Honey Bee New Year

Honey bees are the only insect in the temperate zone that remain alive and active throughout the year. They are well-adapted to survive cold winters in which there is no food available outside the hive. Though insects are normally cold-blooded creatures, honey bees are able to regulate the temperature of their hive by generating heat themselves. They eat their stored honey, a high-energy food that they produced; and then they shiver their flight muscles to generate heat. The bees generating heat are loosely clustered together while a shell of tightly-packed bees surrounds their winter cluster, using their bodies to hold the heat. Whenever there is brood in the hive, the bees maintain a brood-nest temperature of 95 degrees Fahrenheit. The honey bees are able to conserve the precious honey reserves needed to warm the winter cluster by not making an effort to warm the entire hive. Distant corners of a bee hive may be quite cold. Further, the colony reduces its cluster heating requirement by forcing the queen to stop laying eggs in the late fall. With no brood to protect, the winter cluster will reduce its temperature to around 70 degrees, the equivalent of our turning down our home thermostats by 25 degrees!

While our calendar year begins on January 1, the honey bees’ year is well underway. The queen begins laying eggs, a few at a time, on the winter solstice, usually December 21. These first bees of the season will be available to start foraging dandelion nectar and pollen on warm days in February. However, the early start-up of brood rearing has its draw-backs. With brood in the hive, the bees must maintain a 95-degree temperature in the brood area. Also, the bees must cover the brood with their bodies instead of moving about the hive to feed on stored honey. Since honey bees never defecate inside the hive, on warm winter days, bees leave the hive, as in today’s photo, to make cleansing flights. Happy New Year!

--Richard

Springtime Build-up

Black locust trees in full bloom are a milestone in the beekeeping year. Flowering plants are in bloom in abundance, providing plenty of nectar and pollen for rapidly growing bee colonies. A mid-spring hive inspection of bee hives finds the colonies in full expansion with bees bringing in lots of nectar and pollen to feed the brood of developing workers and drones. Honey bees produce drones only when they are needed, and in the spring there are plenty of drones in the hives. When we find significant numbers of drones walking about the combs on the edge of the brood nest, it is time to raise queens and make colony divisions. Employing a technique called grafting, beekeepers can readily produce extra queens at this time of the year by carefully moving the youngest larvae to queen cell cups and then moving these to queen-less starter hives. Colony divisions to increase hive numbers are easily created by moving excess queen cells that the bees produce naturally. Making colony divisions by moving bees and brood from crowded hives to new hives also serves as a method of artificially swarming the parent colony. These divisions are an effective method of reducing the colonies’ tendency to swarm.

If during the spring hive inspection, the beekeeper finds a colony excessively crowded in its hive, the beekeeper may choose to reverse the hive bodies to relieve brood nest congestion. If the cells in the lowest brood nest hive body are empty, this hive body may be moved to the top of the brood nest to provide space for the queen to lay eggs. This action rapidly relieves brood nest congestion, the greatest cause of swarming. Today’s photo shows a healthy frame of capped worker brood holding pupae, the third stage of bee development. Continuous expanses of capped brood indicate a prolific queen. Excessive holes in the pattern may indicate brood nest congestion, brood disease, inbreeding, or hygienic behavior employed by the bees to remove parasitic mites.

--Richard

What's Going On Here?

When the soybeans and cotton are in bloom in the Arkansas Delta, nectar is flowing; and beekeepers avoid brood nest examinations. Instead, they simply monitor the hives to ensure that the bees have sufficient honey storage capacity. While asking what’s going on in the hives, the beekeeper checks to see that all hives are healthy and “queenright,” meaning having an egg-laying queen bee. Observing from the outside of the hives, beekeepers watch hive entrances for flight activity; there should be a significant number of foragers leaving and entering the hives. Viewing returning workers carrying loads of pollen on their hind legs usually means a colony is feeding brood. Seeing some dead bees on the ground in front of a hive is normal, but finding hundreds of dead may signal a hive problem. A discolored or greasy hive landing board sometimes indicates a weakened colony is being robbed of honey stores by bees from other hives. If observations from the outside appear normal, the beekeeper opens each hive to examine honey supers and add supers as necessary. If there is little bee activity in the supers, the beekeeper should examine the brood nest for healthy bees and a laying queen. Today’s photo shows pearly white larvae of healthy young brood in open cells. Finding open brood in a pattern of continuous cells indicates the hive held a productive egg-laying queen in recent days.

