First Job - FAIL (for the moment)

Last Monday I set aside the time to remove the bees from Duff Green.  Quick in, quick out, two hives of bees to relocate.

The result was awful. An unmitigated failure.

The space is not enough to get the hydraulic lift in, said Harley.  But, she said, we have some really long ladders - 60' or so.

OK.

About forty five minutes later, the 42' ladders showed up, and  we maneuvered them into place.  Even fully extended, we were going to be short.  I climbed the ladder, and about halfway up, felt that l'appel du vide - that horrible feeling that you are being drawn to the edge of something at a great height and feel that you are going to fling yourself off the edge.

On a ladder, for crying out loud.

Once I got to the top of the extended part of the ladder, it was obvious.  There was just no way.  We looked at it from about five different angles, and even a couple of angels. From the extension ladder, I would have to stand on top of the last rung.

Um.... nope.

The solution, without the lift, is to have to anchor a 12' step ladder to the wall on top of the narrow balcony.  Sturdy enough, but if I felt the fear of falling from the extension ladder, it was about to get a LOT worse if I tried it from the balcony.

So what do I do?

My next door neighbor is Jared.  He is my insurance agent (Kathe, sensibly, trusts his assessment of risk more than she trusts mine) and his willingness to try anything has made him an invaluable companion on the trips to evaluate bees. Even if he is decidedly NOT excited about bees.

We scoped out the second location - on the left side of the picture above (MORE BEES!)  It was decidedly more accessible.  From the roof, we dropped down onto the metal roof over the balcony.  From this vantage point, we got a better look at what was going on.

The cornice is right at the edge of the same drop.
Don't look down

As Kathe and I had figured earlier, the bees moved into the cornice/eave bracket/sconce.  But what I had seen the previous time....well, the removal of the faceplace of the cornice was going to be an easy job.

Heh.

The cornice is made of cast iron.  The faceplate is not hinged.  And it might be a single cast piece.  Glued, anchored in place, and immutable as bedrock.  Not budging.

Jared and I tried a number of ways.  We removed the two bolts.  We pried.  We hammered a putty knife into the joint. We pried at the wood molding above, and looked for an hour for any way to get in.  Nothing.

OK, time to change tack.

We smoked the bees and then tried to vacuum them through the hole.  They were having none of that.  That was my mistake - the smoke made them retreat deeper into the cornice, and we netted a total of one sad bee.

So even if I had gotten the lift, all I would have been able to do is to remove the external bees.  The bees inside would have stayed inside.

After we finally gave up for the day (and the week - it was raining a LOT this week), I started trying to research the architectural features.  There are multiple cornices on the house without bees in them, so I could test out any removal technique on one that was not hanging over the edge.  The consensus - from builders to architectural historians to economists (I don't know why the economist should have an opinion, but I really couldn't stop him from giving one) - is that there is just a lot of paint and glue - and the bolts - holding it in place.

I'm going to try again.  But as the weather gets warmer, the bees will be more active.  And more prone to defend their space against intruders like me.

If anyone has ideas, I am open.

Wish me luck.

First Job of the Season

I feel a little rusty.  For a while last summer, I was doing honeybee hive removals pretty regularly, and I had my toolkit together, and knew what I needed to do, and in what order.  Each one presented new challenges, but I had the pieces covered.

Now it has been months, and I have a little bit of doubt.

Photo: LeeAnn Riggs

The project is interesting.  A antebellum mansion here in Vicksburg has honeybees in a corner of the building.  Maybe two corners.  I went to take a look, and was more than just a little shocked.  The bees had built their comb on the outside of the building.

Not normal beehavior.

Standing on the ground, 45 feet below, it was hard to fathom what was going on.  The bees had clearly outgrown the space that they had inside, and had continued to build on the outside.  But how....what... why?

And how was I going to get up there?

A narrow balcony hangs off the side of the mansion, directly underneath. I climbed out the window and onto the balcony, trying to get a better idea of how to access the colony.

An extension ladder would be precariously tippy, if the base is not far enough from the roofline. And it hard to get a ladder that can reach 45' in the air that fits in the back yard of the home.  Next stop was the balcony.  From the balcony, you can reach... maybe.  But my 10' step ladder would be a little wide to fit on the narrow balcony.  Maybe doable, maybe not.

