Bees in Bloom

Posted on September 15, 2016 by Tina

I suppose the title should read: Bees in Blooms.

Bees of all stripes and wings are active in the late summer garden, sticking their probosces into the depths of flowers and reveling in pollen. This week, I’m crowning the honeybees as the winners of the bee beauty pageant. From a purely self-interested standpoint, honeybees are significantly easier to photograph, as they’re not speed fliers, nor teeny-tiny, like most of the native bees.

A preferred nectar source for honeybees are the charming blooms of the Coral Vine, Antigonon leptopus.

I grow one small bit of this vine and from late summer into fall, the bees are all over it, all the time. Tagged as an invasive plant here in Texas, as well as some other southern states, in all the years I’ve grown my vine I’ve only seen two or three seedlings develop. That said, I probably wouldn’t grow it if I live in a rural area and not smack-dab in the middle of a city, at some distance from a green belt. Rural gardeners should steer clear of this plant and choose native-to-region plants instead.

Honeybees enjoy the flowerets of Frostweed, Verbesina virginica, a native perennial best known as a migrating Monarch butterfly favorite and a post hard-freeze ice-sculpture plant.

Majestic sage, Salvia guaranitica, is lush with its royal blooms this wetter-than-normal summer. Typically, I see one or two native bee species at this plant, but honeybees have shown interest in stealing nectar.

Zexmenia, Wedelia texensis, always hosts a variety of native pollinators who work its cheery yellow blooms; honeybees are included in that mix.

Garlic chives, Allium tuberosum, recently began their short bloom cycle in my garden, but it didn’t take long for the honeys to find them.

I wonder what garlic honey might taste like? Mmmm!

Another perennial preference of honeybees and many other pollinators is the Rock rose, Pavonia lasiopetala. I like this back-lit shot with the early morning sun, setting bee and bloom aglow.

As well as this shot, which simply highlights both–and the foliage, as well.

An impulse buy from a nursery a couple of years ago as I observed honeybees clamoring for nectar from its blooms, is this Shrubby blue sage, Salvia ballotiflora.

I’d say that the bee is busy and content with its bounty. The Shrubby blue sage also attracts several species of native carpenter bees, as well as a variety of butterflies.

The native-to-South Texas, Yellow bells, Tacoma stans, always has bee visitors, but rarely (or so it seems) at the angle that I can easily photograph. No bees at this bloom cluster, but these flowers always please.

A bee-less photo, but of a great bloomer and nectar source for many different pollinators.

Another bee-less photo is of blooming Garlic chives and in the background, a purple blooming Autumn sage, Salvia greggii.

Both typically have pollinators in attendance; I happened to catch the combo in a quiet moment.

I thank Carol at May Dreams Garden for hosting this monthly bloom bonanza known as Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day. Join in, share your garden pretties, then click over to her lovely blog to see and learn about blooms from many places.

Bee Mama Missive: Doing Just Fine

Posted on September 12, 2016 by Tina

How are your honeybees, Ms. Bee Mama? Why, thank you for asking! Scar, Buzz, and Woody are doing just fine, thank you very much.

I haven’t reported much on my three hives recently, but all are buzzing along: the forager bees are reaping the bounties of the garden,

…the other bees are tending to their chores,

…and their queens are laying eggs and keeping up their part of the operation.

It has been an interesting summer with our hives, having hived Buzz and Woody in early June, a little late in the season. Both of these new Langstroth hives are progressing nicely and are certainly easier to work with than Scar’s Warre hive. However, in early August on a hot and humid Sunday, I noticed that Woody’s queen had escaped her hive and was crawling along the ground, with bee attendants closely following. Workers swarmed out of the hive to find their queen when she left, and then back in again when we caught her and delivered her into the hive. This happened several times that day and after the last great escape, we installed a queen excluder at the bottom of the box. A queen excluder is a meshed, usually metal, sometimes plastic, grate that is placed between bee boxes so that the queen can’t move into a new box.

Bee keepers use queen excluders when they want a box that’s purely honey and comb, but no brood. The queen is larger than the worker bees, and the excluder is designed so that she can’t crawl through it, but the workers can.

Scar, the Warre hive, utilizes bars rather than frames. We placed the bars in the fourth box, and it on top of the queen excluder.

In this photo you can see a Langstroth excluder placed between the third box and a new, fourth box of Scar’s Warre hive.

