Just showered off from being outside working the hive. Summer is well and truly here, sweltering, steamy and sunshiny, complete with the high crescendo of cicadas and distant afternoon thunder, promising but never quite delivering cool rain.
I opened the hive today with the intention of removing the mound of melted comb slumped onto the bottom of the box, so I went in as fully equipped as I could with long rubber gloves, long sleeves, hair up, even a real pair of shoes. Once I started moving bars around and seeing what was going on inside, though, I changed my plan. The bees are working that lump of comb, and have even built more on it from the ground up. Now, I know that's not optimal for honey harvest...in fact, it will be pretty tricky. But the bees get to keep most of their first year honey, in theory, so what do I care if they want it down there? Besides, the only way to get it out is to remove a lot of bars, including a great deal of brood comb. The one concern I have about leaving it there is varroa. I've read that one of the advantages of a top bar hive in combating varroa mites is that the comb doesn't touch the bottom or sides, thus leaving the mites no way to climb back up into the brood nest. We found a varroa mite last week. Just one. They are the size of seed ticks, so if you imagine finding a tick the size of a football on your back, you can get a picture of their size relative to the bees. No wonder they are so destructive.
Still, they are here, and bees and beeks alike need to learn to live with them. I'm studying up on how to prepare a sugar syrup with essential oils that people are using with good results. The bees feed this readily available syrup to the brood, then the mites attacking that brood die from the essential oils. Oils used include lemongrass, peppermint, and wintergreen.
We're learning that honeycomb is significantly thicker than brood comb--the cells seem too be roughly 3/4 inch deep, as opposed to about 1/2 inch. (Figures arrived at by eyeballing, not actually measuring.) So when we build more hives next month, I think we should make some wider bars, or at least cut some 1/4 inch spacers to insert between honey bearing combs. I think that will eliminate some of the cross comb issues we're seeing with Beedicca. Today, as a barefoot style tactic, I cut and pried the combs apart so each comb was attached to only one bar, and slipped in a stick of bamboo as a spacer. One comb was so fat I needed two sticks to give it enough room! (can't wait to harvest that puppy...) All of this meant I ended up removing two bars, so the hive now has a total of 24 bars, with the last 8 or so partly to mostly open for more comb.
I also re-engineered the roof, which is simply a bit of roofing tin. I originally folded ours down the center, so its peak ran lengthwise along the hive. In the early afternoon, the sun would beat down mercilessly on the south east side, driving the drones to cluster outside the hive in beards while the workers assumed the air conditioning position. According to what I've read, many workers abandon nectar duty, and instead arrange themselves in various patterns to control air flow through the hive, while other workers bring in water for evaporative cooling. I theorized that the peaked roof was conducting heat right down into the hive instead of helping to create airflow: probably the cause of that huge comb falling off its bar into the bottom of the hive where we now have to worry about it. I flattened out the tin and set it back up like a shed roof, with the southeast edge raised a few inches, so the hot sun won't have a flat surface to rain fire upon. I think the resulting overhang is enough to keep direct sun from hitting the top of the hive at all. In winter, we can reverse the slant so the sun will hit the flat of the roof and warm the hive.
I saw some new birds today: a flock of adorable woods pee-wees ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Wood_Pewee), and at long last, the elusive cat bird (http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Gray_Catbird/id ), which my guidebook describes as a "skulker." I've caught glimpses of this bird, skulking indeed, in the underbrush, nothing but a bird shaped shadow that vanishes when you look at it. This morning she landed on the dead cassia bush outside my bedroom window and I got a good look before she realized I was there.
The five surviving hens are doing well. They're getting used to their coop, and have started laying again. We let them out on days when we're home and can pay attention in the evenings. The babies are coming along well too, and I'll probably let the two new RIRs out of their chicken tractor sometime next month. The Old English bantams are still so tiny, I'm not sure I'll ever let them out! The three of them will have abundant room inside one of the moveable tractor coops, which are supposedly big enough for 5-8 normal sized hens to live comfortably.
Still no harvest on the tomatoes or peppers that I planted around the hive, but the potatoes are nearly ready to dig, the sweet potatoes are looking good, and there is one chili pepper, the Thai hot, which seems to be enjoying life in partial shade: it's not leggy at all, and has a lot of new fruits coming along. With June approaching, our inside season is almost upon us. I'm starting to look forward to getting a lot more writing done, now that the distractions of spring are waning.
