Hive-Mind

I just spoke with Mike Doleshell, who’s taking care of extracting the honey from my hives for me. He says that I was right about having a good season, looks like we’ll fill 3 5 lbs buckets!

He also said that he was surprised at how light my honey was, especially compared to another beekeeper’s in my area. It sounds like with the weird weather we had in the Pacific Northwest this year, the blackberry season was shorter than usual, so the bees spent more times in the grasses, which can lead to a darker, and sometimes not as tasty, honey. Mine, though, sound like they found the right stuff.

Must be all those beautiful flowers and vegetables my neighbors have been growing.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that in addition to keeping bees, we at Hive Mind throw some kick a** parties. Specifically, 14 years running, we’ve been throwing a huge Halloween party, with all the proceeds going to charity. Here’s a little FAQ on it:

What’s Hive Mind Halloween? An outrageously fun Halloween party (check out some pictures from last year: Chrissy’s and Grover’s.) It started as a house party in 1994, with everybody just piling in and doing the decorating and cleaning up together in one crazy couple of days. It outgrew the house, clocking in at just under 1,000 people last year, but somehow has never lost its house party feel. I hope it never does.

Where does the money go?
100% of the proceeds get split between two flat out awesome charities:

• Room to Read (www.roomtoread.org): This group helps build schools and libraries in developing countries where poor villages simply don’t have the resources to get books for their children to read or even the rudimentary shacks in which to hold classes. Basic literacy is key to freedom and independence. I can’t think of a better way to help people then to teach them to read and to think. And get this: by partnering with local communities, they can do it really, really efficiently.

  In 2006, for example, the Hive Mind Halloween party raised enough money to build an entire school in a village in Nepal, Shree Seti Devi. See the report and pictures of the school with the kids we helped! See it on a satellite map! Feel it!

  In 2007, we raised $9,700 to fund scholarships for girls in poor countries, totalling 32 years of education. Be clear: this isn’t scholarship for an elite college, this is scholarship so young girls, 9 and 10 years old, can learn to read instead of working in fields, or worse. Want to see pictures of the girls we helped? Check out the Room to Read Yearbook.

• Youngstown Cultural Arts Center is a multi-purpose facility committed to providing space and support for creative expression, community building and positive youth development in the Delridge and surrounding neighborhoods. Besides our 150-seat theater, Movement Studio, and other community rental space, Youngstown houses seven non-profit organizations dedicated to youth empowerment through artistic development, and also has two floors of artist resident studios in the renovated Cooper School classrooms. Donations from Hive-Mind Halloween will go towards our All Access After School Programming, offering free classes every weekday to youth between the ages of 13 to 19 in Basic Studio Recording, Yoga, Spoken Word Poetry, Band 101 and more. The Delridge neighborhood has traditionally lacked safe and creative spaces for young people and funds will be used to pay the teaching artists and enable outreach into the high schools of West Seattle.

Sounds preachy. Is it any fun?
Ummm…yeah. Two rooms of DJ’s plus outdoor antic area, tons of art, everybody in costume. Not for the faint of heart. Really.

Can I help?
Yes! First: tell your cool friends about it. Second, we need volunteers to create it, set it up and clean it up. Join the Hive Mind Halloween Planning List if you want in! (Volunteers come for free, of course, if the $20 entrance is a concern)

When is it again?
Saturday, October 25th (the Saturday before Halloween). Full deets at www.hive-mind.com/halloween/08

What’s with the “Hive Mind”?
A “hive mind” is the super-intelligence that arises when a bunch of individuals act together, achieving things that each couldn’t alone. Think of how useful a single neuron is compared to a brainful of neurons. That’s us, everyone who works on something like this, coming together to make it happen. Read more about it.

My friend Marcus just sent this “Beekeepers for Obama” badge to me. I don’t know where it came from (here, maybe?) and it just tickled me too much not to share.

It’s not unreasonable, either: in terms of being a custodian of the environment as well as a voice for the small business-person (and let me tell you, nobody’s buying a second house in Vail off of beekeeping money…it’s golden, not gold), Obama’s definitely the right man. Check out this amazing graph illustrating the distribution of tax cuts in Obama’s plan versus McCain’s.

Now, home come my 60,000 girls don’t get to vote?

As always, some good advice showed up in the comments to Harvest post.

Andrey suggests using 9 frames not only in the honey supers, but also in the brood chambers. Interestingly, he says “let bees draw out foundation first then remove one frame.” I’m curious, though: why let them draw out ten frames and then remove one, rather than just start with nine?

On the mite front, Andrey pointed me towards Thymol as a natural remedy, in addition to affirming the need for a screened bottom board. I did a bit of reading on Thymol, a derivative of thyme, and it does seem safe (although I’ll admit I’m often skeptical of the belief that anything “natural” or “plant-derived” is somehow intrinsically safe). An article from BBC News suggests that it can kill off 90% of the mite population. Might be worth a go.

