Hive-Mind

I’m still having trouble getting my second hive to take. As previously described, back in April (Queens Aplenty and Supercedure) I installed two hives. One did great, the other barely had any brood, just four queen cells. I decided to let the hive replace their defective queen themselves through supercedure, and hoped to see brood after the new queen had had a chance to emerge and mate (about 24 days from the time she was laid, which would have been in mid-April).

However, when I went in in mid-May, there were still no eggs being laid. To beef up the hive, I swapped over some frames of brood from the stronger hive, including, I thought, some frames of unemerged eggs (on the theory that if, for some reason, I hadn’t gotten a good queen, the bees would make one out of my eggs).

I’ve been in once since then and then again today, and I still am not sure I have a good laying queen. There was maturing brood, but I’m pretty sure it’s just the brood I carried over from the strong hive: there are only 2 – 3 frames of them, and they’re all fairly advanced. No eggs at all that I could find.

I decided to give transplanting frames of eggs over and from the strong hive and letting the weak hive create their own queen one more try, but, amazingly, I couldn’t find any eggs in the strong hive either! There’s definitely a good, strong queen in there, but I swear I went through all 18 frames in the two brood chambers and found each one either full of developing larvae, capped cells or honey / pollen, but not a single egg that I could see. Now, I know, they’re tiny and easy to miss, but I must have been in there for an hour, carrying each frame out into the sun to get a good gander at it, and I’ll be darned if I couldn’t find a single one.

At this point, I’m fighting the inclination to throw up my hands and give up on the weak hive. My plan at this point is to do some poking to see if I can find a mail-order queen (which is probably what I should have done a month ago) and see if she can save the day.

On the bright side, the strong hive of Carniolans is going like gangbusters. The first honey super is pretty close to full and the second, that I put on last weekend, is filling up nicely (but still less than 1/4 full, I’d say, very little capping so far).

Also, my light sculpture is making slow progress. Last year, I strung some battery-powered LED christmas lights into an empty frame, in the hopes that the bees would build comb around it, creating an organic sculpture (Sculpture Kick-Off). I got the frame into the hives too late, however (they stop building new comb by July). This year, I included the frame in the first honey super I put on about a month ago, and they’re making slow, but meaningful progress filling it out:

This afternoon took me up to the the first Wallingford Farmer’s Market of 2009. It’s small as farmer’s markets go, probably two dozen booths all told, but all local farmers selling their produce, which is a blessing to have the opportunity to walk to.

While there, I chatted up Karen Bean of Brookfield Farm, a farm with apiary up in the foothills of Mt. Baker. I mentioned the problems I had had with my Italian queen and the steps I’d taken to address them (allowing supercedure, swapping hive positions, swapping some brood frames) and she agreed they were good steps, but also recommended that I take special care to swap over frames that are full of pollen and, if possible place them facing the brood frames, to reduce the amount of work the bees had to do to feed their youngin’s (pollen is fed to the larva as they develop, and is often found packed in close with brood). She suggested I might try pollen patties as well, but that outside my “lazy beeekeeper regime”.

She also absolutely decried Italian bees for this region. Noting they were from southern Italy, where it is considerably warmer, year round, then the Pacific Northwest, she felt they spent too much time eating and not enough time storing. The “ants” to the Italian “grasshoppers” were the Russians (her favs) and the Carnies (my hive). Things are colder up in the foothills of Mt. Baker then in sunny Seattle (heh), but still good advice, from the sounds of it.

No, not a mis-spelling, just a stupid pun. My friend Jen* just sent me a link to this article about people who take the whole “beard of bees” thing do another level: Crazy People Who Clothe Themselves In Bees For Hoots! (follow the link for more pics).

I had always understood that a “beard of bees” was achieved by hanging a queen in a queen cage around your neck: the bees will flock around her (and you). Sounds like these guys have to take it to another level to get full coverage: spray on bee pheremone.

Still, I don’t think I’d want to taste the resulting honey.

Thanks all for the advice on what do with my “bad queen” hive (Queens aplenty). The consensus seemed to be that my best course of action would be to replace the queen as quickly as possible. David Neel of Whidbees, who I bought my colonies from, agreed and offered to provide a replacement queen free of charge. Unfortunately, a combination of distance and laziness (on my part) preventing this from happening, so I had to choose from the menu of secondary options.

