Bee Mama Missive: Beetles Bee Damned

Posted on August 11, 2015 by Tina

In my last Bee Mama Missive, I mentioned that my hives have been invaded by Small Hive Beetles, Aethina tumida.

These invasive ickies hail from Africa, appearing in the United States first in 1996. Here in Texas, there’s nary a honeybee hive that doesn’t host these lovely creatures. Sarcasm here, folks. Our hives were invaded by them last year, too. If the hive is strong, the beetles don’t cause all that much damage–bees will remove some of the beetles and their larvae, thus keeping the invaders in check. But hive beetles are destructive; they can damage comb and the accompanying honey and pollen. If the hive is weak for whatever reason, the hive beetles can destroy the hive and/or the honeybees will abandon their hive.

This summer, many beekeepers in Austin have reported prolific infestations of small hive beetles, owing to the heavy rains and resulting higher humidity that occurred in late spring. My hives are no exception to the rampant hive beetle infiltrations. Last summer, I’d see a few beetles whenever we checked our hives, but only a few. In the last three hive checks, I’ve been appalled at how many of the nasty critters scurried away as we removed the tops of our hives for inspection.

One suggestion to limit hive beetle infestation is to place hives in full sun–apparently the beetles don’t particularly care for the blazing sun and resulting heat in the hives. In my garden, there aren’t many “full sun” spots on my property and none of those spots are particularly appropriate for hive placement, so that’s not a remedy I can employ. My hives face east and are under the shade of a large Shumard Oak. I don’t use chemicals in my gardens and with beekeeping (for obvious reasons), chemical fixes are generally discouraged. While Bee Daddy and I can squish the hive beetles when we open our hives, that’s not a particularly effective or practical way to limit their population, no matter how satisfying the squishing might be. What to do?

I noticed that Beeweaver Apiaries sells a product called Beetle Bee-Gone.

Basically, it’s a package of cotton cloth sheets that act to trap the beetles in the hives.

The sheets are affixed to the frames and the bees will chew up the cloths, rendering them “fuzzy”. The beetles in the hive are then trapped because they have hooks on their legs and become ensnared in the fuzz. Honeybees like tidy hives and they will remove the fuzz-n-beetles loose in the hive.

At $7.95 per 48 sheets, plus shipping and tax, I’m game to try just about anything against the helmeted menaces.

On July 22, just before I left on a trip, I placed two sheets in each of the top two boxes of both Scar and Mufasa.

It wasn’t quite as easy as I’d envisioned, placing the sheets under bars while wearing thick gloves and crooning to the annoyed bees. Yes, I do that. I removed a couple of the center bars in the top and middle boxes, then tacked down each sheet with a little bit of wax, placing the bars back on top of the sheets. I closed the hives, wished the bees well and left town with a good heart.

Sixteen days later and with some trepidation–Did the traps work? Will we see more beetles? Is there beetle damage to the comb?–we opened and checked both hives.

Mufasa is thriving! Mufasa has a strong queen and the hive is healthy, active, a bit cranky, and loaded with beautiful honeycomb.

With plenty of capped and uncapped brood–a new generation is underway.

However, there was no sign of the sheets that I placed in Mufasa’s boxes. A day or two before, I’d seen bees removing fuzz from the hive entry board. Was it Beetle Bee-Gone fuzz? Maybe, but I’m not positive. There were still more beetles that scurried when we opened the hive than I would have liked, but significantly fewer than we’d seen in the last few hive checks. We squished plenty; I’ve discovered an additional use for the hive tool.

It’s an excellent beetle murder weapon when placed on top of a victim and pressed.

Generally pleased that the hive was healthy and that we saw fewer beetles, we closed Mufasa and moved on to Scar. Scar was quite the revelation!! Not as robust a hive as Mufasa, there were hardly any beetles–a few, but roughly in the manageable numbers that we saw last summer. And in Mufasa, we were able to see the Beetle Bee Gone sheets in action.

Or maybe post-action is a better description. The sheets were obviously bee-chewed and fuzzy and there were beetles, dead and alive, caught in the fuzzy sheets.

Victory!!

Scar doesn’t have the full comb in both top boxes like Mufasa has, nor the amount of honeycomb, but like Mufasa, Scar has lots of capped and uncapped brood.

I added more sheets to both hives and will check on the beetle-trapping progress in a couple of weeks. I gathered up the used sheets with beetle bodies,

…and tossed the whole mess where it will do some good–in my compost bin.

I feel good about the success of the Beetle Bee-Gone sheets and their trapping of some of the beetles. Did we get them all? No way and we also didn’t check the bottom, or main, brood box. There could be beetles there, causing havoc. But both Bee Daddy and I concur that we don’t want to go into the hive that deeply–the risk of rolling our queen is just too great. Been there, done that. We’ll continue to monitor the hives from the middle and top box.

That will have to suffice. Fingers crossed.

