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).

Attendees of Guild Meeting on Thurs, Aug 18, 2016 can download Adam's Powerpoint "3 Steps to Healthier Bees" here. In order for the links to be active, you will need to download it and not just view it in Google Drive.

Adam can be reached at phillybees at gmail dot com if you have any questions. Thanks!

Three Steps to Healthier Bees

Attendees of Philadelphia Beekeepers Guild Meeting on Thurs, Aug 18, 2016 can download Adam's Powerpoint presentation "3 Steps to Healthier Bees" here. 

Adam can be reached at phillybees at gmail dot com if you have any questions. Thanks!

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.

A Summer of Strange Removal Jobs - Part I

I have done 4 honey bee removal jobs this summer and they have all been unusual in their own way. I worked with Joel and Jeff Eckel, of We Bee Brothers fame, on each of the jobs (though that's not the unusual part!). Maybe this wacky hot weather is causing some of this weird stuff, who knows. Let's have ourselves a looksie...

The first removal of the summer was at the Philadelphia Navy Yard in an old abandoned Navy theater that is being renovated into medical offices. The foreman of the demolition team called me in an effort to remove and save the bees before they needed to destroy and redo the roof. The bees were entering the building in the gaping hole in the top right corner of the building. 

The inside of the building was totally bombed out, there were no stairs to get up to the 2nd floor, so we had to haul our stuff up a ladder...

We would access the bees from a little bathroom and when I opened the door, my mouth dropped open. On the floor of this room was a tremendous pile of dead bees, 2 inches deep in places. I had never seen anything like it. I think that all that it meant was that this colony had been here a long time and this was just the accumulation of years of dead bees. I wish I could share the funky smell with you...

  Anyway, we set up some scaffolding and Jeff got to work and opened the ceiling to reveal the hive.

We vacuumed bees and removed comb. Jeff spotted a bunch of swarm cells as he was vacuuming bees and we quickly realized that we got this hive just as they were preparing to swarm. Lucky us! We got to see 6 or 7 virgin queens hatching out of their cells, a couple of them came out right into my hands (sorry no pictures)! When a hive is getting ready to swarm the workers will keep the queens in their cells until the colony decides that it is time to swarm. The workers will feed the queens through a small hole in the queen cell and they will keep adding wax to the cell as the queen tries to emerge, effectively keeping her confined until they are ready to let her out. Once we disturbed the hive, the workers could no longer attend to the queen cells and the queens were able to leave their cells. Pretty awesome! We caught 3 of the virgin queens and put them in queen cages with a few worker bees to attend to them. We would try, unsuccessfully, to get those virgin queens mated in our beeyards.




There were some parts of the hive that were tucked up in the rafters and we really couldn't access them without causing major structural damage to the building. I worked on tying the comb into frames in my little blue workshop (picture below) across the hall, nice ehh?

We removed as many bees and as much comb as possible and I think the demolition team just killed the remaining bees a few days later. I set these bees up in my Francisville apiary and when I went to check on them 10 days later - the hive was totally empty of bees! They left me! I think they were still in swarm mode and they just took off to who knows where. So, unfortunately, when it was all said and done I didn't get to keep the genetics and add this colony to my apiary. This is the first time I have ever had a colony abscond on me, drats!






The second removal job of the summer was in Conshohocken. Remember the swarm I caught earlier in the summer out in Conshy? Well, a few weeks after that one, I got a call from the same homeowner telling me there was ANOTHER swarm in his yard. Here's a quick video from that second swarm in Conshy, I caught the swarm actually happening and stood in the middle of it as I took the video. It was quite an exhilarating experience to stand in the middle of these bees! Turn up the volume so you can hear them!



I knew that both of these swarms came from a house nearby where bees were living in the walls and this was the second removal job of the summer. Joel and I did it a month after I had captured the second swarm. Fellow Guild member Amy Hsu watched us and took some great photos - all of the photos below were taken by Amy. When I got to the house and took a look at the spot where the bees had been entering the house, I saw something odd - there was no traffic going in and out. It was a warm summer day and the hive should have been busy working. I stood there for a few minutes and saw only one or two bees go in. Hmmm...

We got to work. We opened the ceiling and this is what we saw...

Wavy Honey Comb

Beautiful, no? Only problem is, this comb should have been crawling with bees! But there was barely a bee to be found, what gives? My only theory is that this hive swarmed twice and then for some reason they completely abandoned this space. They had been here at least a month ago, because I saw them swarm on that day. Between then and the day that we did this job, the bees decided to skedaddle. We did come across a handful of bees, but these were just some poor, lost stragglers. There was still a decent amount of honey in the hive, and there were some other friends dining on the delectable delight...

Wax Moth Larvae - Yum!

 

When a hive is uninhabited, it doesn't take long for wax moths to move in. In the photo above you can see the larvae that have infested the honey comb. They eat the honey, beeswax and pollen that is stored in the comb. They are basically the clean up crew for empty hives.  Normally the bees keep them at bay but once the bees are gone, the wax moths take over and completely destroy/clean up the comb.

Wax Moth Cocoons 

This is what the ceiling looked like. The first hole revealed nothing so we had to move the second hole over to the next joist space to find the hive. Sometimes locating the precise location of the hive is the toughest part of the job.

We cleaned out the ceiling cavity pretty well and wrapped up the job. Joel took the wax moth-laden comb to feed to his chickens, who I am sure very much appreciated the gesture!

