Straightforward. Yeah, right.

"WHY would I use the word 'straightforward' in ANY sentence involving beehive removal work??"

I stared at the wall, hoping solutions would appear.  Solutions failed to appear.  I stared some more.  Solutions persisted in their absence.

The job was supposed to be relatively straightforward.  My boss at the Corps had a hive that had shown up at his house, and had taken up occupancy as unwanted guests.  He had asked me to go and take a look.  I looked.  The house had shiplap siding, and the bees were coming and going in an interior corner in the building. 

I looked under the house in the crawlspace, and there was no evidence that the bees had any access to the space under the house.  No sound, no motion, no dead bees at the entrance. 


And no comb to be seen anywhere.

My proposed approach, then, was,

1. Remove shiplap siding, cutting away just enough to expose the comb,
2. Remove the comb, brushing away bees into prepared boxes, 
3. Place any recently laid brood comb in the boxes, 
4. Vacuum any remaining bees, 
5. Clean up, 
6. Claim my check.



It was a hot day, but the work should be pretty easy.  My only concern was how to minimize the damage to the siding.  "This appears to be a pretty straightforward job," were the words that came out of my mouth.

I arrived on Sunday afternoon, all smiles and selfies.



Happy beekeeper.  It would not last.

First step: remove shiplap siding.  Since I had not actually tried to remove any of the siding before I got the contract signed (it is considered bad form, apparently, to start demo before you get approval),  I was worried that the siding was HardiePlank - the concrete siding.  If so, I was in for a rough go of it on the demo.  That stuff is tough to cut.

Turns out, it was the masonite variety - much easier to break/remove/cut.  I breathed a premature sigh of relief.

And got to work.  First obstacle was the presence of a moisture barrier (easily dealt with) and a layer of waferboard (OSB) under the siding.  Not completely unexpected, but it made the job a little tougher.  So instead of just prying the boards loose, I was going to have to cut them out. 

Reciprocating saw to the rescue!

After I had cut deeper than I had thought was necessary, I pried up a section of the OSB, and found wood underneath.  I cut a wider swath through the OSB, and uncovered more wood.  And then more. 

And more.

Finally, I had pried and cut and uncovered as much as I possibly could.  I was staring at a 2x12 pine board - a floor joist that bore the weight of the house on it.

  

That's right.  A load-bearing floor joist.  Not the thing you want to cut.  Bees were just on the other side of it.  And on top of the pine boards was the subflooring - another layer of OSB.  Immediately on top of that was the wall studs.

Rough diagram of the Cutaway of the corner

I now had a full inventory of what was there.  What I did not have, apparently, was a way in.

Can't cut away the brick.  Can't cut away the load-bearing joist.  Can't cut away the subfloor that the wall sits atop.  Cutting the wall does not do any good - it won't get me into the void.

I sat on my bucket, wondering why I had decided that this was a good way to make some extra money.

And here we join again where we started the blog entry. I stared at the wall, hoping solutions would appear.  Solutions failed to appear.  I stared some more. Solutions persisted in their absence.

I went back under the house, intent on doing more than just a spot check.  Sure enough, there was a tiny, two-inch crack between the joist and the brick. Maybe enough to get my hand between the boards.  And in that crack, there be bees - bright, beautiful comb clearly visible.

As I backed out of the crawlspace under the house, my hand rested on something papery.  My flashlight identified it as an 8-foot snakeskin. 

Now, friends, my option is to go under the house, sharing tight quarters with what might be a snake, focusing on the removal of bees from a remote location where I only have a 2" access crack, on a 95-degree, 100% humidity day in August.  Or I could go home and drink cheap beer.

Beer never sounded so good.

With a lot of grunting and maybe some swearwords, I folded myself into the space and started cutting out the comb.  After the second piece of comb, the nectar and honey began to flow downward.  Onto me.  I got coated in dripping honey and nectar for the next hour, and then needed a break.

I shared the wealth with the Bodrons, who looked suspiciously at the pieces of honeycomb with bees still attached.  "How do you eat it?"  A couple of bites of pure, unadulterated honeycomb later, and they both were convinced that fresh honey was something special.

"One thing to know", I explained.  "This is not honey.  It is only honey after it gets to a certain humidity level, and we stopped the bees from getting there.  As it is, it will ferment, so you will need to screen it and keep it in the fridge - it simply won't last very long."

One sip of water later, it was time to go back in.  I cut away more comb, finally beginning to see brood comb.  There was absolutely no way to keep the comb intact, because it all had to be compressed (read: squished) to get it out of the gap between the board and the brick.

