The Science of Bee Candy

This is not a lid on this jar, it is a sheet of crystallized syrup. The little holes are from the bees drinking through the holes punched in the lid, kind of like Eskimos ice fishing.

One of the things I do to help my bees get through the winter is to give them syrup in the fall so they can top up their honey stores before the real cold sets in when they will need to have plenty of food at hand to keep themselves warm.
I am not an expert on bees, but this is one thing I think really does help them. In the spring I check for extra honey ( hoping to harvest some for us) and I find no extra honey. Just one comb of it in fact. That tells me they needed every drop of syrup I fed them in the previous fall.
One of our problems is that I became a bee keeper on one of the worst springs for bees because of its late low temperatures and record setting rain. A record, that is, until this year.
So I have been keeping the bees supplied with syrup. It can't hurt.
One of the weird things that I have been dealing with though is that sometimes the syrup crystallizes in the jars.
I cannot figure out why it only does it sometimes. It feels like I am making the syrup the same way each time, yet about every fourth time it does this.

I suspect it has to do with SCIENCE. I found this explanation of why candy crystallizes and that helped me understand a little better what the crystallizing process is. But it only alludes to the fact that it only takes a little shock to make sugar crystallize. I have also heard that the trick to keeping sugar crystals from forming is to add an acid, like cream of tarter or lemon juice. Also crystals will not form if something comes between the molecules, like a simple molecule of corn syrup or honey.
In my search I found this cool reference from an 1888 article where readers sent in their recipes for bee syrup and what their results have been.
You will see that it is not a new topic for bee keepers and the variety of methods and outcomes they list are just as diverse as it is today.
It's amazing how something that seems so simple can get so complex.

Bees Wax

The other day I decided to mind my own bees wax.
This summer, the day I was stung, I had been harvesting the crooked combs in hive #1. I was on a mission to encourage the bees to build on my newly designed bar and therefore have straight comb.
Because that day ended in the hospital I hadn't really thought about the few combs of wax sitting in a pot in the corner of the out building.
But when I was tidying up the other day I decided to process it.
To my surprise there was a wax moth on the top comb.

I had only read about these and had never seen one.
Yuck.
I decided to boil the whole business and see what I got.

My bee friend has a great post about how to process bees wax so I won't try to do better than her. I will just show you a little of my process and if you are interested in doing it yourself check out Holly's post.
I was really surprised at how much pollen had been in the combs and felt a little sad about ruining something that took so many bees a lifetime to gather, but there was no going back now.
As I filtered out the stuff, surprise...

One very nasty boiled grub.
Most of all I was surprised at the bright yellow of the wax, tinted by all that pollen.
Not a lot of wax from all those combs, but plenty to make lip balm for Christmas presents.

More on Grease Patties and Hunkerin' Down for Winter

If you look close you can see a passageway into the feeder through the grease pattie.

Buck and I did give the grease patties one more try for the Fall hoping to head off any spurt in the mite population. I don't know if it worked. Spring will tell.
The funny thing is that we tried to trick the bees into walking on the grease patties by building a globby hoop for them to have walk through to get to the syrup in the syrup feeder.
After my last try with grease patties I was expecting the bees to avoid the grease patties. But when we started putting it into the hive the bees seemed to be really happy to see it. They happily began licking on it.
But the next week we opened the hives to check the syrup level and were surprised to find that hardly any syrup was gone and the bees had once again stacked dead bees and debris onto the grease patties.
We decided to just clean the grease patties out and leave the bees to their syrup.

One week later, covered in dead bees but looking like it had been eaten on.

Then I was at the hay house a week later and I noticed that when I open the door a couple of bees flew in and started trying to pry open the half empty bag of grease patties I had set on the feed barrel.
They are giving me very mixed signals. Do they only like it fresh? Do only a few bees like it and the rest hate it and stack dead things on it? Do they only like grease pattie on Sundays and all the rest of the week it is sinful?
It's a mystery.
We will put straw in the hive attics and their bottom boards on this week to keep them warm for the winter but let the hive breath too. It has been colder this month than in the past. It's so cold out  I  have a hankerin' for some grease pattie. MMMM grease and sugar.

