Bloom Love

Posted on February 14, 2017 by Tina

Oh this is happy day of love: for our partners, children, friends and communities and it’s also a perfect day to love those first blooms in the garden. In my awakening garden, only a few are showing their well-loved faces and providing for hungry pollinators. Included in these earliest blooms are flowers of Giant spiderwort , Tradescantia gigantea.

The first of many-to-come blooms of Autumn sage, Salvia greggii, are presenting in a salmon-colored package.

It was in this set of blooms that I spied one of the early native bees, a Blue Orchard bee, busily gathering nectar and pollen.

Reliable winter bloomers are the charmers adorning the Potato vine, Solanum laxum.

This little cluster decorates the residential area of a non-occupied wren house. I’m eagerly awaiting a wren couple settling in, loving and raising some chicks, and enjoying their flowers.

With apologies to Robert Burns and his June-blooming red, red rose, my two red rose shrubs each sport a couple of blooms which have opened for pollinator business and gardener love this February. The Old Gay Hill rose,

…and the Martha Gonzales rose, are gearing up for their spring performances.

These two roses look similar at first glance but Martha is a smaller shrub decorated with petite, deep red blooms and the Old Gay Hill rose showcases larger blooms with a more brilliant hue. Both are water-wise perennials and stalwart bloomers. I look forward to the blast of crimson they lend my garden later in spring.

It’s early days for bloom love in the Northern Hemisphere. This day and everyday, should be a day of love and kindness in the garden–and everywhere.

For a look at more loved and lovely blooms, check out Carol’s May Dreams Gardens celebrating all things blooming from many places this February.

Blue Bees!

Posted on February 10, 2017 by Tina

Last year at about this time, I noticed some stunning metallic blue bees buzzing around my newly installed native bee houses. They worked quickly to fill some of the holes and bamboo pieces in the homes, then they disappeared from my sight and garden. Many different native bee species–big, small, shiny, fuzzy–followed those early blue gals during the growing season. But that startling blue pollinator was a nice introduction to a long period of native bee activity.

These early spring blue beauties are Blue Orchard Mason bees, Osmia lignaria and they’re making their appearance again.

Earlier this week, I spotted one working at a small cluster of a salmon colored Autumn sage, Salvia greggii and thought that perhaps I should pay closer attention to what’s going on with the native bee houses as spring is in its infancy. Sure enough, some of the mud nests have been breached and there they are: blue bee adults emerged, mating, (I assume. I don’t watch.) and are in the process of busily preparing for the next generation of Blue Orchard bees.

You can clearly see holes that have been opened in the packed mud and that’s where the adults emerged from.

Interestingly, according the the information from the US Department of Agriculture that I linked to above, the eggs or “brood cells” that are laid first are female and placed at the back of the nesting hole and the last eggs laid at the front of each hole, are male. The female bee packs the hole with pollen and mud for security, tucking in the brood safely for the year. In case of predation, the male brood are the first in line to get eaten, thus assuring more protection for the females. Poor guys, but the females are more important in survival of the species.

I observed two adults flying around the bee house, entering various holes and most likely laying eggs There are more than two holes opened in the packed mud nests, indicating that more than just these two adults have emerged.

Blue Orchard bees have a short life, but are vital for pollinating the early spring blooms, including those of fruit trees.

Not only did the Blue Orchard bees find a nice nursery and baby-bee day care in the bee houses, but other bee species laid eggs in neighboring holes last year. Those will emerge in their due time–whenever that is.

I know that a different species of carpenter bee, a Horsefly-like Carpenter bee, Xylocopa tabaniformis. drilled and packed nests in a few spots of the mortar between limestone rock of my home to protect their progeny. It looks like an adult has emerged,

…though I haven’t seen one yet. I look forward to watching these charming, blue-eyed carpenter bees sporting their cool racing stripes as they zing from flower to flower. This species is active for most of the year.

Isn’t she a cutey?

Bee Mama Missive: Ramping Up

Posted on February 7, 2017 by Tina

We’re ramping up for spring and another (hopefully) successful year of honeybee keeping with our two newer hives, Buzz and Woody, and the remaining original hive, Scar.

Woody and Buzz, the Langstroth hives, are in the foreground and Scar, the Warre hive, resides in the background.