Another hour later, and I am dripping honey from every spot on me.  I finish up the cutting out of the comb, and brush the cluster of bees into a bucket, before hauling them out and transferring them into a box that is waiting on them.

Each time I come out of the crawlspace, it gets harder to convince myself to go back in.  But several more trips, and I have cleaned the areas out as well as I can, I have dosed the area liberally with poison to discourage the bees from coming back, and I have sealed up as much as I can with expanding foam sealer.  I have vacuumed up, cleaned up, and treated as much as I can.

I slide myself out from under the house, gather up the stuff I need, and trudge to the truck. 

It ends up taking two more trips out to complete the tasks associated with the removal, and every time I get in my truck I find a new spot that has honey residue still sticking around. 

But the bees have been deposited in their new home, and were last seen happily buzzing around all of the nectar-honey that I had fed back to them.  Hopefully making a new home where they were wanted.

And I headed for that beer.  Straightforwards.

The Flowers Appear on the Earth - Honeybee edition

With bated breath, I opened my hives this weekend.  Saturday was a warmer day for us, with temperatures in the mid-60s.  I watched the bees come and go from each of the three hives that had survived last summer and fall, and they were carrying loads of pollen into their homes.  My girls were busy.

So I read a lot about honeybees.  It turns out, though, that my reading material is the honeybee equivalent of Web-MD.  Every single article tells me that my hive is going to die, and that it is going to happen next week, regardless of symptoms.  Bees flying around?  The hive is gonna die.  Bees not flying?  Hive is already dead.  Pollen being carried in?  This early, it is probably coming from Carolina Jessamine flowers, which kills bees.  No pollen?  Death by starvation is imminent.

The sky is falling! The sky is falling!

My worry last week was that they would run out of honey stores before the flowers really started blooming. I have been reading all kinds of stories about bees that were active going into the last cold snap, and ran out of food.  Essentially, during the winter, the bees just consume, since there is nothing to replenish their stores.  Not exactly like they can head to the local Bi-Lo grocery and stock up.  The bees have to wait for flowers to pop.

So a hive can literally starve to death, even after the worst of the winter is over.

First warm day that came, I HAD to see what my girls were doing.  I needed to see three things:

1. Are the girls bringing in pollen - to fill their need for protein?  I already knew they were.
2. Do they have remaining honey stores, to tide them over for carbo-loading until the flowers start blooming?  This was my real worry.
3. Is the queen laying?  If she is reticent because she is trying to make the stores last until it is warmer, she might not have enough bees for the hive to survive when it gets warmer.

Short answer, my bees are OK.  On all three counts.

Traditional guidance is to leave honey on the hive the first year.  While your bees are establishing themselves, they need to keep all the honey so that you have a healthy hive to survive the winter.  The guidance kinda falls under the rubric of 'natural is best', and is not without its critics.  My mentor explained it to me: honey sells for $7.50 per pound.  Sugar sells for $0.33 per pound.  For me, he said, it is purely an economic decision. I will ALWAYS harvest any honey I can get, and feed the girls through the winter.

I believed him.  But I did not have enough confidence to follow through.  I joked that I was going to be leaving the honey in the hive the first year, just taking enough to let the girls know that their rent would eventually come due.  But after a year of rent-free living, I explained, I am going to harvest.

All the same, all winter I wondered whether it would be enough.

So the great reveal: when I opened the hives, all three hives had remaining honey stores.  I also got to see new stores being created, with uncapped honey in one box. Not a LOT of honey remaining - the flowers need to start blooming in earnest soon, so that my girls will be OK.  But there is enough, for now.

I did not specifically spot any of the three queens, but the evidence of what they were doing was clear.  In each box, there were between three and five frames with good brood patterns.  My three queens - Maggie, Isabella, and Lady Xoc - are all laying well.  

Even boys!  Lady Xoc laid a section full of male bees, which means she is ramping up genetic markers for the next generation.  (I might be a little happier if she was investing more in the girls, but if she is looking forward, I can, too). 

As the weather warms up more, I anticipate a spike - more eggs and more larvae and more activity, as everybody gets sent out to bring in more honey.

The only down side of the news was that small hive beetles were EVERYWHERE.  I have gone from being horrified at the presence of beetles to accepting them as a part of my hives.  But they still bother me (I wrote, then erased, 'they still bug me').  The truth of the beetles is much the same as the mites: killing a bug on a bug without killing the host bug is difficult.  

Somebody long ago explained that you don't use Beelzebub to cast out demons.  Most of the time, I feel like that is what I am facing.

I have a bag of diatomaceous earth, and once the ground gets dry, I will spread it around the hives so that the beetle larvae will crawl across the stuff and turn into larva jerky.  I have to be careful not to get it anywhere the bees will crawl - after all, I don't need honeybee jerky, as well.