I think that giving the bees a hand in the maintenance of their hive may have allowed them to get ahead of their beetle infestation. I won’t know if that’s true until we check the hives again, but we noticed that during the last few hive checks and with full, gross beetle infestation, our bees were quite cantankerous. Really mean. Even with adequate smoke, they were much more aggressive than usual. This hive check? They were back to their (relatively) sweet selves. Yes, they get snippy when we invade their home, but they were tolerant of our intrusiveness this time, whereas in the last few checks–wowzers–they were tough customers!! Was their over-the-top defensiveness because the hive was under siege? I think that makes some sense, especially since they seem more normal now and the beetles seemingly have less of a presence.

For now, I have to give Beetle Bee Gone a thumbs up in our war against the invasive Small Hive Beetle.

One of the best parts of checking the hives is that Bee Daddy always cleans our bee tools afterwards!

Isn’t that nice? Now for those dinner dishes….

Wishing the the girls a good August: success in foraging, in egg laying, and the raising of a new generation of bees and in the continued dissipation (dare I say eradication?) of the small hive beetle infestation.

If you live in or near Austin, The Tour de Hives will be held this coming Saturday, August 15. The tour of local bee yards is in celebration of National Honey Bee Day and is a fundraiser for the Travis County Beekeepers Association, a nonprofit organization committed to promotion of and education about honeybees. Check out the links for more information.

Central Texas Floods

Posted on May 25, 2015 by Tina

There is a reason that the Austin area is considered “one of the most flash-flood prone regions in North America”. According to the Lower Colorado River Authority, Austin has received between 8 and nearly 16 inches of rain in the last two weeks and the ground was saturated before that. Today, 3-4 more inches dumped on Austin and its surrounding area from a round of severe thunderstorms. Rivers and streams throughout Central Texas are spilling over, flooding, causing damage, and endangering lives. Additionally there have been tornado warnings throughout the day and continue for some. Once again, Central Texas has proved that it’s subject to flooding and with disastrous results.

On Saturday, the beautiful little Blanco River overflowed its banks, inundating the nearby towns of San Marcos and Wimberley, as well as other smaller communities. As of now, there is at least one dead and a number, not yet determined, missing. Homes washed away, businesses flooded, stately Bald Cypress Trees, alive when Texas was part of Mexico, were uprooted and tossed aside like skinny twigs; the damage is hard to look at and comprehend. Throughout Texas and Oklahoma, severe storms and heavy rain has been the norm over the past few weeks. Late spring weather patterns can produce severe weather events in Central Texas. Having suffered an 8 year drought and with the unfamiliarity of Central Texas’ mercurial weather patterns, many who’ve moved here in the last couple of decades don’t realize how catastrophic heavy rainfall is.

I’ve lived in Austin since moving here in 1978 to attend The University of Texas. I was a student during the historic 1981 Memorial Day flood; thirteen people died that day. You can read about that devastating event here and here and here. The flooding of these past few days will probably not be the history maker that the 1981 flood was, but it’s bad enough.

This rain “bomb” may be what breaks our 8 year drought–time will tell. The local lakes, which supply water to this increasingly populated region of the U.S. are rising and quickly, though none are at full capacity yet. The higher levels of Lake Travis and the other dammed reservoirs in Central Texas is the positive result of the heavy rainfall and resulting flooding. In Texas, it is often a spring flooding event or a late summer/fall tropical storm or hurricane that breaks the hold of a drought.

The water flows away from my house because I built rock walkways to divert heavy rainfall. This afternoon, the walkways looked and acted like flowing rivers.

Here in Texas, you learn to take the good with the bad.

My own home is fine. My family and neighbors are all safe. Water-logged soil with droopy plants, my gardens will recover. As I write this, the rain has stopped and almost all of the water has drained from my gardens and pathways. I am very grateful.

We are appreciative and full of admiration for the first responders–police, firefighters, EMS workers who risk their lives to rescue citizens from floating cars and flooded homes.

They are heroes.

The world is full of tragic stories. It requires only few minutes of listening to or watching news to feel despondent and helpless about disasters, prevalent and ongoing, made by humans or gifted by nature. If you feel compelled to help flood victims who have lost their homes in Central Texas, see the American Red Cross website. Please remember and give what you can to others who are in need–wherever they may be.

Bee Mama Missive: Honeybee Love

Posted on February 24, 2015 by Tina

As good beekeepers, we follow advice from those who know more than we do–which includes the vast majority of attendees at the monthly Austin Area Beekeepers Meetup. The advice this month was to open hives, check out the gals, see if they’re starving or if there’s honey left over after winter, and institute swarm management.

That term sounds like something you’d hear in a leadership management course. Ugh.

Swarm management. It’s basically crowd control. Perhaps more accurately, a kind of birth control. A honeybee hive is a superorganism. A superorganism is a collective of individual organisms which work together as a whole, where the individuals cannot survive without the collective. The way a hive procreates is to divide itself by swarming into a new hive. A new queen is anointed, she leaves the hive, taking workers, maybe as many as half the workers, with her to happily settle in a tree hole or ceramic pot, as happened in the garden of a friend of mine. Swarming is not something we want for our bees. At some point in the future, probably next spring, we plan to hive our bees into one or two Langstroth hives, eventually ditching our Warre hives. That’s not happening this year–we don’t have time to build new hives.