Scar is thriving and all three bottom boxes have brood, so we’ve decided to let the workers build comb and make honey for winter, but not allow the queen to lay eggs in that fourth box. You’ll notice that the excluder doesn’t fit Scar’s Warre hive–it’s too big.

That’s one good example of why we switched to Langstroth hives–all beekeeping paraphernalia is geared toward Langstroth hive beekeeping and none toward Warre hive keeping. Moving away from the Warre hive beekeeping and building and using Langstroth hives lands us firmly in the 21st century.

Back to Woody. After the repeated queen escapes that fateful Sunday, I glanced out my bedroom window the next evening and to my great surprise, saw a swarm of bees. The swarm congregated along the underside of a wooden structure, placed near the three hives, but supporting a shallow water pump/pan mechanism which was supposed to attract hummingbirds. (As an aside, the hummer water feature was an abject failure–at least as far as the hummers are concerned. The honeybees were enthralled, though. ) I’ve read how to capture a swarm, but never needing that particular knowledge or skill set, I wasn’t quite what sure the swarm-capturing steps were. It was near to sundown and Bee Daddy wasn’t home to confer with in person, so I called and had him Google “catching a swarm” while I donned the bee suite, mixed some sugar-water, and gathered my tools. After a quick phone tutorial, I caught my first swarm!!

A honeybee swarm is the method by which honeybees hives reproduce. A swarm includes a queen and many (as many as half) of the workers of a hive, and they seek and find a new home. Many folks are freaked out by swarms, because they view them as scary, but in reality, swarming is when honeybees are at their gentlest and most docile: they have no home, nor brood, nor food stores to protect–they’re just hanging out with their queen, chillin’.

I lightly spritzed the cluster of bees with sugar-water mixture and brushed the clumps of bees into an unused bee box. I placed a lid on the box and left the box next to where the swarm congregated so that any stragglers left outside could find their way to their new home. I said a cheery night-night to the newly housed bees.

In addition to swarmed bees, Woody had few bees in it, so it makes sense that it was actually Woody’s bees who swarmed and not some rogue group from somewhere else. I don’t know to this day whether the swarm was Woody’s workers and the old queen (who was unnaturally crawling around on the ground) or if the bees made a new queen–which honeybees will do if the queen is weak, sick, or dead. I never saw any queen cells in the hive (they look different from regular capped brood cells), but it’s always possible that we missed one. I don’t think it was the old queen who led the swarm, because she waddled away, with one or two attendants and I didn’t see her again. Regardless, early the next morning, we transferred the swarm to the empty Woody hive.

I placed 4 bars for comb-building in the hive and dumped the cluster of bees in the area left open. We closed Woody and Bee Daddy and I whooped! and congratulated ourselves on a well-housed swarm.

Except, we messed up.

We should have reopened Woody within 24-48 hours and placed more bars, or better yet, frames with foundation, to fill the entire box, but…we didn’t. We totally forgot that honeybees build downward and will do so, from whatever surface is handy. Two weeks later, during a regular hive check, we realized that Woody’s bees were happy and healthy, had built gorgeous comb, had a great queen laying eggs, and diligent workers making honey. But there was a glitch: Woody’s bees had built the comb (with honey and larvae) on the underneath of the lid, NOT along the 4 original bars where WE would have preferred them build.

This lid belongs to Buzz, but Woody’s swarm built their comb hanging from the underneath of its lid.

Ooops! We forgot to make our wishes known and didn’t send out the memo about where we wanted the ladies to build comb. If we’d reopened shortly after hiving and added the rest of the frames, the busy bees would have built on the frames, not the lid. This wasn’t the bees who screwed-up–it’s squarely on us. The humans.

A decision of one of two choices was at hand: we leave their (to our minds) miss-placed comb and never extract honey or conduct hive checks in a reasonable way, or we scrape off the comb and fill the box with full foundation frames. The second choice would mean that they would have to start over. Again.

Poor honeybees, having such incompetent, fumbling bee keepers.

We scraped the comb off the lid, added new frames to fill the entire box, then left that comb on top of the frames, because bees will re-use everything, except wax, to build new comb.

Part of our move to Langstroth hives is that instead of using simple bars for the bees to build their comb from (like those in Scar) we’re now using full frames, with foundation. Foundation is honeycomb which is fortified with wire and fitted into the frames, so that the bees can build their own comb more quickly directly on the foundation.

You know, 21st century bee keeping technology.

Woody has two beautifully combed-out frames.