Regardless, the outcome of the winter is solid good news. 

Finally.... I am starting to prepare for more.  New boxes, cleaning out old boxes, and spreading the word that I am available to catch swarms and remove bees.  I got some business cards made, to help spread the word.

A young friend of mine knows that I love bees, and he included a drawing of a bee in a recent card, which I have scanned and incorporated into my cards.  

Trap Out!

It was time.

I have been putting off the job at the Vicksburg Auditorium for a while.  Partly because of the nature of the job.  Partly because the removal from the other side of the building (yeah, they had TWO hives) had not gone as I wanted it to (the bees moved inside the building, and made a mess, in a lot of ways).  And partly because of the height of the work, combined with a shaky ladder and NO place to grab hold.  

The job, as before, requires me to remove the bees.  From the inside of the auditorium, there is no way to get to the bees - no opening and no access to the interior of the wall.  From the outside, there was also no way to get to the bees - it is solid brick with a small hole.  But the bees need to be gone.  The city has planned a renovation job on the building next month that will put people in contact with the bees, and it is necessary to get the bees out before they begin.  

And so while I did other jobs in the area, I pondered the proper way to approach this job was.  I read.  I asked.  I talked it through.  And finally it was time.  I could not wait any longer to get started.

The idea behind a trap-out is to get the bees out of a wall that you cannot access any other way.  Part 1 of the trap-out is to create a one-way door so that the bees can leave, but not return.  The bees leave the hive to forage, and then can't get back in, and start looking for somewhere to be.  They end up congregating in the closest available space. 

That is where Part 2 comes in.  In Part 2, the beekeeper places a box nearby that the escaped bees can use as a new home.  Make it attractive, make it nice, and you can eventually evict all the bees from their current home, and they will be in the new mobile apartment that you can then move to a safe location (like my backyard).

There are some problems.  Problem #1:  The queen does not like to come out.  This is a big problem, because the queen lays a LOT of eggs every day.  She lays up to 2,000 eggs every day, which means that within the next few weeks, there are up to 42,000 bees in process.  As many as you draw out of the hive, she is going to replace them just as fast.  So the process can take a while.

Eventually, the nurse bees run through all of their honey stores, and they, as their predecessors did, leave to forage.  The queen only remains inside, unwilling to leave.

Problem #2: without the queen, the workers will bring honey and pollen into their new 'apartment', but they won't lay eggs.  You need a queen for that.  So the only way to proceed is to give the inhabitants of the new apartment what they need.  

To take care of problem #2, I opened a hive at the house and pulled out two frames.  One of the frames had eggs, larvae and capped brood, as well as a queen cell (the bees had prepared a queen, just in case).  The other frame had honey.  I put both frames in a 'nuc box' with three empty frames to give the new inmates neighbors a 'partially furnished apartment' - a little bit of a head start on increasing numbers.  And the right smell.

Now all I had to do was to install the art project.

Step 1.  Anchor the box.  Kathe and I had discussed it together, and ended up deciding that the best approach to anchoring a box to a flat brick wall was to throw an escape ladder over the top of the wall, and attach it to that.  So I put the 75-foot aluminum stepladder against the wall, and started the climb, with each aluminum step compressing below me precariously.  At the top, I grabbed on to the top of the wall and held on for dear life, while I tried to 'maneuver' the escape ladder into place without sending the 'man-over'.

Following the successful installation of the ladder, I climbed back down to get the next piece of the puzzle - the straps.  Because I am planning to leave these in place for a couple of months, I used tie-down straps to anchor the box to the ladder. I climbed back up, and attached them - with only one precarious wobble in the process.  That wobble did it - at that exact moment, I made a decision, and stated it out loud for nobody to hear.

"If anything starts to slip, I am letting it fall.  It is all replaceable.  NO heroic saves."  

Step 2.  Next, I needed to place the box in the strap loops. The box, while not heavy, was a little awkward and not well centered, and climbing the ladder with it was a challenge.  But with slow, steady motions, I got in place, grabbed the top rung of the ladder with an elbowlock deathgrip and tried to slide the straps over the box.  I got them in place, but they were loose, and I started to cinch them up.  

First one side.

Then the other. 

Then back again.

One of the straps overlapped, and I was about to get caught in a bind, so I switched hands and....

26 feet, end over end tumble.

No heroic saves.

Before I descended the ladder (no point in rushing) I adjusted the straps.  My wife suggested that she could go and get me some duct tape (why don't I have duct tape?) and drove off as soon as I was safely on the ground.  I picked up the pieces of the box and frames and put them back together.

