Deep or Illinois?

News stories, particularly related to Colony Collapse Disorder, over the past four years have brought considerable interest in beekeeping. I am regularly approached by individuals who are interested in getting started keeping honey bees. They have questions about obtaining bees and ordering or building bee hives. I always encourage them to join their local beekeeping association and follow along with experienced beekeepers as they learn about honey bee biology and the craft of managing bees in hives. When Reverend L. L. Langstroth built the modern bee hive in 1851, he used the available lumber of the day. His hive box stood roughly nine inches tall. That same box is still in wide use today, and is commonly called a “deep” hive body. A typical bee hive uses two nine-inch hive bodies and has a volume of 84 liters. Honey is collected in supers of five or six inch heights. At Peace Bee Farm, we prefer to use a slightly different arrangement. We use three medium-depth boxes, often called “Illinois” hive bodies. With a depth of roughly six inches, the three medium boxes make a hive having the same 84 liter volume. Why would one use three boxes with 30 frames instead of two boxes with 20 frames? The medium-depth boxes provide many advantages. First, it is a convenience to the beekeeper to manage equipment of the same size. I find the greatest advantage of using the same size frames for hive bodies and honey supers in swarm suppression. Swarming is often initiated by brood nest crowding. Brood nest frames full of spring-time honey can be moved up into a super to immediately relieve brood nest crowding.

The transition from deep to medium equipment can be accomplished over the winter by allowing the bees to move upward into frames of drawn comb filled with honey. Once the queen is up in the medium boxes, I place a queen excluder under them to prevent her from returning to the deep box.

--Richard

A New Bottomland Forest

Whenever we are planting, we should give consideration to the honey bees and the native pollinators. Whether we are planting a flower garden, a kitchen vegetable garden, an herb garden, or a pollinator pasture, we can greatly increase the available forage and habitat for our important pollinators. By including native plants in our horticultural plantings, we can provide food as well as places for the pollinators to nest and reproduce. As Tod and I went about hand-planting a portion of our wetland reforestation project that was accidentally destroyed by a farmer’s plow, we tried to accommodate the pollinators as we replanted the forest. In the river bottoms, we planted hardwood trees from seed collected in other woods on the farm. We planted Shumard, Nuttall, overcup, pin, sawtooth, water, cherrybark, and willow oaks; shagbark and bitternut hickories; pecans; and American black walnuts. The seeds, acorns or nuts, we planted into the heavy clay Delta soil before rains. We also dispersed the seed pods of green ash to be carried by the wind. Along a gentle ridge rising above the river bottoms, the natural embankment of an old Mississippi River oxbow chute, we planted a number of species of trees less tolerant of seasonal flooding. For these plantings we included a number of flowering trees to provide food for honey bees and native pollinators. Along with the oaks, hickories, pecans, walnuts, and ash, we planted seed for black locust, peach, plum, and persimmon. Along the ridge, we also distributed by the wind the seed of catalpa and redbud.

After the tree seeds germinate and start growing, we will return and plant understory plants like hawthorn, blackberry, and milkweed. Grape vines and native muscadine vines will provide food for honey bees in the treetops. After pollination, their fruit and seed will provide food for songbirds and small mammals that will distribute the plants throughout the forest. Clouds gather for the rain that will start the regrowth of the forest.

