Busy as Bees... and our responsibility to the same

“Gentlemen!  You can’t fight in here!  This is the War Room!”

--Peter Sellers fictional American President in Dr. Strangelove

We experienced a hive death this winter, and while experienced bee keepers have all had this happen to them at some point or other, we are not (yet) experienced bee keepers, so this was more than just a little traumatic for us.

That having been said, we are not a family that rests on its laurels.  Every experience must be milked of all possible lessons, and made worth its own pains by serving as a teaching moment.  So the first thing we did after cleaning out our first top bar hive, naturally, was start reading source materials again.

And we have learned a lot, as ought to be expected.

There is no solid evidence one way or the other, of course, as to exactly what happened to our first colony of bees, apart from the fact that one day they were there, and then a few days later, they simply weren’t.  There are some telltale signs, though, which give us more than sufficient clues.

First, there was still about a pint or so of honey in the combs.  Our bees, more than likely, did not starve to death.  There were only a small number of dead bees trapped in the comb, which suggests that while our backs were turned, they simply migrated, probably due to queen death.

There was no brood left in the comb anywhere, either.  Granted, the die-off happened in late February/early March, so there would not have been a lot of eggs there in any event… but it looks like our queen either died or left.  No way to be sure which… but it is safe to say that she was not in the hive the last time we checked.  Lesson learned – don’t open the box without locating the queen, and making sure she’s still there.

We have learned other lessons along the way, some of which had nothing to do with our colony die off, but which are important all the same, and how we handle things will be completely updated when our new package bees arrive in May.  Some of the more important changes to bee keeping at Myrtle’s place this year:

·         No more smoke.  The classical description of why smoke is used actually even hints at why we will not be using a smoker any more… from the Wikipedia page on collecting honey:

“Collecting honey is typically achieved by using smoke from a bee smoker to pacify the bees; this causes the bees to attempt to save the resources of the hive from a possible forest fire, and makes them far less aggressive.”

Less aggressive, maybe, but also more stressed.  Pacifying the bees by kicking in their fight or flight instincts?  Sorry, that is on its face an intuitively bad idea.

Instead?  Pacify the bees the way they pacify themselves.  Prior to swarming, bees gorge themselves on honey, storing up for the uncertainty of flight and finding a new home; swarming bees are the least likely to attack of bees in any state in nature.  This state may be duplicated with the use of a spray bottle full of sugar water or honey water… and even better with a light dusting of confectioner’s sugar.  Puff them ‘til they are a dusty white and they will be peaceful and happy, not peaceful and panicky.

·         New front door – the traditional entry to even top bar hives has been located fairly low on the box, mostly out of habit, tradition, and sloth.  Langstroth hives are designed with the entrance on a “landing board” at the base of the hive, in fact, and on our old hive, the holes we drilled in the side were near the bottom.  Landing boards, of course, are a human invention – old hollow logs in nature don’t have them, so why did they ever gain hold in the mind of bee keepers as a necessity?  Who knows, but they go hand in hand with a “front door” at the bottom of the hive.
This is the wrong place to put the entrance, as a simple observation of hives in nature would have told us, had we bothered to observe.  Bees prefer to enter near the top of the hive, for a very practical reason – diseased bees (and mites and other intruders, as well) fall to the bottom.  If the entrance is at the bottom, then every single worker has to pass through the hives’ mortuary on their way home after every single flight.

A much better arrangement is to allow the detritus to be collected at the bottom of the hive where only the worker bees tasked with cleanup have to deal with them.  Exposure to disease, pesticides, mites, etc. is inevitable; however, by moving the entrance to the top of the hive, the amount of exposure is reduced.  By how much?  Well, only a few hundred bees are necessary for cleanup; by contrast, there may be as many as 50,000 workers who have had to cross the debris with the traditional setup – that’s not just a minor change, that is an orders of magnitude change.

·         Related to the new front door, actually…. Instead of a screen at the bottom of the hive (suggested in some designs because it “allows trash like dead bee carcasses or mites to fall out”), we are putting in solid bottoms on all our top bar hives from now on.

How will we remove the dead bees, mites, etc.?

We won’t.  The bees will.  Remember those bees tasked with cleaning up?  Yeah.  Turns out in nature, they do their job.  When entomologists study wild hives, they do not find a lot of detritus – there are very few carcasses because they are removed from the hive and flown away several yards. 

On the other hand, when an open mesh exists at the bottom of the hive… it doesn’t just allow things to fall out, it allows other things to crawl in.  Bees choose to live in seclusion for a reason – they want to be able to control their environment.  We should let them, as much as it is possible to do so.

There are all sorts of elements of “natural” bee keeping that make it a better system.  Experienced Langstroth hive keepers ask all sorts of wrong questions, like “how do you limit the number of drones” or “what do you do about temperature control” or the like.  And the answer is “nothing”, because the bees know their business better than we do.  In any hive, there are exactly as many drones as there ought to be.  And one of the reasons is because they help regulate temperature.  There are others, which we can’t even guess at, because we are big lumbering primates, not small and nimble bees.

We’ll be back in the honey production business soon… probably as soon as June… but we’re only partially in it for the honey.  Mostly, we’re in it for the bees.  Well, the bees and the flowers.  No garden is ever going to thrive quite as well as a garden well tended by bees.  We’re hoping to make our next colony of bees as happy and healthy as they make us.

Happy farming!