Honey everywhere.  I can't tell how badly the brood are damaged, but I suspect none of them will remain viable.  And the box itself is a mess.

But duct tape fixes everything, so humpty dumpty got patched and taken back to the top of the ladder, where he was reattached to the escape ladder.  As I started to descend, I realized that the hole was facing the wrong way - away from the opening.

Ah, well.  The bees will find the opening or they won't.

I then moved to the final step.  Setting the trap.  

The idea for the trap is that the bees will come out of a cone over the entrance, but will not find their way back in.  And if there are two cones, one over top of the other, it will be twice as unlikely that they will find their way back in.  So I sealed up the entire hole, with one opening left open, with expanding foam sealer. Once complete, I set the smaller of the cones, made of screen wire, over the entrance and held it in place for the sealer to set. 

Then repeated for the outer cone, made of 18" hardware cloth.

The process took forever, during which time I was on the top of the ladder, surrounded by (surprisingly passive) bees, clad in multiple layers of a bee suit on a hot July day at noon.

When I released the cone, and it stayed in place, I hopped down the ladder and stepped back to observe.  The bees were emerging, and congregating around the entrance.  But it is too soon to see if they are able to get back in.  I will have to check back pretty regularly to see what is happening.

**Update 8 July - I have been monitoring the bees for the past few days, and there does not seem to be any activity on the new apartment.  And more importantly, perhaps, there does not seem to be a large cluster of bees on the exterior of the cone.  I suspect that they have figured a way around the cone, and I will need to re-seal.

When I do (scheduled for Thursday), I will see if I can't take more pics.  And I will replace the box.

Eulogy fit for a Queen

The Queen is Dead.  Long live the Queen.

So I am researching what happens to a bee colony when it dies.  There are a lot of websites, and a lot of sections in the books on what can do a hive in.

Yes, I am doing my beehive post mortem.

I am also dealing with some sadness, because I loved having my bees in the yard, and it has been hard to see them die.  The worst part is knowing that perhaps a less novice version of me could have improved their situation... and their chances.  It has been a month since I figured out that my colony was going to die, and there was a single moment when I realized that there were no real steps I could take to keep that from happening.  And it is only just now that I am able to write about it.

I am also trying to decide whether, and when to do my next experiment with the bees.  Much of that question will be answered by what I determine to be the cause of death.  And to my degree of certainty as to the cause.

The colony entered into a death spiral before I even realized something was wrong.  The brood that I got with the nuc(leus) hatched (they were pretty stabby when they did) and started to build the frames out with good waxy comb.  But then they slowed down comb production, and the queen was laying in weird patterns.  She was not replacing them fast enough.

And by the time I looked again, two weeks later, the beetles had taken over and the bees had started raiding their stores of honey instead of building more and saving it for a rainy day.  With not enough new eggs being laid to replace the last generation (workers only live 6-8 weeks in summer, so continual replacement is critical), the death spiral had begun.

So I have to ask some hard questions before I introduce another hive.  If the factors that led to the death of my hive are elements that I can control, then I need to know. And if they are not, then I might have to rethink the location before putting another hive in.

1.  Was it the setting?

I live in a neighborhood with lots of lawn and lots of old growth trees. They are located at the edge of the woods in semi-shade, and the single deep hive I provided got morning sun and afternoon shade.  Directly down the hill - perhaps 30 feet away - is a stream where there is water for them.  I lifted them off the ground on concrete blocks (I have seen elaborate wooden frames used, but the blocks get them off the ground just as well.)

There is not much of a second understory that would provide a rich source of usable nectar and pollen (oak tassels just won't cut it....).  And there is no agriculture nearby.

It is possible that my bees would have done well in a field of poppies. (Or any other flower.  I just like saying 'poppies'.)  Since the environment is not a typical nectar-rich environment, it is possible that they did not do well for that reason.  If that is the case, I will have to think twice about installing another colony in the same place.  There are things that I can do to supplement, but at what point am I just subsidizing bee production with artificial setting?

My across-the-creek neighbor (my backyard hive overlooks hers) also just lost her hive.  Although we haven't talked about it, I suspect that the same thing happened to her.  There might be something systemic affecting our bees.

Management measure:  I will be spending more time watching the bees from the outside, making sure they are bringing lots of pollen into the hive.

2. Was it the bees?  

In my reading, I have found evidence of some queens that just don't do the job.  A friend of mine said that a couple of his hives were struggling, and he found the queen and 'mashed her'.  And then described the process he had developed for re-queening.  It could be that the queen simply was not up to the task.  This seems less likely, because she was leading a healthy group before she got brought to the Woodstock yard.