My Deputy Bee Keeper

I have had to pass the baton of bee hive maintenance to my trusty Homestead partner Buck.

Why? Because I had the lovely surprise this July of getting stung on the face, no big deal in itself. Put some baking soda on it and keep working the hive. So that is what I did, until the unhappy moment when I realized I was having an allergic reaction to the sting.

This realization came almost too late, at the moment in which I was on the phone with my best friend who lives 40 minutes away and realized my hands felt funny and I could not speak coherently.

A 911 call by my friend (that's a real friend indeed) and couple thousand dollars later, I am hesitant to open my hives in my casual style anymore. Not because I am afraid, I remember very little of the incident and so don't really feel fear per say, but everyone who knows me (especially our daughter June), knows they must be very stern with me, and they have.

Because I know that I would be furious with Buck, June and my friend if the tables were turned and they did not take proper precautions in such a situation, I am attempting to do the right thing for them and ultimately for myself.

And so Buck has stepped up to the hive, so to speak and volunteered to be my hands.
Unfortunately it turns out I am not such a good direction giver for dealing with bees. I keep jumping in and grabbing things and barking incomplete orders and then chastising Buck for not doing it right.
It has truly been an exercise in patience for both of us, Buck doing better than me.

The thing is, I am very sad to not be close to my bees. I was having so much fun with them this year. Opening the hive willy-nilly on a warm day and peeking in at my bee kingdom. It was a little like Gulliver's Travels, maybe even to the point of me being taken prisoner, in a kind of abstract way.

Now I suit up and stand ten feet away shouting directions through my bee veil and taking a million pictures with my zoom lens so I can pour over them later.

I am looking into getting a "sting proof" bee suit., but it costs over $200. On one hand I could work with the bees again. On the other hand I don't even want to think about the money I have spent already in the name of bees.

 I have a daily internal debate about this. How much is this costing us? How much do we gain from that? Believe me the numbers are not good when you look at them on paper. The bees are not cheap, even if you don't have to include hospital bills in the equation. Sugar is 14.00 a 25 lb. bag. I have gone through 3 of them in one year. Initial costs include hives, hats, gloves, feeders, grease pattie ingredients, classes, several books and the list goes on. What have we gained monetarily from our hives? Zero. Nothing. Nada.

What it comes down to though, for me, is the original and root reason I started a hive: I wanted to increase the pollination of our plants here on the homestead. I wanted to help preserve our country's honey bees in the face of Colony Collapse everywhere. I wanted to make a safe place for bees. Try as I might, I can't really put a price tag on that.

There's an upside to finding out this late in the game that I am allergic to bee stings: I have had a great time with my bees up to now. I have messed with my hives in tank tops and flip flops, captured 4 swarms and started two hives. I've spent countless hours reading, thinking, planning and playing with the bees. If I had known I was allergic before I started all of this, I would have never had the pleasure of being surrounded by bees and being totally in tune with them, being a part of that complex world for a little while and forgetting all of the fear I once had about bees.

I think I will get that suit and just wear my epi-pen around my neck. When I weigh all the pros and cons, to me it's worth it. But I am sure Buck will insist he is always there with me, sting proof suit or not. And I'm O.K. with that.

Results of the Grease Patties

 

I would love to tell you that my Grease Pattie experiment in Hive #1 has made a real difference, but I have to honestly say that I have no scientific proof if the grease patties I used in hive #1 worked or not.

I worry a little that they didn't have maximum effect since I had to adapt their use to my Top Bar Hive. I placed them as best I could, in areas where they would walk across them as the directions say but because of the way the entry holes are placed 2" up from the floor in the hive, I could not put the Patties where the bees would be forced to walk across them as they entered the hive.