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Saturday, May 8, 2010
It has been way more than a week since my last entry, and there's a lot to write about. In my last post I discussed the loss by fox of several of my chickens. The death toll climbed to five before we finally wised up enough to take the drastic step of keeping the chickens confined to their coop. We thought at first that if we waited until full daylight to let the girls out, we'd avoid that dangerous twilight dawn time...and that seemed to work. Everyone was still there when Jordan got home from work at four pm. But when I went to close the coop at dusk, Darkle was gone.
So Jordan sent a good deal of time Saturday reinforcing the coop with wire so predators can't dig in, raking out the litter, and setting up a feeder. Up until this point the chickens only slept in the coop, and except for one or two really cold, wet days this winter we let them out to forage everyday. They are none too excited about being jailed, and confinement has sadly curtailed egg production. But it's a decent sized coop and they have adequate room--they're just accustomed to freely hunting and gathering over our entire property (and as far away as the cow pasture, 3 or 4 acres away).
I'm debating even now whether to let them out for the day, but I think our evening plans may take us away from the house before dusk, leaving them vulnerable. Poor biddies. I miss having them hanging around with me on my days off. It is interesting to see how many little sprouting weeds are coming up after only about a week of not having them loose--they do a good job of keeping our little glade from getting overgrown.
Now on to the bees: Sunday afternoon Beedicca gave me a good scare. I was preparing for our trip, and for my all too brief visit with my excellent friends, S & D, when I noticed bees gathering in a beard on the outside of the hive. "Bearding" is something bees do when they swarm; they cling to each other 'like a human chain of bees', as Jordan described it. For f****s sakes, today? You're swarming today?? we're going out of town today! So I messed with them a bit. I poked around in the beard with a stick to see if I could identify a queen (I couldn't--I still haven't seen Beedicca herself herself), and when that didn't help, I decided to add more bars. Maybe they would decide to move back in if they had more space. I added ALL the bars. The hive is set up something like a trough, with 26 bars and a divider board. The management theory is to add bars slowly as the bees need the space; adding them a few at a time encourages them to build nice straight comb along each bar rather than running it longways across several bars. Of course the only real purpose for that is to make our honey harvest easier--it matters not to the bees that their comb runs in nice straight lines.
When Jordan arrived home, he and the guys we were traveling with found a ton of bees outside the hive in two huge beards, and they swept them into a planter with a stick, then shook them back into the hive. M. observed that the beards were largely composed of drones, and speculated that they were preparing to ship out, seeking a queen on her maiden flight. All the way down on the trip to Miami we puzzled over why Beedicca would be ready to swarm so early. They've only lived here 6 weeks!
It was a great trip to Miami, by the way. While Jordan was feeding peanuts to the prehensile tailed porcupine in his role as guest keeper, J&M and I drove all over the Redlands visiting Robert is Here, a huge bonsai farm, and the beautiful Buddhist Temple. In the evenings, our hosts A & J drove us through Everglades National Park hunting for invasive pythons (A. has a collection permit). I brought home a couple of pretty little trees, and we had a totally unexpected audience with the Temple's master, who graciously spent nearly an hour with us discussing the nature of the Buddha and the practice of mediation. He also nearly busted a gut laughing when he flipped us a bird as an example of what comes of being the bad, "third child."
When I have more time, and have thought it through a little more, I'll try to recreate that talk for you--it was really something, and felt incredibly timely: I've been feeling moved toward Buddhism, recently. Drawn to meditation,at any rate. There is a saying, that when you're ready a teacher will come, and it's been true for me a couple times in my life already. This felt like a little karmic nudge.
And...back to the bees. One of my fellow New Bees remarked in a post that her bees engaged in the same behavior the day after ours, and she did much the same thing, added bars and shoo'ed them back inside. Once we got home and I had some time for homework, I looked it up. When the temperature in the hive climbs above 90, the bees undertake cooling protocols. This involves them lining up in certain patterns inside, to channel the air through, while others stop collecting nectar and bring in water, for evaporative cooling. And some bees--especially the lay-about drones--just have to get out of the way in order to stop contributing to the heat inside. They go out and cling to the sides of the hive, in beards.
