The Slimed Bee Hive

International travel and trade regularly bring plants and animals into the country as accidental imports. Removed from their natural predators or controls, these plants or animals often grow rapidly in their new environment. The small hive beetle is an invasive species that entered the United States about 10 years ago. Aided by the transportation of migratory honey bee hives on trucks, the small hive beetle spread across the U.S. in short order. The small hive beetle was truly not a welcomed addition to American beekeeping, which was already in serious decline largely due to the effects of parasitic mites which entered the U.S. in the 1980s. The adult small hive beetle is an insect with a hard outer covering which protects it from the honey bees, allowing the beetle to live inside the bee hive. The beetles reproduce rapidly in a hive that is queenless or in stress. When the beetles reproduce, it is the larval stage of the small hive beetle that is extremely damaging to the honey bee hive. The larvae eat everything in the hive, leaving behind a “slimed” waste covering the badly damaged combs. The slime, which has the odor of rotting oranges, repels honey bees and attracts small hive beetles. The beetles can drive the honey bees from their hive in merely a few days.

To help control the beetles, it is important for the beekeeper to prevent the small hive beetle larvae from leaving the hive and entering the soil where they continue their life cycle as pupae. Whenever we find a slimed bee hive, we place all of the frames in heavy plastic bags to prevent the larvae from entering the soil. Lightly damaged frames can be frozen to kill the beetles and then washed in water and returned to the bees. Heavily slimed frames must be completely cleaned of all comb. In the photo you can see catfish helping take care of the hive residue. These scavengers eagerly eat the honey comb, fermented honey, protein-rich pollen, and worm-like beetle larvae.
--Richard

Elderberry and Pigweed

The elderberry is a tall, common shrub of roadsides and forest margins. Throughout July, the plants were crowned with broad clusters of small, white, fragrant flowers. Now the flowers, pollinated by honey bees and other insect pollinators, are giving way to prolific bunches of berries. In the photo, the elder berry shows white flowers as well as green and dark purple berries. The ripe berries will darken and turn black in color. Elderberry is one of the flowering plants that go a long way toward supporting wildlife. The plant is browsed by deer. The berries are eaten by rabbits, fox, and squirrels. At least 25 species of birds including indigo bunting, bluebird, catbird, mockingbird, brown thrasher, phoebe, robin, dove, quail, turkey, and woodpeckers regularly eat the fruit of the elder berry plant. The elderberries are used to make pies, preserves, and wine.

The Memphis Commercial Appeal reported yesterday that hundreds of thousands of acres of soybean and cotton fields in the Mid-South have been infested by an herbicide-resistant strain of a common weed, Palmer pigweed. The pigweed is thriving in the presence of the most commonly used chemical herbicide, glyphosate, which is commonly sold under the trade name Roundup. Soybeans, cotton, and other plants have been genetically engineered to withstand glyphosate, allowing the weed killer to be sprayed directly on the crops. The herbicide-resistant pigweed can’t be controlled by glyphosate, so farmers are being required to return to labor-intensive hand chopping of the weed. We find in agriculture that chemical resistance commonly occurs. That has been the case with beekeeping, as strains of miticide-resistant mites replaced the first mites to enter this country. The beekeepers are having to adjust their mite control tactics; now the row-crop farmers will have to do the same.
--Richard

Painted Queen Bees

At Peace Bee Farm the queen bees wear a dot of color for identification. Whenever I have the opportunity to locate the queen bee in a hive, I catch her and mark her thorax with a color to represent the current year. This year’s bees wear green. Whenever I find a queen that I have previously marked, I can immediately tell her age by the color of paint. The queen bee is the only long-lived bee in the colony. The dot of paint, of course, helps to make the queen bee stand out among the thousands of bees in the hive. Even though the queen bee is somewhat larger than the worker bees that comprise the majority of the colony, she is often overlooked. The queen’s abdomen is longer than a worker’s, and it is more wasp-like in shape. Other than the shape of the abdomen the queen and workers look quite alike. She is often not recognizable, even when one is looking directly at her. If the queen is laying an egg, her abdomen is hidden in a cell. Because she emits strong pheromones, the queen may be covered by worker bees, hiding her from sight. Possibly the most important reason that we feel like it is worth the effort to locate, catch, and paint our queen bees it to tell if they have been replaced by supersedure. If we find a queen that is not marked as our records indicate, we can assume that the colony has replaced her. Following a painted queen over a period of months or years allows us to continuously evaluate her as a potential mother of new queens to be raised in the future.

Brandon Dill photographed one of this year’s queens marked in green. The paint helped make the queen stand out among the hoard of nurse bees and queen attendant bees. Brandon’s work can be seen at http://www.brandondillphotography.com/.
--Richard

A Collapsing Honey Bee Colony

Accompanied by beekeeper and photographer Brandon Dill, I am checking the supers on some strong hives. Any hive with large population of bees and plenty of bees in the honey supers is considered normal. A large hive with few bees in the honey supers indicates a potentially collapsing colony. In those cases, we remove all of the honey supers and carefully examine the brood nest. Whenever we look into the brood nest, we are looking for evidence that we have a good, laying queen. The presence of eggs and young larvae indicates that there has been a queen in place in the past few days.

