Queen Bee and Such.

Here are a few photos Jason took of our last hive inspection.

See that long abdomen hiding along the wooden endbar? Thats Queen Bee from Hive B. I would wager the bees circled around her are her attendants.

Here she is again, a bit blurry, the bee with the white dot.

Gosh. Wow. Honey.

Bees and brood. When the new workers are ready to come out, they chew their way out and come out as new, fuzzy, slightly lighter colored new bees. Then, of course, they get right to work.

Queen Cups and The Urge to Leave the Hive

I came back from a lovely trip to see my folks and family and found yesterday that the bees had been real busy while I was away. They were feeling cramped and built what are known as queen cups, potential places to raise new queens. If this train of thought proceeds, half the hive can leave with the old queen and the half can stay behind in their newly roomy hive with their new queen (whichever one hatches first and aborts her sister queens). While this is a natural thing, I'd like to keep my bees around by giving them their desired space when needed, but not before. Not quite as easy as I thought!

On advice from more knowledgeable beekeepers, we went back and found the queen in both hives, determining that they hadn't swarmed yet. We then removed the queen cups. Last night, my coworker Bob and I put together frames and hive bodies and Jason and I added the third story to their hive apartment today, interspersing empty frames within their brood nest to give them a roomy feeling but keeping enough brood together so it doesn't catch a chill. The bees need it together so they can keep it warm. Ideally, if we had frames lying around already drawn with wax comb, we would have used those, so the queen could pop eggs right in, but she will have to wait for the workers to build out the cells for her. When I first saw the "swarm cells" I thought half the bees were long gone but my untrained eye can now see they are the eggless, less finished "queen cups".

Images of Queen Cells from the book

The ABC and XYZ of Bee Culture

1920 Edition by A.I. and E.R. Root

One of the little queen cups we removed.

Queen cup, view from the bottom

Deceased worker bee

The 3 Bee castes:

• Queen (1 per hive, egg laying machine attended to by workers, lives longest and stays in the hive after her mating flight or until she dies or the bees decide it is time for her to go)
• Drone (male, taken care of by female workers, important to the genetic diversity of hives)
• Worker (female...may have many jobs throughout her life: nursing the young, cleaning the hive, carrying out the dead, and then foraging in the field until her short life expires.)

While we don't see the queen, except for a lucky glance when looking in the hive, we get to hang out with the bug-eyed drones and workers daily. The bees are always about at Garden Dreams, the workers coming and going from the wild overgrown lots of Wilkinsburg were I imagine they are finding food. They love to follow us around when we water the seedlings and suck water out of the soil in the pots. They largely ignore the 5 gallon bucket of water I put by their hive and try to keep pristine for them, complete with floating rafts so they won't drown. They prefer the plant pots. They rest for a bit, preening their antennae after a drink, and then they are off into the distance.

Bees in May and June

A swarm: bees reproducing at the colony level.

Brood - the bumpy ones are the drones (guys) and the flatter cells the workers (ladies)

100% natural comb. Pretty!

Starting to draw out foundation.

More brood, with honey at the top.

Here is a belated bee update of our two new, 2 month old hives, lovingly named A and B for now. Jason took a few photos of our last hive inspection. Also included, an image of a swarm of bees that alighted here in Wilkinsburg on Rebecca Street a few weeks ago and me grinning goofily beside them. I "helped" (as in mostly watched and moved the box to catch them) my bee mentor catch them. They were about 2 feet from the sidewalk in a front yard.

Our bees are doing well. In the second hive bodies we added, we interspersed foundation frames and foundationless frames. The foundationless frames have comb guides along the top bars as a starting point for the bees to build on, but they were building a bit crooked on them. Jason sanded down the comb guides in the foundationless frames so they came to a sharper point. These steps seem to lead to straighter comb building, making it easier for us to take the frames out to look at them with out damaging the bees' hard work.

We lost the queen in Hive A to some unknown fate, but the bees raised a new one and she was spotted two weeks ago, running around happily laying eggs. My mentor was able to mark her with a white dot so if I need to find her, it may be a touch easier.

The ladies are out flying today, sometimes crashlanding at the hive entrances with heavy loads of pollen on their back legs and nectar, storing up food for the winter. Til next time, we wish them luck!

Bees.

I believe the bees are enjoying their new homes. These photos by our friend Ashley Rose are of the installation of 2 packages of bees back on Monday April 4.