Roof access is dicey.  The overhang gives a view of the bees, but I was literally hanging over the edge to take this picture.

To-the-side view.  Don't look down.

There is certainly no way to reach under from above, and completely clear out the comb. Worse still, you can't see well enough to know whether the bees are coming out of a different location, or whether you've gotten them all.

A second visit to the hive, later in the day, helped confirm some things that I had suspected, and got clarity on others.

The original hive, as best I can tell, had formed inside the architectural feature at the corner of the roof line (cornice?  eave bracket?) and the bees had quickly run out of room inside.  So at some point last year, they expanded outwards.  Way outwards.

Right now, the bees have removed most of the honey as they have overwintered, so the comb is empty and dry.  Their numbers are starting to recover, as the queen starts her spring laying.  The worker bees are getting pollen from somewhere... which means protein for the babies.  All of which is basically indicating that they are about to have a population explosion.

So it is time to get them into some new, rent-free digs.

Harley Caldwell, who owns the bee-and-bee, listened as I made my offer.  There are almost certainly two hives - one on either side of the building.  Same spot, opposite corners, almost equally inaccessible. I put it to her that there were essentially two options for removal: a) I could anchor a ladder to the balcony and the chimney, and scale the heights, or b) she could rent a lift.  My price went WAY down if she rented the lift.  But not enough to make the overall project cheaper for her.

Excuse me, General.  May I bum a lift?

Even though it would be more expensive for her to do it that way, she agreed that renting a lift was the way to go.
She is looking into the details of renting the lift for me.  Meanwhile, I am counting my boxes and frames.  Going through checklists to make sure that my tools are ready, and clean, and in good repair.  That my suit only has holes where it is supposed to.  And that I am ready, and that I have figured out what I need to do to prepare another home for another hive.

Maybe two.

Slimed

Last week, one of my queens - Aline - stopped laying.  I thought maybe I had accidentally skooshed her, but then I saw her bopping around on the frame.  Happily not laying any eggs.

Bitch.

I asked my mentor whether I should do anything more, and he asked about the pollen.  If the hive is not pulling in pollen, he explained, the queen will be reluctant to lay.  Hold off, he said.

I was mostly worried because last year I lost my one and only hive to small hive beetles that overran the hive when the queen stopped laying, and it broke my spirit. And this year, there are lots of beetles, and Aline is not laying.

But Russian bees particularly will hold off laying in the absence of pollen.  So I gave her another week.

Every night - all week long - I woke up with dreams of slimed frames, with beetles and larvae crawling all over the hive.  Every.  Single.  Night.

I opened the hives.  The inside of my worrisome hive was damp.  We have been having a lot of rain, but the inside of the hive is not supposed to be wet, regardless.  Wet means the bees are not doing their job of climate control inside the hive.

There was a cluster of bees in one corner, but otherwise, the honey I had left for them - not harvested, because it is the first season - was starting to melt.

I pulled the first frame and it was covered with webbing from wax moths and slimed with beetle larvae crawling all over it. The hive was destroyed.

I took the super - the top frames of brood with the honey, and set it to the side and opened the brood chamber.  Aline had been laying, which means that my mentor was right - she just needed some time.  But....

But she was laying in the middle of destroyed comb.  Comb overrun with small hive beetles.

Every single beekeeper I talk to about SHB tells me that the way to keep the beetles at bay is to raise strong hives.

Great.  How do I do that?

Turns out, it is genetic, as much as anything.  So the answer seems to be, have a bunch of hives, and cull those who are not strong.

I have four hives.  Culling out my weak hive means I have just lost 25% of my entire bee yard.

There is still a lot of summer left, so I cleared out the box, set all of the frames aside for a hard clean-and-freeze session, and put the queen into a smaller box.  Less room to have to protect.  I have no idea whether she can survive (EDITOR'S NOTE: she did not) or whether the diminished numbers will end up dooming the whole hive.

Worse still, I don't know how to prevent this with my other hives.

So I will mourn the loss of Queen Aline, and use the boxes to prepare for next season.  And next season, I will use what I have learned better.

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.