the two hives.  Now, when all of the field bees from the strong hive returned they would, unbeknownst to them, become part of the weak hive.  Well, it worked.  I did that maneuver about two weeks ago and I checked on those hives today.  The populations are not totally even but they are much closer than they were.  The strong hive is still really strong and the other one is now about average size.

So, lessons learned from this adventure - wear my veil, be better prepared, don't rush, stay calm and most of all, be very careful with the queen!

I have some good stories from installing the other hives too, but I will post those adventures later.

Finally...

...the bees have arrived!! They were supposed to arrive Wednesday - which would have been great because I work near home on Wednesdays - but alas, I got a call from the post office to tell me they didn't arrive on Wednesday!! So Thursday afternoon I get the call from Fred - post office manager - telling me that "Your bees has arrived". Problem was, Thursdays I work 40 minutes from home and I wasn't finished until 7:00. So I called my neighbors, the Champagnes, and they came to the rescue - they went and picked up the bees (thanks guys!!). So I didn't get to see the looks on the postal worker's faces, but I was told that on the walk home from the post office, there were many questions from the neighbors about what David was carrying!

This is what a 3 pound package of bees looks like. They are all hanging onto each other around the feeder can (which you can't even see). The queen is in the middle of it all in her own little cage.

So anyway, I have to race home from work to try to get home before it's dark out so I can install the bees in their new home. I get home at 7:40 and still have a few things to do to prepare (hey, I was never a boy scout, what can I say). The light is fading fast and I am scrambling around. I could have left the bees in the cage for the night but since they had an extra day of travel, I really wanted to get them in the hive. There were a few hundred dead bees on the bottom of the cage, but that's pretty typical. It had gotten dark out so we needed to bring a lamp out onto the roof - wonder if any of the neighbors were watching!

It is pretty amazing to hear the package of bees buzzing and humming - as I carried them up to the 3rd floor of the house, the volume of the buzz would rise and fall - but 10,000 bees buzzing in unison is pretty loud. I think Jolie liked it too...


I bring the bees up to the roof to and I'm ready to go. So I popped the lid off of the cage and removed the can of sugar water (their travel rations). When the cage was opened, a few bees starting flying around, but 99% of them stayed in the cage. The queen comes in her own small cage which is suspended in the middle of the larger cage. When the bee suppliers prepare the packages, they take bees from many different hives - so the workers and drones don't really know the queen. If the queen were just dumped in from the start with strange bees, there is a good chance they would treat her as an invader and kill her. So, the queen cage allows the workers to get to know the queen and her pheromone so that they can accept the queen as their own.

I had already set up the hive and now I just had to dump the bees in. (This picture is actually after I had already dumped them in.)

The bees are all kind of clinging to the top of the cage and to each other - they hold onto each other and form a kind of daisy-chain - it almost looks like a net. A sharp rap of the cage on the ground (or roof in this case) makes all the bees fall to the bottom - and then I just turned the package over and literally shook the bees into the hive. It took a couple more sets of rap-flip-shake to get most of the bees into the hive. At this point there are many more bees flying around - but they are incredibly docile. And somehow, I felt totally calm - I was surprised myself. I had no idea how I would feel - if I would be scared or nervous - but for the most part, I was calm. I didn't wear a veil or gloves or anything other than the clothes I had been wearing all day.

Like everything in beekeeping, there are several different ways to release the queen from her cage. One end of the queen's cage is plugged with fondant/candy. A typical way to release the queen is to suspend her little cage between the frames in the hive and let the worker bees eat through the candy to release her - this usually takes a few days and gives all of the bees time to get acquainted with the queen so that when she finally gets out of her cage, everything is hunky-dory. One disadvantage to this is that you lose 3-4 days of the queen beginning her work of raising brood. Another disadvantage is that you have to open the hive/frames to check if the queen has been released and retrieve the empty cage and this is very disruptive to the hive. So, another way to release the queen is to pop open her cage and dump her into the hive with the rest of the bees - the so-called "direct release" method. The major risk here is that the other bees may kill the queen. Also there is a chance the queen could just up and fly away when you release her this way. The major advantage is that the queen is immediately able to settle into her new home and get to work laying eggs.

Because my bees had a few days on the road to get to know the queen, I opted for the direct release method. I pried open her little cage and dumped her in. In reality, I can't say 100% that she is in the hive at this moment - besides the fact that it was getting dark out, she could have just taken off and said "I'm outta here". But I feel pretty good about it. I will know for sure when I open the hive for an inspection in a few weeks to check on what's happening - if there are eggs in the hive, you know that the queen is in there and doing her job. It is really discouraged to poke around in the hive a lot, especially in the first few weeks of a new hive setting up their home. It is hard to resist the temptation!!

Next I had to figure out the feeding situation. Until the hive gets more established, the weather gets consistently warmer and the nectar really starts to flow, they need a little help with food. Typically people use sugar water or honey to feed the bees. I opted for honey. I was using a method of feeding that involves filling a ziploc baggie with honey and laying it on top of the frames in the hive. You cut a few small slits in the bag, and the bees are able to get to the honey without it leaking all over the place (note to self - this only works if you have a ziploc that actually closes tightly!) So I am tearing through our kitchen trying to find a freakin' gallon ziploc that doesn't leak - yeah, the treehugger that I am, we wash and re-use our ziplocs and we didn't have one new bag in the whole house (I thought we did but I never actually checked!). So I finally found one that would hold water - or so I thought. I filled it with about 4 cups of honey and a little water to thin it out. I even turned it upside down just to check for leakage - all good. So I laid it on the top of the frames and made a few 3 inch slits with a razor and covered up the hive.



At this point I am just kind of hanging out and watching the bees. There are a decent number of bees flying around - some of them bumping into me or landing on me. But again, I was pretty calm. I felt a few bees on the back of my neck - hanging out on the fuzzy hair on the back of my neck. It didn't really phase me until I felt a little pinch. I honestly didn't realize I had been stung for a good five seconds - it barely hurt at all (not as bad as some acupuncture needles I've inserted!). I did get a little freaked and I went inside for a second to make sure the stinger was out - I had Teresa scrape it out. If you ever get stung by a honeybee, first thing you should do is get the stinger out - because as it sits in your skin, it pumps more venom into you. It stung a little bit, but really not bad (today it is just itchy like a mosquito bite). I went back outside to finish cleaning up. No biggie.

I woke up early this morning to check on the girls. When I looked outside - I saw a total mess! A river of honey was flowing from the bottom of the hive down to the gutter. Bees were drowning and getting covered in the sticky sweet liquid. I guess if you're a bee, there are worse ways to go - I think it's equivalent to us drowning in a vat of ice cream or maybe beer if that's your thing! My ziploc was unlocked!! This is definitely not how it is supposed to happen! After cleaning up as best I could, I just spent some time watching the bees settling into their new home. I think they'll be OK.

To be continued...