I instead put them across the entry to the syrup feeder. This worked fine for a couple of weeks. But after a while the nectar flow began and fewer and fewer bees crossed that threshold. As I watched their reaction to the Grease Patties I would have to say they seem to have no interest in eating on them. I am not sure if this is normal (I suspect that it is, since the instructions for using the Grease Patties seemed more about placement than feeding) but it was true for my bees.

 

What I can say for sure is that shortly after the bees stopped using the feeder with the grease patties in front of it , I took the syrup jar out and left the Patties. A week later when I opened the hive I discovered that the bees had decided that the Grease Patties were a fine place to pile dead bees and hive debris. This message seemed pretty clear to me, so I took the Grease Patties out.

There have been some drastic fluctuations in the hive population and I believe it is because of mites. 

Hive #1, June 25, 2011

Hive #1, August 2, 2011

Hive #1, August 28, 2011

Shortly after all the fussing with the Grease Patties, I did notice an improvement in the hive health. Previously I had been seeing a few bees with wing deformities, a sure sign of mite infestation since the virus is spread by Varoa Mites, but over the last few months Hive #1 has built up substantially from its beleaguered numbers and seems to be doing well. I haven't seen any more wing deformities either I have no idea if the Grease Patties helped with this or if they just managed a rebound naturally despite the Mites and the very poor weather this spring.

Even though I don't really know if the Grease Patties worked I think I will put a new batch of Grease Patties into the hive for this Fall. Even if they only helped a little I think it is worth the effort.

According to most sources I have found, mites reach their peak population in a hive at the end of the summer, just as the bee population decreases to get ready for the winter. This is why hives seem to mysteriously die out in the winter. The mite load is just too great for each individual bee and weakened colonies cannot cope with the hardships of winter.
According to the Florida State Extension video on Varoa Mites, if you open your hive in the spring and only have a pile of dead bees, it is almost certainly because the bees had a Varoa Mite infestation in the Fall. Because they are weakened by the mites they slowly die off as the Winter sets in. The hive population slowly decreases until they reach a critical point where they cannot maintain a "ball" big enough to keep warm.
I really hope that doesn't happen to Hive #1.

Good Job!

It is very obvious that having two hives of bees at the Homestead has made a real difference in the pollination rate of the old apple trees around here.

These trees barely produced fruit the two years previous to getting the bees. Maybe even longer, I don't know.

What I do know is that there was not a single honey bee to be seen here for the whole summer of 2009 and the old apple trees showed it in their complete lack of fruit. That's why I started my first hive.

This spring, when it wasn't raining, you could hear the intense hum of worker bees as they climbed in and out of thousands of apple blossoms.

This is a huge plum on a tree we didn't even know was a plumb tree. I think it had never been pollinated before.

The trees that had the good fortune to bloom when it wasn't raining are absolutely covered in apples.

The trees that had the misfortune of blooming during a blast of bee free rain, are not so fortunate.

 

This year our "Canby" raspberries which have been under performing, with odd shaped fruit in the past, have beautiful plump fruits this year.
All in all I think that despite the fact that we are in the middle of miles of nature we are were lacking in pollinators for whatever reason.

 

Happily it seems our bees are having a really positive impact on the Homestead.

Predators

Sitting in front of the hive while eating lunch this summer, I couldn't help feeling a little protective when I saw a Bald Faced Hornet tackling honey bees mid flight in front of the entrance. The Hornet would fly hard into the bee and knock it out of the air then quickly try to locate it in the grass below the hive. It took several tries before it manged to catch a bee on the ground. When it did, it stung it several times and grappled with the dying bee until it stopped struggling. The Hornet had caught dinner. In the natural order of things I suppose it is fair. My bees are not the only ones trying to eek out a living in this landscape. And my bees are, after all, not the natives.

This is a Bald Faced Hornet that flew into the trailer. I caught it in a jar and decided to take it's mug shot before I released it.