--Richard

Honey Bees Benefit Cities

The New York Times published a story relating the rapid increase in the number of individuals who are choosing to keep honey bees at their homes in the cities. While beekeepers have always been welcomed in some cities, other communities passed ordinances to limit or prohibit beekeeping. The story, which tells of beekeepers’ efforts to change restrictive laws, is located at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/09/garden/09Bees.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=homepage. Some of those communities that attempted to restrict beekeeping did so in an effort to prevent Africanized honey bees from entering. Laws limiting beekeeping activities may actually have the opposite effect. Fortunately, the Africanized honey bees have not proven to be the threat that some predicted. All beekeeping organizations recommend beekeepers adopt good neighbor policies involving beekeeping practices designed to lessen unpleasant encounters between honey bees and the public: Bee hives should not be placed close to property lines. Tall fences or shrubs encourage the bees to fly high above the heads of neighbors. Hives placed in pastures with livestock need to be fenced to keep animals away from the hives. Beekeepers should provide the bees a source of water. Don’t place too many hives in residential areas, usually three or four for lots less than one acre. Bees should be worked in a manner to prevent disturbing bees when neighbors are present: Open the hives in the daytime when bees are foraging. If a colony is defensive, re-queen it. Reduce robbing by not working bees during a dearth, and limit the time that honey is exposed to flying bees.

Having managed honey bee colonies benefits cities: They provide pollination for food and ornamental plants, establish a trained group of beekeepers who can handle bee emergencies, and prevent the creation of environmental niches for more dangerous stinging insects. I think that maybe the greatest benefit involves developing environmentally aware citizens. Peace Bee Farm maintains three bee yards in public areas in the city of Memphis. Today’s photo shows some of our urban bee hives facing an evergreen barrier.

--Richard

Hive Set-Up for Winter

The survival of a honey bee colony over the winter depends largely upon the way the beekeeper sets up the hive in the fall. The first requirement for winter-time survival is that the bee hive must have adequate ventilation. Honey bees maintain a warm hive throughout the winter. Whenever the bees have brood present, they maintain a temperature in the brood nest of 95 degrees Fahrenheit. The bees can withstand a cooler temperature than their developing brood, so they will only warm their cluster of bees to about 70 degrees when they stop rearing brood in the winter. This is equivalent to our lowering the setting on our home thermostat in the winter to save energy. The honey bees’ respiration produces moisture inside the hive. With a warm, damp atmosphere inside the hive and cold winter temperatures outside, condensation occurs inside the hive. The effect is similar to that which occurs on the outside of a cold glass of iced tea on a humid summer’s day here in the Delta. Water drips profusely down the glass. Water from condensation dripping into the brood nest bees kills bees. Tilting the hive forward in the winter keeps the water from falling onto the bees. It is most important to provide ventilation to prevent condensation from occurring. Leaving screened bottom boards uncovered provides good ventilation for the hive. A vent port in the hive’s inner cover provides air flow through the top of the hive. Surprisingly, protecting from cold temperatures is not a requirement for winter-time hive set-up.

The second requirement for the bees to survive the winter is that they must have adequate stores of honey, and it must be located where the bees can access it. The honey should be above the cluster of bees. The bees consume the honey above their cluster and then move upward into the empty cells. Experience tells beekeepers how much honey the hive needs for the winter: in the Arkansas Delta, about 60 pounds.

--Richard

Hive Poised for Starvation

One colony of honey bees stood out as different from each of the others. When I checked the hives for stored honey for the winter, all were heavy in weight with the exception of one. Most hives were full of honey, located in the top of the hive, available for the bees to access during cold weather. However, one hive was extremely light in weight. Inside, I found yellow-colored bees as opposed to the dark-colored bees that occupied each of the other hives. Click on the photo and you can see the chewed-out honeycomb and empty cells where the stored honey has been removed. No, the hive has not been robbed; these bees simply consumed more stored honey than their neighbors. The difference between this hive and the others is the race of bees. The dark bees are Russian; the yellow bees are Italian.

Each race of bees has distinct behaviors. Russian honey bees tend to build up their population slowly in the spring. It was already mid-spring when I added the colony with the young Italian queen to this bee yard. Italian honey bees build up quickly in the spring and maintain a large population throughout the year. Both races of honey bees in this bee yard produced good crops of honey, allowing me to harvest some surplus honey from each hive. It was after the harvest that the difference in the races of bees became apparent. The Italian bees with a larger population simply consumed their winter stores early in the fall. Fortunately, I detected the hive’s honey shortage in time to add supplemental feeding. The Russian bees, popular because of their resistance to Varroa mites, over-winter with a smaller cluster of bees and require less stored food for the winter. Russian, Italian, and Carniolan queen bees are each selected for resistance to parasitic mites. It is easier for the beekeeper to manage bees with more similar behaviors than the two races occupying this bee yard.