Finally, Beek pointed me towards a “clearer board” or “Porter”, a device for getting the bees out of supers without wasting hours trying to brush them off. Best I can tell, it’s a sort of one-way door you put into your hive, so that they can exit the supers but not re-enter. Leave it in for 24 hours and all the bees inside will have dropped off honey and headed out to gather more, then not been able to get back into those boxes. The nurses and such that don’t leave the hive will be down with the brood, so you should have relatively bee-free honey supers you can just pluck off.

Great. NOW you tell me.

In all my years, I have never dealt with a feister, more ornery bunch of bees than I wrangled with this Saturday. It wasn’t just the stinging, which there was a lot of (the suit is good but not perfect protection), it was that they just refused to go where I wanted them to go.

The nectar flow has pretty much ceased for the season, so it was time to pull off the honey supers and set the bees up for their winter quiet time. We had a bit of an Indian summer this past weekend, highs in the 70′s, which is unusual for late Seattle September, so I took advantage, clad my armor and headed out to the yard. The trick of this stage of the adventure is to separate the honey from the bees. That means taking the top boxes (supers) off the hive and clearing the bees off them so that I can bring them elsewhere to extract the honey, while not bringing the bees elsewhere to sting me in the car while I drive to elsewhere.

I started with the Sunny Hive, and quickly started wrestling with a bad news good news story: the hives were so heavy with honey, it was back breaking pulling them apart. I asked Michelle to pull down our bathroom scale so I could see exactly how heavy each was: the heaviest came in around 60 lbs!

I hauled the honey supers across the yard to my deck, and then poked around a bit in the lower two boxes (brood chambers, these I’ll leave for the bees to overwinter in). I was a bit worried to find that there was virtually no honey in either of these boxes. Lots of brood (bee larvae) and lots of pollen (which they store near their larvae to feed them), but almost no honey whatsoever (see below left). This is not a good thing, I don’t think, because it means that if I took all the honey and harvested it, they’d have nothing to eat all winter.

Not to beat a dead horse, but I also saw the same old problem with the remaining plastic frames I have (below right). They take to it grudgingly, at best. See how they’ve avoided working out whole sections?

I spent some time going through the brood chambers, frame by frame, looking for drone cells (distinguished by their larger, bullet-shaped profile) because I’d read that one way to fight varroa infestation is to kill off the drone cells, which are better home for the mites’ eggs. Surprisingly (to me), I found hardly any at all, just a few at the bottom the upper chamber. I’m supposing that I got to them too late?

Next, I set up about separating the bees from the comb. My strategy, which has worked in past years, is to establish a “clean area”. I remove frame individually, brush the bees off, then carry the beeless frames over to a separate part of the yard, where I reconstruct the now empty supers.

Maybe I did something different this year, I’m not quite sure, but it didn’t work so well. Despite my best efforts, they kept following me over, so that my “clean room” was not clean, but, instead, bee infested. I did manage to come up with a significant number of half-filled frames that had enough honey that the bees would enjoy enjoy it overwinter, but it wasn’t worth my time trying to harvest. Many of these half-filled frames weren’t capped, which means their moisture content would be too high to harvest, anyway, so I left a honey super, partly filled with honey, on each hive.

Shady Hive had a better outlook for the brood chambers, with a significant amount of brood, pollen and honey in the brood chambers. (That’s solid brood on the left and solid honey on the right).

On the downside, as I was partly through working Shady Hive, a bee managed to worm her way inside my suit, up under my shirt, where she proceeded to do the expected. Howling, swatting, swearing and slapping ensued (me, not her).

Eventually, I landed on a system where I set up a bee-free(ish) area in my driveway, brought only bee-less frames to it, and quickly covered it as I deposited each, so minimize the number of bees that were left on the frames. I also found that if I left them covered for a while, the bees that had managed to sneak in rose to the top and few away the moment I removed the cover, so I was able to clear them out over time.

All in all, it looks like it will be a good harvest. Five full supers of honey. Mike Doleshell has agreed to extract for me again this year, so I’m arranging with Alyssa to ferry the supers up to his place.

A few final pieces of note:

• Mike was absolutely right about using fewer frames with a separator. As counter-intuitive as it may seem, having nine frames with more space between them definitely led to more honey than 10 frames with less space. They simply build deeper cells, rather than wasting space on separation space between frames and foundation.
• I am somewhat stymied on how to handle the mite issue. I’m going to need some advice on how to treat without chemicals. I’m going to try to pick up some screened bottom boards and try the powdered sugar technique, but I’m afraid I’m coming in too little, too late. I don’t want to lose my hives again this winter.
• Apparently, yellowjackets aren’t the only enemies of bees. Check out this little scene from near the hive. Welcome to my parlor, indeed!

• My latest art experiment failed. Apparently, the bees simply won’t build out new comb late in the season, and I didn’t put in my lights until late July. Oh well, I put this frame back in to Hive 1 and we’ll see if they take to it next Spring.

As our little bit to help in the wake of Hurricane Ike, I posted a question on Sunday from Gabriela, a beekeeper hit by Ike. There’s been an educational conversation going on in the comments, and Gabriela just sent me these pictures of her hives to help further. The first shot is the hives strapped down for the storm, then some of the sludge that appeared after the storm, and the bottom left photo is fighting around the hive entrance.

Thanks, Andrey, for the useful insight!