Flower/Crab Spiders usually wait in flowers to catch bees. Here are a couple of pictures I took the other day.
As crazy as it seems, I noticed what must be a mite on the back of this spider. There is an interesting,
albeit difficult to read, scientific paper about parasites on spiders.

This Flower Spider decided to set up at the one place she just couldn't miss, the entrance of my hive.
"Like shooting fish in a barrel" my Grandpa used to say.

She stayed for a couple of days and then disappeared. This video shows the bees going to check her out and then running away. EEk spider!

Measuring With Body Parts

Here I am pulling two Top Bars apart and causing a little chaos. As always, click for a much larger picture of bees holding on to each other in a chain.

Festooning is what it is called when bees hang together in a chain. These bees might be "measuring" out the top bar or could be doing something else, the jury is still out about why they do it, but I think it's pretty cool. They do this before they begin to build their comb. It's hard to describe if you've never seen this, but the bees hold on to each other in little chains and don't let go

even if you stretch them a ways out. They don't want to lose their place I guess. I don't know if bees in Langstroth hives do this.

Another thing that I have observed that my bees do in Top Bar Hives is that they build a huge variety of cell sizes.

Not being a scientist I can only guess what this is about, but I bet the bees know exactly what it is about and I have decided to just trust them when it comes to cell size.

 

They don't have that kind of freedom when they are working in a hive with prestamped foundation. They must create the cell sizes that are stamped into the plastic or wax. I wonder what that is like for them?
I found this page on Bush Farm's web site helpful for his experience with natural frameless comb.

      

Proof!

I  felt brave the other day and decided to ascertain for certain if my Hive #2 is building their comb straight on my experimental top bars.
I probably should have planned a little better and put my camera onto a tripod but, well, here is the video of a random bar I pulled from the middle of the hive.



I was so excited and relieved. It looks like I'm on the right track for hive design. I have not had to correct the comb on a single bar so far. The comb is being built down the center of the bars and is not being attached to the walls of the hive body at all.

Hive #2 is thriving with nearly 15 full combs built since I hived them May 11, as apposed to hive #1 which is struggling and has no new comb.  I'm sure it is because Hive #1 swarmed twice and then had a bout of mites. All this really unfriendly weather is not helping either.

Click to make larger

While I was checking Hive #2 there was a tiny wild bee pollinating the grass plume next to the hive. It was only about 1/3 of an inch long.

Hive #1 seems to be on the mend though. I checked last week for brood and found plenty.

They must have solved the Queen problem themselves. I think they will make a good recovery, especially if the weather improves (which it has not yet).

We are supposed to be in the primary nectar flow of the Himalayan Blackberry in the Willamette Valley. But the rain and cool weather has postponed the blooms by almost a month.
I have been keeping the hives supplied with jars of syrup and pollen patties to get them through these drizzly days.

BH2O=bee water

I have been puzzling over what my honey bees want when it comes to water. It turns out I am not alone.
I was just reading a post by one of my fellow bee keepers about her water/bee dilemma concerning her neighbors bird bath and her son's wading pool.

Everyone seems to be wondering exactly what it is that makes the bees swarm to the neighbors hot tub or bird bath and ignore the sources of water set out for them.

The bees have their own idea about what they need, but it seems to change on a regular basis. What my bees love one week is completely bee free the next.

I had been thinking all morning about the fact that nary a bee has been sighted at the water barrel pond in my garden this year. Last year I had to add vegetation to keep them from drowning in it. So many bees were landing on the edge that they kept knocking each other into it.

This afternoon I sat in the sun near an old outbuilding and enjoyed my coffee. I noticed, after a couple of minutes in silent revelry (finally some sun), that there was a high hum going on above my head.

Up in the clogged and useless gutters were droves of bees drinking the composted water trapped in the gutter by globs of fir needles.

So that's where they are drinking.

What I know from my urban beekeeper friends is that their bees love hot tubs and swimming pools. Bird baths and neighbors ponds come in at a close second.