The acquisition of firms dealing with honey bee health by big chemical companies is worrisome to beekeepers. Many are afraid that their interest in profiting from the sale of pesticides will cause them to quell research and silence unfavorable findings regarding the effect of chemicals on bees, beneficial insects, and pollinators. Zhara Um Nikko asks, “What’s going on here?” She reads about Monsanto’s September 2011 purchase of Beeologics, a firm devoted to studying and protecting bees, http://healthimpactnews.com/2012/beekeepers-15-year-research-on-pesticides-halted-when-state-steals-his-bee-hives/. Also, Natural News, http://www.naturalnews.com/035688_Monsanto_honey_bees_colony_collapse.html#ixzz1tCMrEtUB, questions whether Monsanto’s purchase of Beelogics will support research or quell the flow of information.

--Richard

Chilled Brood

Early spring bee hive inspections give the beekeeper an opportunity to determine the health of the colony and the condition of its queen. Inspections also allow the beekeeper to analyze and start taking corrective action for hive or colony problems. In the inspection, we look at the size of the population of bees and examine the brood. A hive with a smaller population than others being inspected at the same time may have a failing queen. Much can be learned about the queen’s productivity by examining the different stages of brood. Because of the amount of time that the brood remains in each of the different stages of development, we can determine if there is continuity in the queen’s egg laying by roughly counting the brood. When she is laying, there will be twice as many larvae as eggs and twice as many pupae as larvae. For example, finding capped brood but no uncapped brood may mean that the queen has stopped laying eggs.

Honey bee eggs and larvae are pearly white in color, and are found in open cells and should not be discolored. Pupae are housed in capped cells, which should have even-shaped cappings made of recycled beeswax. The brood should never have an unpleasant odor. Observing the appearance, texture, and odor of brood can usually identify two serious brood diseases, American foulbrood and European foulbrood. However, there is a very common bee hive condition that is similar in appearance and often tricky to identify. It is chilled brood caused by having a portion of the comb exposed to cold or damp conditions without being covered by protective bees. Chilled brood may have discolored larvae similar to European foulbrood or eneven, discolored, and perforated cappings like American foulbrood. There may be an unpleasant odor as well from decaying bees and brood. The chilled brood and dead bees in today’s photo resulted from vandals exposing a hive to the elements. Knowing the hive’s history helps identify chilled brood.

--Richard

Early Spring Hive Inspection

Opening a bee hive engages all of one’s senses. We very quickly learn the condition of the colony within. As soon as we remove the cover of a bee hive, we smell the aroma of beeswax and honey. An unpleasant odor may indicate a brood disease or dead, decaying bees in the hive. Of course, what we see in the hive reveals much about the condition of the colony. We notice the bees’ activity in and around the hive. We find that from hive to hive the bees vary from calm to highly agitated. Some bees remain in the frames, while others fly out in response to opening the hive. The sound of the hive changes with different colony conditions. A queen-right colony with normal activity will generate a gentle humming sound. A queen-less colony will often buzz loudly for a few seconds when the hive is first opened. The beekeeper’s sense of touch comes into play, sometimes unpleasantly. Most bees in the hive’s brood nest will allow the beekeeper to handle the frames of bees bare handed, never stinging unless a bee is accidentally mashed by the beekeeper. The bees from some colonies will punish exposed skin with effective stings. Colonies that readily sting may be queenless; they may be experiencing attacks from skunks or other predators; or they may have inherited defensive behavioral traits. Even gentle bees may sting if the weather conditions are wrong; it is late in the day; or the hive has been opened too frequently. One hive condition seems to always involve my using my sense of taste while examining the hives in the early spring. An unidentified white substance found inside the cells of honeycomb tastes sweet and pleasant; it’s crystallized aster honey from late last fall.

As we inspect the bee hive, we always examine the brood. In today’s photo of healthy brood, we see, from right to left, eggs, young larvae, older larvae, pupae in capped cells, and adult worker bees.

--Richard