Fresh from a day-long beekeeping seminar that we attended a few weeks back and armed with loads of new and refreshed honeybee information, we’ve been eager to check out our hives and see how the girls fared over winter. Though it feels a little early in the season, it’s been a mild winter with the exception of a few days in the 20s F (-6ish C) in December and early January. Our original plan for a first hive check was to test for varroa mites, but it’s either proven too cold (below 65 F /18.3 C) or, as it was this past Sunday, above 65 F, though too humid. Varroa mites are a serious threat to honeybees and unfortunately most commercial and hobbyist bee hives have some varroa mite levels. The trick is to keep tabs on the mite levels so that they don’t overwhelm a hive and subject the bees to fatal viral overloads. Truthfully, Bee Daddy and I haven’t been particularly good about keeping a regular check on varroa mites; in fact, we’ve been downright irresponsible about checking for varroa mites. Partly that’s because we’ve hived honeybees who enjoy a proven resistance to varroa mites (thank you, BeeWeaver!), and partly because…we just haven’t. I’ve seen mites on larvae a few times when I’ve pulled off comb and last year we lost a hive, Mufasa, to a fatal viral load, most likely due to a varroa infestation. You can read about that sad event here.

This year, our 2017 bee keepers’ resolution is to be better bee keepers and we will check for varroa at least four times over the course of the season.

Ahem.

It was good to see what was going on in our honeybee hives after so many months.

This frame has comb and nectar, but little else.

Buzz is buzzing along beautifully and Woody survived winter and though small, is thriving. The girls have been foraging and bringing in pollen of varying colors:

The corbicula is also called a pollen basket. I use a Tina-term “pollen pantaloon.”

I’m enamored with the salmon-red pollen; I have no idea which plant produces it, but wow!

The bees have also been bringing in lots of creamy white pollen, much of which I suspect comes from a neighbor’s stand of viburnum.

Creamy white pollen taken from the flowers and stored in the corbiculae, pollen baskets, or pollen pantaloons.

As always, lots of good, old-fashioned yellow pollen is collected–no doubt from a variety of sources.

Can you count the number of bees carrying pollen? I counted five!

Honeybees forage up to three miles and I know that viburnum, rosemary, flowering quince and perhaps a few early trees are in flowering mode. My Leatherleaf Mahonia, Mahonia bealei, was certainly one source of nectar and pollen a few weeks ago, but there’s nothing currently blooming in my garden that the honeybees are interested in, though I have seen a few of the tiny wild bees working at some native salvia species that have pushed out some blooms in the last week or so.

Honeybees forage for nectar, which is their carbohydrate source, and pollen, which serves as protein. A diverse and well-rounded diet is key to a healthy life and honeybees certainly benefit from a diversity of flowers. That the honeys are pulling in pollen and nectar from a variety of early sources is a good thing. I planned to take a photo of the comb with differing pollen colors, but completely forgot about that once I was in the hive and looking at the good work of the queen, with support from her workers.

This comb–and it wasn’t the only one–demonstrates a beautiful pattern of capped brood, meaning that Buzz’s queen is healthy and laying eggs. The next generation of honeybees is in the works!

While pulling up some frames to check, I tipped one full-of-comb frame and the comb broke. ARGH! It’s not the first time I’ve made that mistake (when will I learn?), but when I’ve done that in Mufasa or Scar–the Warre hives, with top bars and not frames–we had to sacrifice the comb, or if it was full of honey, take the honey. There is simply no remedy for placing a broken comb attached to a bar back into the hive, because there is no way to “hold” the comb in place. Now that we use Langstroth hives with full frames, a dumb mistake is fixable.

This frame is mostly capped brood, but there are some uncapped brood (larvae) and there is also some honey in the top right corner.

Three rubber-bands wrapped around the girth of the frame will sufficiently hold the comb in place and allow industrious little bees to repair the beekeeper damage by building new comb and continuing their honey-making or baby-bee tending.

Unfortunately, some of the larvae about half-way through their development were victims of the comb breakage. The bees will harvest the doomed larvae as a protein source–bees waste nothing. Once they’ve rebuilt the comb, Ms.Queen will probably lay more eggs in the new comb.

Ramping up indeed! I was pleased to see that Woody and Buzz seem healthy and next time we open up the hives, we plan to conduct our first varroa mite check for the season.

Sadly, Scar is on her way out as a viable hive. There were five full combs of honey in the top box–we took three out–but the lower boxes contained mostly empty comb. There is no brood, indicating that the queen has probably died and while there are worker bees busily foraging and still engaging in most of their bee work, there’s no new generation to nurture. Last year, we decided that once our Langstroth hives (Buzz and Woody) were up and buzzing, we’d allow Scar to atrophy naturally–there would be no extreme measures to keep her going. Still, I’m a little sad and must admit to a temptation to re-queen her. But Scar is a difficult hive to maintain and I’ve become quite spoiled at the ease of working with Buzz and Woody in all their Langstroth glory, so I imagine I’ll keep with the original plan and let Scar go. Scar’s bees will live out the rest of their lives over the next month or so and then she will be empty.

I’ll plant something bee-friendly in that shady spot in Scar’s memory: maybe a nice Evergreen sumac, Rhus virens or Turk’s cap, Malvaviscus arboreus.