As of early September, in Woody there are only two full combed-out frames with honey and larvae, and another partly built out. All seems well, though: the queen is laying eggs, brood is developing, and the foragers are foraging. All of that bee drama has meant that Woody is behind in her development. Woody is a small–and therefore, vulnerable–hive as we head into autumn and winter. I’ll continue feeding Woody (and Buzz, too) for the foreseeable future to help them along.

Buzz is flourishing with 7 of 10 frames completely combed out. There’s lots of brood and some honey stores–in short, an active and healthy hive.

The “clean” wood is currently un-used by the bees.

Scar the Warre hive is strong, as is evidenced by our need for a fourth box.

My biggest concern with Scar is that it still hosts those nasty demons–small hive beetles. We add fresh Beetle Bee Gone cloths, which is a non-chemical beetle control, each time we check the hives in the hopes that the cloths will ensnare the beetles and keep the population controlled.

The bees chew the cloths, which makes them (the cloths, not the bees) fuzzy, and the beetles get caught in the fuzz. If there’s any justice in this world, they die a miserable death.

A partially used Beetle Bee Gone cloth on a frame with foundation.

The method is working in the two Langstroth hives–which have few beetles, many caught in the cloths. Unfortunately, Scar is still plagued by beetles crawling rampant, as it has been all summer. We’ll keep tabs on Scar, but it’s a robust hive and the beetle population should decline with cooler weather.

There’s never a dull moment with honeybees.

Buzz

Scar

Woody

I’m glad to know them.

Flexible Foliage

Posted on September 10, 2016 by Tina

Leaves on my American sycamore, Platanus occidentalis, are useful indeed. They provide beauty in waving flags of luscious green,

…and cooling shade for the trunk and anything (or anyone) else beneath the canopy.

The sycamore tree exfoliates beautifully, revealing creamy white new bark.

Sycamore foliage also provides shelter for a bird home and a nursery for bird babies.

Only recently have I spotted this nest in the sycamore. I was standing in a part of my property where I don’t usually hang out, when I saw a nest structure nestled in the lower part of the tree. There are no birds there now, no doubt their having fledged earlier this summer. I’m not sure how I missed seeing it before now, but going forward, better tree observance is in order.

Handsome, peeling limbs serve as strong foundational support for the nest.

I suspect it was a Blue Jay, Cyanocitta cristata, nest because I know that they were active in the tree earlier in the summer–they’re wonderfully gregarious birds and even if I don’t see them, I hear them. Plus, in perusing photos of nests, Blue Jays appear to favor building with larger sticks, which I guess makes sense because they are large-ish birds.

Dropped sycamore leaves are also versatile on terra firma. Dead, downed, and brown leaves provide cover along the soil and pathways,

…though that can be annoying when they drift to the gardens or patio and cluster, becoming garden “detritus.” Because of the wet year, there wasn’t as much shedding of sycamore foliage as is typical, but some dropped.

I find the large, thick leaves graceful and lovely ON the tree, but awkward and messy on the ground and in the garden.

On occasion I’ve used a leaf as a tool to pick up and remove an insect that I’m squeamish about, or to remove fresh goo (use your own imagination on that one) from lawn furniture surface or a birdbath. Never though have I utilized a Sycamore leaf to feed a bee–until about two weeks ago. I watched an American bumblebee, Bombus pensylvanicus, cruise along the ground in my back garden one morning. I suspect that it was near the end of its life, because it wasn’t flying and bees fly when they’re healthy and productive, but not when they’re dying. At some point, I thought that some sugar-water might be in order to nourish and reinvigorate the bee. Per my knowledge of feeding honeybees, I mixed a tiny amount of white sugar with water, (30% sugar to 70% water). I found a sturdy Sycamore leaf which had a slightly convex shape and poured the liquid in. Placed in the path of the bumble bee, it eventually found the leafed treat and enjoyed a snack.

He/she sipped and slurped for several minutes.

It vacated the sugar-water leaf for a time, but returned for more of the sweet stuff.

Eventually, the bumble left for unknown parts–I didn’t see it again. Ants moved in for the remaining sugary drink, and by later in the day the leaf was back to playing the role of a brown and crispy leaf, or, garden detritus–take your pick.

My American sycamore has retained most of its leaves this year and is full-foliage as we enter into fall.

I’m glad there was at least one leaf that could be put to use for the wayward, and perhaps hungry or thirsty, American bumblebee.

A few days late for Tree Following, I’m thanking Pat of The Squirrelbasket for graciously hosting this fun and interesting meme about trees. Check out her blog to learn about trees from all over the world.