--Richard

Nature Deficit Disorder

Four years into the largest die-off of honey bees that has been recorded, we are finding how resilient the honey bees and the people who tend to them are. One of our followers sent me at link to a presentation recorded in the summer of 2008 by one of the researchers working to uncover the causes of honey bee Colony Collapse Disorder. Though some time has passed since the recording was made, the conditions, driven by pesticides, toxins, and disease, described in 2008 remain accurate today. Dennis VanEnglesdorp, acting as the State Apiarist for Pennsylvania’s Department of Agriculture as well as conducting research at Penn State University, passionately describes the condition of beekeeping in America. Bees serve us in a most important way: We rely upon the honey bee to provide one bite out of every three that we eat. This is accomplished by honey bees completing the reproductive step of pollination of our flowering crops. The bees that do this work are carried about the country on trucks by a group of crafty, determined migratory beekeepers. In spite of heavy losses, they have been able to maintain colony counts by splitting hives each year.

VanEnglesdorp asks why bees are now suddenly susceptible to the conditions that result in CCD. He mentions the heavy dependence our agriculture places upon pesticides. Studies are being conducted to identify the pesticides found inside bee hives. Interestingly, some of the hives with the greatest amount of pesticide are healthy. Some beekeepers attribute this to the deadly result of having too many parasitic mites in a hive. Possibly, those beekeepers who used pesticides heavily in the hive more effectively controlled the Varroa mites and the viruses that they vector. VanEnglesdorp describes our environment as suffering from “Nature Deficit Disorder.” To help correct this situation, he suggests we “make meadows, not lawns.” I photographed a mule deer eating fireweed, a famous honey source, in a Wyoming meadow. Hear VanEnglesdorp’s enthusiastic 16-minute presentation at www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/dennis_vanengelsdorp_a_plea_for_bees.html.

--Richard

The Greatest Killer

The Northeast Arkansas Beekeepers Association’s membership includes a diverse group of commercial, sideline, and hobbyist beekeepers who willingly share their experience in handling bees. The group’s conversation usually revolves around honey bee health. Meeting in Jonesboro, the discussion involved the things that kill bee hives. We talked about Varroa and tracheal mites, Nosema disease, viruses, American foulbrood, Colony Collapse Disorder, and the several other pests and pathogens that affect honey bees. Fires are a cause of concern, especially for bee yards placed in agricultural areas where fields are burned, sometimes by accident but usually as part of no-till farming practices. Windstorms damage bee yards, particularly here in “tornado alley.” Several beekeepers lost hives in spring-time flooding. Delta beekeepers who occasionally experience some water in the bottom of their hives literally lost hives; they washed away. There is universal agreement as to the number one cause of honey bee colony losses: starvation.

 Depending upon seasonal flowers for food, a honey bee colony spends most of the year in preparation for the dearth of flowers in the winter. The honey bee is unique as the only insect in the temperate region that stores food so that it may remain alive and active throughout the year. The amount of honey that the colony stores is determined by the size of the colony, the forage available, and the weather conditions. Whether the colony has enough stored honey to survive the winter often depends upon how much honey the beekeeper harvests from the hive. Experienced beekeepers, like those of Northeast Arkansas share their experience in how much honey a colony needs to survive a cold Delta winter. The pictured hive has plenty of honey for the winter. Worker bees have concentrated honey in the upper portion of the hive, the appropriate place for the bees to access the honey. Hives that are light in weight need supplemental feeding.  I lift the back of each bee hive and try to estimate its stored honey.

--Richard