But she was also from elsewhere.  One of the concerns with getting package bees (they send them to you through the US Postal Service) is that bees are adapted for the area that they are raised.  And might not flourish in the new space.

I got my bees from a few hours' drive away.  Not exactly importing Arctic bees and trying to make them thrive in MS.  But maybe a more immediately local variety would do better.

3. Was it the beetles?

When I first took the bees out of the box and hived them, I freaked out a little because there were quite a lot of what I soon figured out were hive beetles.  When I spoke to the guy who sold them to me and another beekeeper besides, they both assured me that unless there is a LOT of beetles, it is not a problem.  Every hive has beetles.

Um.  What is a lot?  I just transferred the bees to their new home, and what moved in with them seemed like a lot to me.  How many before I need to worry?

The end result was a lot.  The beetles really took over and out-competed the bee larva.

I suspect that the beetles are just a secondary stressor, and not the origin of the problem.  Like diagnosing a nosebleed (just apply more pressure!) when the problem is something much worse.  But there is something that I can do to address the beetles.

Management measure: I will order beetle traps, and make that investment in the health of the hive.

4. Was it zika?

I was worried last year when I saw the mosquito spraying trucks come through, spraying for mosquitoes during the Zika Scare of 2016.  Knowing that I was going to have a hive, I had spent some time trying to figure out what was reasonable to ask the City of Vicksburg to protect my bees.  I would not ask them to shut down the program altogether - the mosquito problem and the risk was real.  But I had planned on talking to the truck driver, and as needed, the city officials, about delaying the spraying in our neighborhood until after dark, to give my bees a better chance.

But they did not even spray this spring at all.  So there was nobody to ask.

Now it is possible that the environment had built up enough toxicity from previous events to wreak havoc on the bees.  But without a real forensic post-mortem, I can't fathom it.  And there would be no way of counteracting it.

5. Was it mites?

One of my mentors immediately asked me about the mite load.  Varroa mites are one of the biggest problems, and is one of the proximal causes of hive collapse.  If you lose a hive, chances are good that it was either poor management (gulp) or varroa mites.  And you can address a varroa problem through a number of techniques; left unchecked, it will destroy the hive.

But I had been spending quite a bit of time under the hood, so to speak, and had not been able to find any mites.  I had done a couple of dustings with powdered sugar to do a count, but had not come back with any that I was able to identify.  Which, of course, means I did it all wrong.   But by the time she asked the question, there were too few bees to even test.

Varroa management will be on my list for management measures, when I get the next hive.

6. Was it poor hive management?

This is where I worry, and am sad.  Because if my hive died as a result of something preventable that I simply did not take care of, then I am at fault.  I might very well have killed my hive.

Better management is something that I can take steps to accomplish.  I can feed bees.  At least until they are established, I can provide them gallons of simple syrup, and maybe even give them some protein pacs that are sold for this reason.

I can also better manage the bee space.  One of the things that I have read and discussed a lot recently is the management of the area inside the hive.  I had understood that bees don't like open space, so I left them plenty of room to grow outward from the center frames, densely packed to fill up the usuable space.

What I have heard, though, is that it is better to intersperse your empty frames in the box.  By alternating empty frames and full, I can encourage the hive to fill in the space more quickly, and give them help in defending that space from the beetles.  Because they HATE having frame between brood and brood, they will start building up the wax comb immediately, and she will start laying.

Moving them out into the sunshine might help.  The first real indication that I had that there was something horribly wrong was when I saw that the hive was not clearing the trash from the entrance.  Dead bees, wax, twigs, leaves, all cluttering the entrance.  Housekeeping might be easier with less of a canopy shielding light.

Still I worry that it will not be enough.

Epitaph

I am very sorry to see my bees go.  The poor queen held on to the end (she is pictured below, a week before the rest of the bees gave up), and only disappeared once I had less than 100 bees left.  I have cleaned the combs, cleaned the frames, and have tried to improve the situation, so that the next round of bees will have a better chance.

The dying hive.  The late queen in the yellow circle.

And then I got a call today.  A woman in town wants a hive removed from the corner of her house. I went over during lunch, and she has agreed to let me do it.  She's getting a deal.  Normally, it is a $300 charge for bee removal.  And since I have only done a removal one time before, I figure that I am learning on the job.  Doing it for free, and getting the bees.

My goal is to remove the hive, remove the brood, remove the honey.  And clean it out so they can close it up and avoid repopulation from another swarm.

And, in the process get myself set up for another try.  Local bees.  Feral hive.  Feed them, fight off the beetles, and get them started.

Wish me luck.  Long live the queen.