Build-Up, Behavior, Brood

After evaluating a honey bee colony’s over-winter survival success, the beekeeper can observe other desirable traits for continuous stock improvement. The speed of a bee colony’s springtime population build-up is determined by the queen’s genetic make-up. It is also affected by the age of the queen and the queen’s successful mating with a large number of drones. Conditions in the environment also affect spring build-up. Favorable weather, producing ample pollen from flowers stimulates the queen to lay eggs. The beekeeper can stimulate the queen in the same manner by feeding pollen substitute in late winter and early spring. A honey bee colony’s behavior is largely dependent upon the queen’s genetics. Excessively defensive behavior can result from inbreeding or Africanized Honey Bee genetics. Drones in the hive’s surrounding area can influence a hive’s behavior if the drones impart defensive genes during queen mating flights. Environmental conditions also affect a honey bee colony’s behavior. A normally gentle colony is likely to become highly defensive if the hive is attacked by skunks at night. The beekeeper’s actions in manipulating the hive greatly affect the bees’ defensive behavior.

A bee hive’s brood pattern should contain large areas of continuous capped cells of pupae with few empty cells. Today’s photo is an example of an excellent brood pattern produced by a prolific queen. However, genetic conditions can negatively affect the brood pattern. Inbreeding results in brood with many empty cells. The bacterial infections, European foulbrood and American foulbrood, also leave brood with many empty cells. An environmental factor affecting brood pattern is the presence of Varroa mite-infested hives in the surrounding area which may spread these parasitic mites, often by workers robbing weak or collapsing hives. In the early spring, it is common for bees to fill brood nest cells needed by the queen for egg laying with nectar. The beekeeper can significantly affect a hive’s brood pattern by rearranging frames to help prevent brood nest congestion during a strong nectar flow.

--Richard

Defensive Honey Bees

Honey bees are typically gentle in nature. Unless a bee is mashed, as if stepped upon by bare feet, she will not sting. Honey bees do, however, sting to protect their hive. Beekeepers consider the honey bee’s behavior as “defensive.” Honey bees are not aggressive in nature. Honey bees do not attack or seek people to sting. However, any bee colony can be defensive at times. Defensiveness can result from the bees’ genetics or from environmental factors. Africanized honey bees are typically more defensive than European races of bees. Bees may pick up defensive genes from the various drones that virgin queens mate with when colonies replace their queen through supersedure, swarming, or emergency queen production.

Environmental conditions can make any colony defensive. Any time that a hive is under attack, guard bees spread alarm pheromone through the hive, making the bees considerably more defensive. Hive attacks can come from large mammals, like bears that destroy the hive, or from small mammals, like raccoons or skunks. Skunks particularly affect the behavior of the bees because the nocturnal mammals may attack bee hives for hours on end. Skunks eat bees, and they scratch at the hive entrance with their claws to entice the guard bees out of the hive. With a skunk attack, the bee hive is filled with alarm pheromone, and the bees are highly disturbed. Signs of skunk attacks on bee hives include hive scratch marks, like on this blue-colored landing board, or pellets of chewed bee exoskeletons on the ground near bee hives. Another sign that a skunk is attacking bee hives is an unprovoked sting by a guard bee at a distance from the hives as soon as one approaches the bee yard. Other attacks on honey bees can come from humans throwing rocks at bee hives. Often, though, the greatest threat of attacks upon bee hives comes from other honey bees when robber bees attack a weak or physically damaged hive to take its honey.

--Richard

World Trade

It is a reality that goods are shipped regularly around the world. Among the goods traded are agricultural products that are grown where the conditions are favorable and then transported to distant lands. The goods are often transported in shipping containers that can be passed from one carrier to another without unloading the contents. The containers are carried across the oceans in ships that arrive in deep-water ports. The same containers can be transferred to railroad cars or trucks for transport to terminals where the goods can be distributed to stores, markets, or processors of foods. The process efficiently moves goods around the world; however, it sometimes moves unwanted pests and pathogens as well. A number of foreign insects, mites, and pathogens have entered the United States in recent years, often as a result of world trade. Two species of deadly parasitic mites were detected in the mid-1980s. Their arrival started the rapid decline in both managed and feral colonies of honey bees. Varroa mites are responsible for vectoring at least 15 viruses that weaken and kill honey bees. Africanized honey bees have been traced to deep-water ports in the South-east. As researchers began looking for causes of the greatest die-off of honey bees, named Colony Collapse Disorder, they found a new strain of Nosema disease, Nosema ceranae, had entered the United States. This strain is a spore-forming pathogen of the Asian honey bee. Small hive beetles, bee hive scavengers from Africa whose larvae destroy honeycomb and drive honey bees from their nest, entered this country about 1999 and spread rapidly across the country. Their spread was aided by transportation of honey bee hives for pollination service.

While world trade has the potential for the accidental spreading of agricultural pests, pathogens, and invasive species, it also brings beekeepers of the world closer through the exchange of ideas and experience in treating honey bee problems. Today’s photo shows one of the shipping containers that pass Peace Bee Farm daily.

--Richard

Searching for Pollen

The end of winter and the beginning of spring find the honey bees eagerly searching for food for their expanding populations on any occasion that allows the bees to fly. The bees are in a period of population growth which demands considerable amounts of food; however, there are not yet ample amounts of food available from flowering plants. Adult bees can live on the high-energy carbohydrates in stored honey, but developing bees must have a complete diet. For good nutrition, the bees must have both honey and pollen. The pollen completes the honey bee diet by supplying protein, fats, vitamins, and minerals. The colonies are now consuming the last of their honey stores from last fall. Most of their pollen is being brought into the hive by foragers who seek out any flowers in bloom. The first warm days of spring bring foraging honey bees to plants that may not regularly attract bees. The bright yellow blooms of forsythia at times attract pollen foragers. Daffodils are early-blooming perennial flowers that do not often attract honey bees. However, this week I found large numbers of bees foraging for pollen in daffodils. These flowers marked the location of a long-abandoned home site in the margin of the woods. The bees would fly directly into the large bell of the flowers’ coronas and emerge with pollen.