Here at the homestead they have more choices. I often see them gathering dew off the long grass in the late mornings. As the season gets dryer I find them at the drip emitters in my garden. The system will have turned off but each dripper still has a reservoir of water left in it. If my hands are wet in the garden they will often land on me to sip the water from the creases of my palms.
Last fall, while I was doing some masonry work on a chimney, the bees came one after another to drink the water dripping off of my mortar.

Thinking I could track down some authoritative source on what bees want for water, I combed my books and the web.

No one agrees. People have seen many bees on their livestock salt licks after a rain. Or in their garbage can lids. Hot tubs again. Koi ponds. Saltwater pools. Regular pools. Their kids wading pools.

And now I know they like gutter water. This one throws my most recent theory into question. I had been thinking about what all these hot tubs and swimming pools have in common. I was thinking "PH of course" since that is the one thing you must always keep on top of when it comes to pool maintenance. Or maybe not. What is the PH of a gutter full of fir needles, garbage lids of maple leaves, a plastic wading pool or a cement birdbath? I don't think they are the same but I don't know for sure.

Another element these all have in common with each other is temperature. All are either heated by the sun or electricity.

They also have a certain salt content. Either added to soften the water, by sweaty people or the vessel/debris the water sits in.

If I were to take a wild guess at this moment I would say that what we perceive as bees "drinking water" many times is just bees gathering liquid minerals and salt.  When they are truly drinking water what makes them choose one source over another? At this point in the search for the best bee water my hypothesis is that it is the perfect combination of location, temperature and PH.

But I realize that the  real question for many urban bee keepers is not actually about creating the perfect bee saloon it is "How do I provide a water source that the bees will choose instead of my neighbors pool?"

I don't have an answer to that, yet. One thing I have noticed is that open water that is too close to the hive gets rejected. Bees are very hygienic and I believe they will not drink open water that is in their cleansing flight path. So that helps with the "location" part.

The scientist in me is coming out. I'm setting out a dish of salt water and then off to the store I go for a PH kit. I am going to get to the bottom of this for my own sake. The bees I am sure, could care less.

I'll let you know if I find out anything and let me know if you have any ideas or experiences that will help in the search.

Mystery Queen

Every once in a while a bee will fly in completely covered in neon yellow pollen.

I opened hive #1 today to find no sign of the queen cell. It is as if it had never existed. If the queen cell was a desperate attempt to requeen I will not know if it worked for 5 days after the disappearance of the queen cell, which is approximately how long it would take a virgin queen to mate and settle in to egg laying.
Everything I have read says that a queen cell on the edge of a comb is a swarm queen, but there is no way this colony is preparing to swarm. They just do not have the mass of bees it would take. Or they've gone completely of  the deep end.

I am very concerned that there is something wrong with this hive. I finally pulled a couple bars back to try and locate some brood or eggs and found a few cells with larva but the cells looked dry and all the cells that were capped around them were drone cells. If the queen is only laying drone eggs that is bad news.

I started this endeavor believing that the bees know best. But I am realizing that the cost of finding out if this is true is the possible loss of this hive. I guess I need to be O.K. with that or I need to seriously consider introducing a new queen.

This is a comb they began building a month ago and they have never finished it. This was my first clue that things may not be going right. They should be building comb like crazy for the impending nectar flow.

But for now I will wait a week to see if there is an increase in population and I will check then for more progress on the brood.
I have put in a syrup jar and a pollen patty to help things along.

If it doesn't look better by July 1st I will think about taking drastic measures by introducing a comb of brood from hive #2 so they can raise a queen if they need one.

Straight Comb in Top Bar Hive #2

Four weeks have gone by and Hive #2 has been busy building comb. They have filled up 10 bars with beautiful straight combs, so I feel confident in celebrating the fact that something I did was right.
The trouble is that I have done a couple things different than hive #1 and I will never really know which one or two things worked.