Cleaned Out Ceiling Cavity

One Lonely Little Lady

So, two removal jobs and no bees to show for it (unless we count the two swarms from the Conshohocken hive, both of which are doing quite well so far). I did get some nice drawn comb from the Navy Yard bees, which I have already put into use in other hives. And I managed to salvage some other wax that I'll make into candles in the fall.  I'll write about the other 2 removal jobs in my next post...

Damn, It's Hot

Ridiculously hot weather so far this summer. Here in Philly we recently had 10 consecutive days of 90+ weather. The bees seem OK with it, they have made a lot of honey. One thing they do when it is this hot out is called "bearding", they remove themselves from the inside of the hive at night in order to help cool it off, here's a look...

Hey Sis, Pass Me a Beer and a Slice of Pizza

Given that I am an urban beekeeper, I like to call this "Sittin' on the Stoop"

Stay Cool, y'all...

A New (Old) Apiary

So I set those Conshy bees up in a new apiary, a location where I have kept bees in the past - The Spring Gardens Community Garden. Just in case you haven't read all of the posts on my blog (!), here are some stories from the good ol' days when I kept bees in the Spring Gardens way, way back in 2009: Bees in My Britches (a must read!) and The Waiting.

Those original Spring Garden bees didn't survive their first winter and I wasn't a hearty enough soul to continue climbing up on top of that shipping container to put more bees up there, so I focused on my other apiaries. Time passed and a few months ago I got wind that a new beekeeper and Garden member (Karen) was planning to keep bees in the garden this year. And then, knowing that I had kept bees there in the past, Karen contacted me to ask for my advice and help. So I gladly offered my input, not expecting to actually have any bees there myself. Karen had planned on keeping one hive at the garden but the beekeeping committee got the OK to place two hives there, so Karen asked if anyone else wanted to set up a hive. I jumped at the opportunity because I think its a great place for bees and I really enjoy being in there myself AND the bees would have a nice, new home in a cozy evergreen corner of the garden. Thanks Karen, for all of your work in getting this set up!   

Setting up the Conshy swarm in a new hive was a breeze thanks to the bee vac set-up I used for catching the swarm. Basically I just needed to plop the box with the bees (frames already in there) onto a bottom board and voila - instant hive! We had a few onlookers and helpers, which is always fun. I set the bees up around 5:00pm and by 1:00pm the next day, they were already bringing in beautiful yellow pollen. Thanks to Karen's hubby for taking pictures!

Getting Things Ready

Leveling the Bottom Board of the Hive

Placing Hive on Bottom Board and Removing Top of Bee Vac

Apprentice Beekeeper

Taking a Quick Look at the Bees

Feeding the Bees Some Crystallized Honey

View of Center City From Behind the Hive

The Bee Corral!

First Honey Bee Swarm of the Year!

As usual, it's been months since I wrote but I'll spare you the typical lame excuses. It was an incredibly mild winter in Philly and the bees barely stopped working all winter. They have built up quickly and some of my hives are booming already, looking like they usually do in summer. I went into the winter with 8 hives and I lost 2, both of which were weak and small at the end of last fall. I should have combined those two into one hive, which would have given them a better chance to survive the winter.

I am guessing it will be a busy year for swarming as hives build up quickly and take beekeepers by surprise (hopefully not my hives, but I wouldn't be shocked!). I had my first swarm call last week and I successfully captured and re-homed the bees. The bees swarmed from a colony living in the walls of a house in Conshohocken. I am scheduled to remove the colony from the house in early June. The swarm settled in the neighbor's yard on a peach tree. The day they swarmed was a gorgeous sunny day, but I didn't get there until the next day, which was cold and rainy. I think there is a good chance these girls would not have made it if I didn't grab them because the next two days were nasty.

The swarm was clustered on a two fairly thick branches, about 7 feet up in the tree, so I wouldn't be able to cut these branches off. I set up a ladder so I could get closer to the swarm. I would have to quickly shake/jar the branches to get the swarm to fall off.

When I shook the tree, about half of the bees went into the box (not shown in picture), a quarter of the bees ended up on the lawn and another quarter were still in the tree. At first I wasn't sure if the queen ended up in the box, but within 5 minutes or so, I saw bees fanning and spreading Nasonov pheromone at the entrance, which is a sure sign that the queen was in da' house. I moved the box to the ground to get the bees from the lawn. If you look at this crappy video, you can see a bunch of bees flying into the hole and also some bees marching on the grass towards the entrance as they pick up the scent of the Nasonov pheromone and reunite themselves with the colony.

                                    

Once most of the bees from the ground were in the hive, I moved the box back up to the ladder to get the bees that had reclustered on the tree. As a side note, I used the box from the Bushkill bee vac setup, which I find awesome for catching swarms.

I strapped the box on the ladder to secure it and I left it there for a few hours to give the bees a chance to rejoin their sisters and queen mama inside of the box. When I returned later in the afternoon, 99% of the bees had moved into the box, with just a small handful of stragglers holding out. I left them there, hoping that they would rejoin their parent colony back in the walls of the house. It was a successful and relatively easy swarm capture. I gave the homeowners, Danny and Abey, a small jar of honey and thanked them for helping me (and the bees!). I kept the bees in the box in my basement for two days until I had clearance to set them up at my newest apiary (story to come soon)...