Mystery solved. Beedicca is not leaving us, huzzah! In the process of fiddling with the hive during all this, we found that they've been building massive, heavy combs just plump and juicy with honey, at an amazing pace. Of the eight bars we added before we left on the trip, three had complete, full honeycombs when we returned four days later. Astounding. We got a little taste of the honey as we worked the hive and inevitably broke open some comb: it was light, clear, and faintly perfumed, like jasmine or magnolia. Astounding!
So Jordan sent a good deal of time Saturday reinforcing the coop with wire so predators can't dig in, raking out the litter, and setting up a feeder. Up until this point the chickens only slept in the coop, and except for one or two really cold, wet days this winter we let them out to forage everyday. They are none too excited about being jailed, and confinement has sadly curtailed egg production. But it's a decent sized coop and they have adequate room--they're just accustomed to freely hunting and gathering over our entire property (and as far away as the cow pasture, 3 or 4 acres away).
I'm debating even now whether to let them out for the day, but I think our evening plans may take us away from the house before dusk, leaving them vulnerable. Poor biddies. I miss having them hanging around with me on my days off. It is interesting to see how many little sprouting weeds are coming up after only about a week of not having them loose--they do a good job of keeping our little glade from getting overgrown.
Now on to the bees: Sunday afternoon Beedicca gave me a good scare. I was preparing for our trip, and for my all too brief visit with my excellent friends, S & D, when I noticed bees gathering in a beard on the outside of the hive. "Bearding" is something bees do when they swarm; they cling to each other 'like a human chain of bees', as Jordan described it. For f****s sakes, today? You're swarming today?? we're going out of town today! So I messed with them a bit. I poked around in the beard with a stick to see if I could identify a queen (I couldn't--I still haven't seen Beedicca herself herself), and when that didn't help, I decided to add more bars. Maybe they would decide to move back in if they had more space. I added ALL the bars. The hive is set up something like a trough, with 26 bars and a divider board. The management theory is to add bars slowly as the bees need the space; adding them a few at a time encourages them to build nice straight comb along each bar rather than running it longways across several bars. Of course the only real purpose for that is to make our honey harvest easier--it matters not to the bees that their comb runs in nice straight lines.
When Jordan arrived home, he and the guys we were traveling with found a ton of bees outside the hive in two huge beards, and they swept them into a planter with a stick, then shook them back into the hive. M. observed that the beards were largely composed of drones, and speculated that they were preparing to ship out, seeking a queen on her maiden flight. All the way down on the trip to Miami we puzzled over why Beedicca would be ready to swarm so early. They've only lived here 6 weeks!
It was a great trip to Miami, by the way. While Jordan was feeding peanuts to the prehensile tailed porcupine in his role as guest keeper, J&M and I drove all over the Redlands visiting Robert is Here, a huge bonsai farm, and the beautiful Buddhist Temple. In the evenings, our hosts A & J drove us through Everglades National Park hunting for invasive pythons (A. has a collection permit). I brought home a couple of pretty little trees, and we had a totally unexpected audience with the Temple's master, who graciously spent nearly an hour with us discussing the nature of the Buddha and the practice of mediation. He also nearly busted a gut laughing when he flipped us a bird as an example of what comes of being the bad, "third child."
When I have more time, and have thought it through a little more, I'll try to recreate that talk for you--it was really something, and felt incredibly timely: I've been feeling moved toward Buddhism, recently. Drawn to meditation,at any rate. There is a saying, that when you're ready a teacher will come, and it's been true for me a couple times in my life already. This felt like a little karmic nudge.
And...back to the bees. One of my fellow New Bees remarked in a post that her bees engaged in the same behavior the day after ours, and she did much the same thing, added bars and shoo'ed them back inside. Once we got home and I had some time for homework, I looked it up. When the temperature in the hive climbs above 90, the bees undertake cooling protocols. This involves them lining up in certain patterns inside, to channel the air through, while others stop collecting nectar and bring in water, for evaporative cooling. And some bees--especially the lay-about drones--just have to get out of the way in order to stop contributing to the heat inside. They go out and cling to the sides of the hive, in beards.
Mystery solved. Beedicca is not leaving us, huzzah! In the process of fiddling with the hive during all this, we found that they've been building massive, heavy combs just plump and juicy with honey, at an amazing pace. Of the eight bars we added before we left on the trip, three had complete, full honeycombs when we returned four days later. Astounding. We got a little taste of the honey as we worked the hive and inevitably broke open some comb: it was light, clear, and faintly perfumed, like jasmine or magnolia. Astounding!
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