So as part of our swarm management responsibilities and because it’s simply time to see how the ladies are faring, we opened our hives to check for any leftover honey stores, to see if our queens are laying eggs with resulting larvae, and if there are any queen or drone cells developing.

On Valentine’s weekend Bee Daddy and I donned our bee suits,

…fired up the smoker,

…organized our honeybee paraphernalia and got to it.

As a refresher, our hives are Mufasa and Scar.

For those of you who are parents of a certain age, these names will be familiar–from the overplayed Lion King movie which was released in 1994 and by 1995 was on DVD (remember those?) and that a little tiny girl watched while Mommy held the new baby brother. At least, that’s how it was at our house.

The names were given (in the case of Scar) for obvious reasons–oops that table-saw blade pulled the wood right out of Bee Daddy’s hand, leaving a scar on the wood and a partially numb finger on the Bee Daddy.

Yes, there was lots of blood and a long afternoon visit to our local Emergency Room.

Mufasa is so named because that’s the obvious next choice.

This was the first full hive-check in quite a while as we haven’t opened the entirety of each hive since re-queening last July. This February examination was a complete physical, if you will. Mufasa was first on our list of hive appointments. We took off the top box and there was only empty comb.

I knew that already because I’d peeked in there occasionally on the warmer days of winter. Mufasa has always been our smaller, less hardy hive, so I wasn’t surprised or disappointed that the bees hadn’t mustered the numbers to honey-ize the top box. Off it went, stored for later use in the season. If all goes well–good flower production and pollen/nectar gathering in conjunction, we’ll pop it back on later in the season.

Then we checked the second, or middle box.

A side story: In September, as we checked our hives, a comb with full, capped honey broke, which I decided to leave in the box as is, knowing that it wouldn’t be easy to extract once the bees reconnected it to the box. You can read about the dropped-comb incident here. Now after winter, the time of reckoning is at hand–we must carefully cut each top bar with comb, to check honey stores and brood development. And that check includes the cross-comb developed from the dropped comb.

Oh, the stress of it all.

After slowly and carefully cutting away the comb from the sides and the bottom of the box (which directly attached to the bottom brood box), we were very happy with the results.

Mufasa’s second/middle box was moderately full of capped honeycomb, with some empty ready-to-be-filled comb.

We removed the cross-comb and cut the comb off a couple of the top-bars.

… and bagged some rich honeycomb for later honey extraction work in the kitchen.

We left some comb with honey and some empty comb so the bees have honey on cold rainy days and room for brood and more honey stores–whatever is their preference. Both of those goals are in keeping with swarm management–give ’em room to grow, so some of the more rebellious members of the hive don’t have an excuse to leave home.

Finally, we checked the bottom, or brood box and what good news for Mufasa and tangentially, for us!!

Whoop!! Queen Mufasa (the name suggests a little gender bending there–Mufasa was a dude lion, Queen Mufasa is a queen bee), is ramping up for spring, laying eggs and the larvae are growing and developing. You can clearly see that there are capped and uncapped larvae.

What a great queen she is and how ’bout those workers, eh?

The development of adult bees occurs in stages and is driven by pheromones according to what hives need: workers, drones, or queens. Capping instigates the final stage in development–what emerges two to three weeks after the egg is laid is an adult bee. All of these are workers (because of where they’re located and how they’re capped) and the hive will need workers once spring nectar flow begins–in about three weeks. The timing is perfect! We didn’t see any queen cells, which is a good sign. Queen cells develop on the sides or bottom of the comb and are larger and oblong–very different from what the photos here show. That no queen cells exist signifies that the bees are content with their queen–she’s healthy and laying eggs and everyone, it appears, is down with that.

We closed Mufasa,

…grinned, did a little dance and high-fived each other, then moved onto Scar’s examination.

It was, essentially, more of the same. Lots more. In Scar’s top box, all eight top bars were full of capped, glorious honey.

Heavy, heavy bars of honey.

We removed all eight, cut the comb, bagged it and stored the box for later use. The second box was similar, though some comb was empty. We left some full honeycomb, as we did with Mufasa. The brood box was also full of good news. Like Mufasa, Scar contained capped and uncapped brood, no queen cells, and stored honey.

I’d call the examination of both hives a good day at the office. Both Mufasa and Scar have a brood box and a secondary box for expansion. If the year goes well, the bees will produce enough brood, honey, and comb that we’ll add another box in late summer or early fall, just like we did last season. I don’t think that far ahead though–there are too many factors and variables in beekeeping. For the present, in late winter, the immediate future looks good for both hives. Fingers crossed that success continues into the new year and growing season.

Time to clean up and,