This is the early version of my new bar design. It has a deeper cardboard strip. I have since taken the hint when the bees chewed it down to suit themselves and trimmed them all from a 1/2" to a 1/4" deep. I was happy to see that the bees built supporting comb up to the wood bar. At first it seemed they were going to just build the comb on the edge of the cardboard strip, which would not be good as the comb became large and heavy with honey or brood.

I feel pretty good about recommending my new bar design though, because I have put a couple of the new bars into hive #1 and they are building straight comb on them, in spite of the fact that the comb next to the new bar is crooked.

The queen cell looks a little like the shell of a peanut

I am a little concerned about hive #1. They seem to have a new queen in the making and I don't really understand why. In theory they were left with a new healthy queen when the hive swarmed, twice.
I can only guess what is going on is that the queen they were left with did not get mated because of the really poor weather we have been having, or she was effected by the mite population.
I opened the hive yesterday to find only healthy bees- no wing deformities at all and a queen cell on the edge of the outermost comb that was not there last week. I will be keeping a very sharp eye on them.

Mites in the Hive

I was very alarmed to find a drone scuttling around in the grass under the hive the other day. That in itself is not an unusual event. Drones are expendable and are often unceremoniously tipped out the door of the hive when more room/food/cells are needed.

These were full drone cells last week, now they are cleaned out and being used.I am watching to see what develops here. Drone cells are very attractive to mites, so drones are commonly higher in mite infestations.

What was alarming was the comparatively giant Varroa Mite that was hanging on the belly of the drone. Seriously, if that mite was on my belly it would be the size of a small cat!
I took these pictures and then went on the search for what to do.

Mite is circled, click to enlarge this photo

 I have found this series of videos from the Florida State University on bee diseases to be concise and exceptional in their information content. Every time I watch one I learn something new.

I found a few other up to date sources on the web that also confirmed that screened bottoms are the way to go. My hives already have screened bottoms.

The next thing to do, it seems, is to make some "grease patties".  Here is a recipe I adapted from a much larger recipe from the West Virginia University (go here for a pdf with more detailed direction on the type of salt and where to place patties). I cut the recipe down because I didn't need enough for 10 hives.

That's "wintergreen oil" last on the list

The sugar and salt encourage the bees to eat the pattie. The oil in it gets on the bee's hairs and makes it difficult to hold onto for the mites.

 It also has wintergreen oil in it which is supposed to upset the mites and cause them to run around, increasing the chances that they will fall off the bees and through the screened bottom, never to be seen again.  

Caution: do not add more wintergreen oil than this. It will cause the bees to attack and kill the queen because they will not be able to smell her. In this recipe, more is not better. Also do not follow older recipes which advocate antibiotics being added. New studies have shown this only harms the bees in the long run by making anything the antibiotic treats, resistant.

 

I didn't even try to stir this stuff with a spoon, it's just too stiff. I just squished it in my hands like play dough, scraping the bottom several times in the process.

Grease pattie the size of a small hamburger.

You can see the screened bottom of the hive here. I had a syrup feeder in the hive so I replaced the jar with the grease pattie and put one on the side for good measure.

Only time will tell if this is an effective method for my top bar hives.

I am keeping a close eye on them. I am on the fence about using anything stronger to deal with the mites. There are a few more organic methods to use. But the danger is in Fall when the bee population drops for winter and mite populations spike. I have heard several accounts of seemingly healthy hives suddenly being a dead pile of bees, and apparently this is the number one sign of a critical Varroa Mite infestation.

The livestock salt from the feed store is too coarse for the grease patties so you have to whurr it up in a blender.

 I am hoping that the mites only achieved a foothold in the first place because of the stress the hive was under from of the very wet spring/summer we are having, and that as the weather improves and the bees now are not so crowded (because they swarmed twice) they will become healthy enough overcome the mites again.

Drone next to the mite

 Apparently all hives have mites these days. But it's all about how many mites they have that determines the health of the hive.