There are two problems with simply letting the bees replace the old queen with a new one:

• The new queen will be a hybrid of whatever is in the area, instead of a true bread Italian
• The time it will take the new queen to grow, emerge, mate and start laying could set the hive back critically. By the time she’s ready to go, the population of the hive may be decreased through normal attrition to the point where it collapses.

I’m willing to live with the first issue, as I’m not really clear on what the advantage of a bred queen are from a hybrid. My understanding is that all the bees we have hereabouts are either bred, anyway, or first / second generation feral. There just aren’t large populations of honey bees growing generation on generation in the wild. If they could survive, it would imply there was a breed out there that was resistant to all the nasties that plague the domesticated hives.

I knew I had to address the second issue, though, so I tried a combination of tactics:

1. I moved three frames of brood from the strong Carniolan hive to the weak Italian hive to provide some reinforcements while the new queen gets ready.
2. I swapped the placement of the two hives at around 3 pm on a warm day, so that some portion of the population of the strong hive would return to the weak hive and move in, taking it as their new home. (The reverse would happen, as well, but to a lesser extent because there are fewer of them to begin with).

Note how the the weak hive (on the right) is already showing more activity than the previously stronger hive, even just shortly after we finished the move?

As of the next day, the previously weak hive was showing considerably more vigor and activity, so I believe the position swapping maneuver worked. It remains to be seen whether it will be enough.

Bad news on the bee front. Truth is I could use some advice.

First, though, the story to this point: as previously blogged, my two hives died overwinter, so I ordered two new colonies through the Whidbees (Whidbey Island Beekeepers). Interested in doing a little comparison, I got one Italian queen and one Carniolan.

I went up a couple weeks ago Sunday (April 5th) to pick them up. This was something of an adventure, as I walked on to the ferry to Whidbey Island, hopped off, met David of the Whidbees to get my bees and walked back on, a colony of bees under either arm. The looks I got. You’d think they’d never seen anyone walking around with 10,000 bees under his arms before!

David mentioned to things that might be helpful to those who want to offer me advice:

• He said he’d had much better luck in terms of productivity with the Carniolans in past years than the Italians.
• He said the queens had only been with the hives for 24 hours, so he recommended I wait to set the marshmallow / free her.

As soon as I got home that day, I hived the bees and set the queens, still caged and corked, in their hives.

When I went in later that week (Thursday, April 9th) and released the queens. I didn’t bother with the marshmallow, just turned the queens loose in the hives. I did notice a few strange things in the process:

• The Italian hive seemed much smaller than the Carniolan hive. The Italians were all clustered to one side of the hive and not that thickly. The Carniolan hive seemed to fill the box. (See the pictures below. That’s the Italian on the left, Carniolan on the right).
• The Italian hive barely touched their sugary syrup, whereas the Carniolan hive devoured a good half gallon.
• Despite the fact that I say “Carniolan hive” and “Italian hive”, all the bees appeared Carniolan to me, with just a few Italians mixed in in both hives. I’m assuming that until the queen starts laying, this is just who was scooped up to start the colony?

Now the grim story starts today, a couple weeks later (April 21st). I went in to check to make sure that the queens were laying well, and, while the Carniolan hive looked just fine, with a good strong laying pattern, the Italian hive had virtually no brood at all except for four queen cells:

So, what do I do? Simply killing off the queen cells won’t help, because the hive seems to be without a healthy laying queen to begin with. But how did the queen cells get there in the first place if they don’t have a laying queen? Should I bring some brood over from the Carniolan hive?

Help?

Branden posted this link as a comment a previous post: Cure For Honey Bee Colony Collapse?. The article says, in part:

In a study published in the new journal from the Society for Applied Microbiology: Environmental Microbiology Reports, scientists from Spain analysed two apiaries and found evidence of honey bee colony depopulation syndrome (also known as colony collapse disorder in the USA). They found no evidence of any other cause of the disease (such as the Varroa destructor, IAPV or pesticides), other than infection with Nosema ceranae. The researchers then treated the infected surviving under-populated colonies with the antibiotic drug, flumagillin and demonstrated complete recovery of all infected colonies.

Eh? I’m no microbiologist, and honestly, I’m barely a beekeeper, but I find it hard to believe that after all the hullaballoo, Colony Collapse Disorder could really just be Nosema, a well-known and treatable disease. When they say “found evidence of” CCD, what does that mean, exactly? Are they sure they were seeing CCD and not just Nosema?

I mean, come on, beekeepers have tried treating for Nosema before, and would have noticed if it really led to “complete recovery of all infected colonies”, right?