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!