While inspecting bees, I found the colony that held two queens on January 24 had died of starvation. I gave all of the colonies in that bee yard supplemental feeding at that time, and they consumed all of the syrup. It is likely that the colony with two queens laying eggs simply produced a population that could not be sustained by the available food. Beekeepers who want to produce a honey crop face a balancing act during the early spring. They must encourage the bees to build a large population to be able to exploit the large nectar flows while trying to avoid starvation and swarming.
--Richard

Beekeeping Short Course

The Memphis Area Beekeepers Association held its Forty-Fifth Annual Short Course in Beekeeping today. One hundred thirty-nine people attended the one-day overview into beekeeping. Such programs are being conducted in local beekeeping associations across the country at this time of the year. New beekeepers are planning their hives in advance of colonies of honey bees becoming available in the spring. Interest in beekeeping is widespread. Paul Mallory is shown here as he began his portion of the program by asking, “Why would you want to keep honey bees?” Paul has been keeping bees for 66 years. He began his career as a queen breeder and producer of packaged bees in 1944. Paul was engaged in one of the early efforts to lessen the effect of the spread of Africanized Honey Bee genes as the aggressive bees moved across South America toward the United States. As part of a team committed to breeding European Honey Bees and exporting them to the affected region of Mexico, Paul bred nice, gentle queens. However, exporting honey bees to Mexico presented a problem. To get the bees through customs at the Mexican border, Paul passed the queens to nuns who carried the queens in their habits.

Paul Mallory served as president of the Memphis Area Beekeepers Association and the Tennessee Beekeepers Association. I am proud to have followed in his footsteps in both organizations, myself. Today, I followed Paul on the program. I gave a brief introduction into Integrated Pest Management strategies for beekeeping. I suggested the new beekeepers consider the trend of moving toward more chemical-free beekeeping. It was a pleasure for me when I made the nomination of Paul which resulted in his receiving an award from the Tennessee Beekeepers Association for a lifetime of service to honey bees and beekeepers. Paul’s charming manner is so disarming. I can’t think of anyone else who could entice nuns to smuggle bees in their habits.
--Richard

Winter Feeding

Honey bees gather nectar and pollen and make their own food. There are times, though, that the colonies need some extra food to ensure their health or to prevent starvation. Colonies of honey bees spend the spring, summer, and fall gathering food to feed the colony. They also store honey to feed the colony over winter when flowering plants are not blooming and no food is available. This hoarding behavior marks a difference between honey bees of temperate regions, like the Arkansas Delta, and honey bees of the tropics. The bees that live in tropical climates do not need to store honey for a winter’s dearth, since there is an abundance of food available throughout the year. The annual life cycle of tropical honey bees follows the changes in rainy seasons, while the annual life cycle of temperate honey bees follows the blooming of flowering plants. For these reasons, it is thought that Africanized Honey Bees, which originated in tropical climates, may not be able to thrive in cooler regions. The Africanized colonies would simply starve over winter, because they don’t put up large stores of honey.

In the early fall, we weighed all of our bee hives to check for the amount of honey available for the bees. This was done by simply lifting the back of the hive. If the hives seemed to be light in weight, we placed a feeder atop the hive and gave the bees some supplemental feeding of sugar syrup. For winter feeding, we use a heavy syrup of two parts sugar to one part water. The feeder is the varnished wood box. To be effective, the feeding must be accomplished early enough for the bees to have time to convert the sugar syrup into honey and place it in cells near the cluster of bees. Notice in the photo that the hives are tilted forward with a stick under the bottom board to prevent condensation from dripping onto the bee cluster.
--Richard

Honey Bees as Good Neighbors

Many beekeepers seem to love their bees; however, not too many people other than beekeepers like to have large numbers of bees close at hand. Some people fear honey bees as well as other stinging insects. A small number of people have allergic reactions to the venom of bee stings and need to avoid contact with bees. For these reasons, it is important that beekeepers maintain a safe environment for humans, pets, and livestock near the bee yard. Most beekeeping associations train new beekeepers on techniques for lessening problems associated with maintaining harmony between beekeepers and their neighbors. These good neighbor practices are particularly suited for honey bees kept in urban settings. Many managed colonies of honey bees are kept in hives in backyards of major cities as well as surburban settings.

The beekeeper's first consideration is placing bee hives so that the flying bees will not regularly encounter people. A fence or evergreen hedge near the entrance to the bee hive will force the bees to fly over the obstacle, and this keeps the bees flying above the heads of neighbors. A hive hidden from view of the street is less likely to be vandalized as well. Backyard beekeepers should watch the behavior of the bees and remove the drones and replace the queen of any highly defensive colony. In areas with Africanized Honey Bee genes, bees should be kept in more isolated bee yards. Providing a source of water for the bees helps keep them out of the neighbor's swimming pool. Bees love the flavored water of swimming pools. Most beekeepers share honey with their neighbors. Today, while working my bees that pollinate the beautiful Memphis Botanic Garden, I noticed a wedding was in progress nearby in the Japanese Garden. My beees, located in the Urban Orchard, are visited regularly by the public. A juniper hedge keeps the bees aloft.
--Richard