I started with gloves and rubberbanded trousers and sleeves. Ended up keeping the rubberbands on but ditching the gloves since they were cumbersome.

the package of bees come with a feeder (a can full of sugar syrup that the bees access through tiny holes punched in the lid) that we removed. Then, the bees can be dumped gently into the hive or the whole box can be placed in the hive and they can exit on their own. I chose the gentle dump for various reasons.

We are using frames without foundation (wax or plastic base). The bees build directly on the wooden comb guides along the top bars of the frames. We leveled the hives on the pallet since the bees build with gravity in mind. Some people melt beeswax and paint a bit on to entice them to build on the guides. I didn't use it and they knew exactly what to do and where to build.

There she is in my left hand, the lovely queen in her little box.

Our tiny beeyard.

Taking a moment and collecting myself.

I placed my own inverted pail feeders

over the clusters of bees so they would have syrup

to make wax with until the nectar really starts coming in.

Empty hive bodies went around the pails and the covers on top.

Awaiting the Bees

Langstroth Hives10 FramesPail Feeder made from a bucket with 1/16" drill bit holes for bees to suck syrup from.

I'd like to call them 'The Wilkinsburg Ladies'...perhaps make them a little sign and post it by their hives. The ladies arrive in a week, via 2 southern packages, 3 lb boxes of bees, containing about 10,000 bees and 1 queen each in a little cage. She is in a cage so the bees can get used to her on the ride up north and accept her (hopefully). These packages were obtained from Lee Miller, a reputable source recommended by my Burgh Bees class instructor. In retrospect, I if I could do it again, I may have chosen bees bred locally, nucleus colonies from local beekeepers, as they have proven that they have what it takes to survive in our locale, and tried to find bees with resistance to the biggest bee threat around, the Varroa destructor mite. However, I followed the common beginner path of getting packages, and I'm going to try and give them the best home possible.

The photos above are the 2 hives that have been residing in our living room for the past month, getting assembled, moving to the porch for coatings of paint when the weather warms and coming back inside after. The hives are Langstroth hives, one of many hive designs, and a popular one here in the US. Stacked boxes are filled with frames that the bees build comb onto, secreting wax they make by eating honey, or sugar syrup if there is no nectar flowing yet. The queen lays eggs and the lady worker bees raise up the young and do all other manner of things to strengthen and care for the colony: gather food as soon as nectar and pollen are available, store it around the eggs and in frames above them, take out the dead, clean the hive, attend to the queen, help the pampered boys (drones) out of their cells and feed them. Drones may appear as freeloaders, whose sole purpose in life is to try to mate with a queen, which is true, but they are quite important in keeping a good gene pool going. They are also brutally pushed out of the hive to starve once their job is done, winter approaches, and all food is needed for the ladies to eat and keep the cluster of their sisters warm over winter by shivering their little flight muscles and generating heat. The honey that people harvest (should) only be the bees' excess, leaving them with plenty of their hard-earned honey to get through the winter.

Bees, quite simply amaze me. They are what may be called a "super organism" - a colony of individuals that cannot survive and flourish outside of the group. Ants and termites also fit this bill. They work together as a well-oiled machine, sacrificing themselves for the safety of the hive if necessary, and at times, doing the brutal work of advancing the strength of the hive in a different way, by a swarm cell queen aborting all her sister queens, or the drones being pushed out of the hive once their job is done. I find myself going on about what I am learning and how absolutely astonishing the little buggers are and sometimes don't notice people's eyes glazing over. I've gone on quite a bit here, I notice. Well, best of luck to The Wilkinsburg Ladies and all the bees out there this year. A lot of what I have learned so far has come from Burgh Bees, Michael Bush's great website, and Ross Conrad's Book Natural Beekeeping.

I leave you with a fun factual bit about the Reverend Langstroth, developer of the hive currently employed by most American beekeepers, and author of The Hive and the Honeybee.

The Reverend Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth, born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is credited with introducing the idea of "bee space" into American beehive design. Bee space is the space in bees' homes that they will fill with propolis (antimicrobial glue they make from plant resin) if it is smaller than 1/4" and in which they will build comb to store food if it is larger than 3/8". While this idea had already been incorporated into hive designs in Europe, in 1852, Langstroth patented the first movable-frame beehive in the United States, built for him by a Philadelphia cabinet maker and bee lover, which used the ideas of precise bee space within the hive, movable frames and stacked boxes.

Return of the Ramps

Last year our friends Yve and Marty let us dig up some ramps from the woods behind their house. We ate some with relish and planted some is our shady back yard, hoping they would return this year, which they have, and they've brought friends, much to our delight.