In the colony with the collapsing population of bees, we find eggs and larvae; but there is evidence that they are not the products of a good queen. Instead of the eggs being laid upright in the center of the cells, a number of eggs are laid on the sides of the cells. In a number of cells we find a number of eggs instead of a single egg. Click on Brandon’s photo to see cells with both a small c-shaped larva and extra eggs indicating multiple uses of the same cell over a number of days. Other cells show numbers of eggs laid in the same cell. This frame of brood appears to contain only non-fertile drone eggs and brood. There are two possible causes for drone laying. One is the presence of a worker bee with a fully developed reproductive system. The other potential cause is a queen bee that has depleted her supply of sperm and cannot fertilize eggs. In each case the colony is hopelessly doomed, as it cannot produce new workers or a new queen. A beekeeper must step in and take action or lose the colony. In each case the colony is unaware that it is collapsing because the laying worker and the sperm-depleted queen both secrete pheromones which stabilize the colony. See Brandon Dill’s powerful and imaginative work at: http://www.brandondillphotography.com/.
--Richard

Spring Honey Flows

Light amber colored spring wildflower honey flows from the extractor. The honey is the result of an entire spring’s efforts by many a honey bee. It takes the full life’s efforts of 32 bees to make just one tablespoon of honey to pour over a hot buttered biscuit. To produce a one pound jar of honey, bees will have to visit two million flowers and fly a combined distance of 55 thousand miles. That’s more than twice the distance around the earth at the equator.

This spring honey that Rita and I extract today is the small surplus that the always ambitious bees stored after they fed large volumes of honey to their developing young throughout the spring. To build up their population to large numbers, the bees started gathering nectar from dandelion flowers and red maple trees on any warm winter days. Throughout the winter and early spring the bees searched river bottoms for tupelo and black willow. The bees foraged each of the fruit trees in order: plum, pear, apple, and crabapple. The honey bees sought out the Delta’s wild flowers. Ample rains brought large stands of clover into bloom. Lawns not sprayed with herbicides became white carpets of clover blossoms. As the spring honey flows from the extractor, it is strained to remove flecks of beeswax and debris. The raw honey is ready to be bottled and eaten. It will not be heated or treated further. Over time, crystals of sugar will form in all honey. Crystallization of honey does not harm the food in any way; the crystallized honey retains all of its healthful qualities and flavor. Some of the sugars in honey are stable in the crystal form, not liquid. Also, honey is a highly concentrated sugar product, being about 82 percent sugars and 18 percent water. I’ll admit that I interrupted the writing of this piece for a bowl of ice cream topped with some spring honey from the Delta.
--Richard

Extracting Honey

The recorded history of beekeeping tells us that man has managed honey bees for thousands of years. However, most of the advances in modern beekeeping occurred in the mid 1800s. In 1851, L. L. Langstroth developed the modern bee hive with removable frames to hold the honey combs. Shortly afterward, inventors went to work designing equipment to make the beeswax foundation upon which the bees build their honey combs. The foundation was embossed with the six-sided design of the honey bee cells. Other inventors designed the beekeeper’s smoker after the blacksmith’s forge bellows. Seven thousand year old cave paintings show Neanderthal Man calming bees with the smoke from a torch. The beekeeper’s smoker made the use of smoke convenient. With honey comb housed in removable frames, the beekeeper of the mid 1800s had options for handling the hive’s honey. While all previous methods of handling the honey were destructive of the comb, Langstroth’s removable frames of honey comb could be reused. Beeswax comb built by the bees this year can be used by the bees to hold next year’s honey crop.

The fourth major beekeeping invention of the mid 1800s was the extractor, a machine used to spin the honey out of the combs. After the beekeeper removes the beeswax capping over the cells of honey, the frames are placed in the extractor. As the extractor spins, centrifugal force removes the honey. Rita is loading frames of honey into the extractor in the Peace Bee Farm honey house. The output of the extractor is light amber spring wildflower honey.
--Richard

Passion Flower in Bloom

The passion flower is truly one of the showiest of all of the wildflowers. A break in the rain found the flowers of this climbing vine being worked heavily by honey bees as well as a number of different species of solitary bees. The honey bees climbed into the pale purple bloom and collected pollen while hanging upside down from the large exposed anthers. As the bees groom the abundant pollen from their hairy bodies, they brush some onto the sticky surface of the flower’s stigma. This transfer of pollen is a necessary step in the reproduction of the passion flower. After pollination, it produces its fruit, a lemon-sized berry called a maypop. Inside the maypop are seeds which are favored by songbirds, particularly bobwhite quail. The honey bee helps provide food for wildlife by pollinating plants.

The passion flower is an herbal remedy used to treat sleep disorders and to relieve pain. Its aerial foliage is collected for this herbal use. Passion flower is a native of the southern United States as well as Central and South America. Click on the photo to see one honey bee grooming pollen onto its honey baskets while two others arrive to forage. The honey bee on the left already has a partial load of pollen in its pollen baskets located on the hind legs. This beautiful plant clearly illustrates how flowering plants attract bees and as a result get reproduced.
--Richard