Avert Thy Gaze

After my rather disastrous attempt last year to take up beekeeping again, I decided I'd had enough and gave up on it.  Keeping bees in this climate is expensive and heartbreaking.  However, the empty hives have remained sitting out in the field for two reasons:

1. Every time I looked at them and thought about doing something with them, I was filled with a sense of exhaustion and paralyzing indecision.  So, I opted for a time honored therapeutic solution I call "Avert Thy Gaze".  Sometimes, procrastination really is a good thing.
2. I had the vague idea that the hives, still full of honey, might attract a wild swarm.  I've had beehives on and off for 15(+/-) years and it has never happened, but hey, it does happen sometimes.

Every now and then I'd wander past the hive looking for a bit of activity.  Every time I failed to find any, I'd quickly turn away and revert back my procrastination therapy.  It is now very late in the year for swarms and I had quit bothering to even peak occasionally at the hives.  I was even starting to form some semi-coherent thoughts about getting rid of them.  Then, early this week, I drove past them on the ATV and thought I saw some activity around one of the hives.

I stopped to check it out and, lo and behold, there be bees!

I haven't done anything more than pull some of the weeds from in front of the hive, but it seems to be a very large swarm that has taken up residence.  They are bringing in goldenrod pollen and rather frantically gathering food.

The hive appears to be robust and very active, but a late summer swarm like this faces a truly daunting challenge to gather enough food for the winter and raise enough young bees to survive till spring.  August swarms seldom survive and most beekeepers would combine this swarm with another hive to improve the chances of survival.

I have no other hives to combine them with so they are on their own.  This hive had large stores of honey left over from the hive that died last winter, which is no doubt what attracted this swarm in the first place.  I hope that this leftover honey will give them a much needed boost and a chance to make it.

These bees had to come from local stock who have survived well enough to reproduce, so I am hoping they will be tough enough to make it here on Hellwind Hill.  I've decided to maintain my hands-off approach and just leave them to it.  I will erect a new wind break for them since they don't stand a chance without it, but otherwise, they are on their own.  They are either survivor stock or they aren't.

This may sound harsh, but I've found that trees and plants that need coddling and care from me never survive the winters here.  The plants that are tough enough to live through drought, flood and freezing are the only ones that make it.  There is no amount of help that I can provide to make them grow if they aren't strong enough to do it on their own and I am not strong enough to keep throwing my energy at lost causes.

The bees are going to have to do the same as the trees because I know that if they can't survive without help, then they never will.  I'm sticking with my original plan to avert my gaze and hope for the best because only the strong survive.

Beeing There

In between all the hay drama and the heat wave, it also ended up being the weekend for the new honeybees to arrive.  They were supposed to be ready by the first of June, but the late cold spells we had delayed everything.  It is late to be installing nucs, but that is beekeeping for ya.

There are a couple of ways to start a new hive.  You can order "package" bees in the spring from a large apiary in the south.  They put a newly hatched queen in a cage and add either 3 or 5 pounds of bees (yes, they weigh them), depending on what you pay for.  The whole package is then shipped to you in the mail.

The post office loves that:)

The other way is to pull several frames of bees, including eggs, larva, honey and mature nurse bees, out of an existing hive and give them a new queen.  This is referred to as nucleus hive or"nuc".  This is by far a better method than starting with a package, but they are harder to find and must be purchased from a fairly local source.  If none is available than packages are the only way to go.

I have not had much success with package bees in the past.  They tend to do very well at first, but none of them ever survived a winter here.  A few months ago, when I was thinking about getting bees again, I got in touch with a young beekeeper who has just started an apiary a few miles from here.  He was offering nucs and was very local so I ordered two of them.  I picked them up yesterday.

I went through my old equipment and pieced together the makings of two hives.

Just barely made it past the inspectors....

...and then picked up the nucs last evening.  The nucs are the small, white boxes, which are temporary housing.  The entrance holes are covered with tape to keep the bees inside during transit.  You really don't want a whole bunch of pissed of bees flying around inside the car with you after you pick them up.

It is not good weather for working bees as it is in the 90's and the sun is intense.  However, I really needed to get these bees transferred into a real hive today as I won't have time to do it this week.  I waited until evening, which is usually a bad idea, but it all went fine.

Each box of a hive holds 10 frames, although I generally use 9 in my hives.

This is a lovely frame of bees.  All of the solid tan portions are capped cells, each holding a baby bee.  These will be hatching withing the next few days, giving this hive a large boost in population.

One of the things I like about keeping bees is the way the world calms and focuses when I am working in the hive.  It is a sort of meditation.  You cannot approach a beehive with any type of negative emotion.  Honeybees respond nearly instantly to emotion and sudden changes in emotion will elicit sudden changes in the bees as well, generally not for the good.  If you come to them with calm and appreciation, they stay calm.  Lose your temper or get in a hurry and you better close up that hive and get out of there fast or you will pay for it.  Honeybees know our souls better than we do.

I found the queen in both hives and they were both very busy laying eggs.  Can you find her?  She is the very large bee, center left.

Just left of center again...notice that there is always at least one bee touching the queen with her antennae, the bees gather the queen's scent this way and pass it among the rest of the hive.

This is blurry, but she is easy to see here, just backing down into a cell to lay an egg with her ring of attendants all around her.  The queen always has attendants.

At the end of the day, both nucs are tucked into their hives with an extra box to provide room for all those new bees about to hatch.  It is late in the year for nucs - they have a lot of work ahead of them.

I have my doubts about how the bees will do up here on Hellwind Hill, but I can't help but hope.

Hope, but Don't. Get. Attached.

To Bee or Not To Bee

I used to be a beekeeper.  I never managed to get much past the amateur-owner stage, but I had hoped to.  At one point, I made it up to 15 hives that I thought were all strong.  I figured at least 2/3 would make it through the winter and I would be able to expand further the following Spring.  This was several years ago, just when Colony Collapse Disorder was first starting to gain a bit of press.

When Spring came, all 15 hives were dead.  A couple died from normal winter problems.  One got wiped out by skunks.  The rest were just gone.  There were baby bees in the combs, lots of honey in the larder and NO bees, which is what happens with CCD.

Keeping bees is a tough business.  The bees are plagued with mites and disease.  The honey they produce sells for pennies a pound because of stiff competition from cheap, poison tainted honey flooding in from China.  Equipment is expensive and so are the bees.

Keeping bees can be brutally heartbreaking.

And yet, there is something very satisfying in tending a hive, in watching the flight of busy bees, in sitting next to them on a sunny day and listening to the quiet, vibrant hum of life.  There is satisfaction in pressing your ear up against the cold side of a hive in deep winter and hearing the quiet thrum of survival.  Honeybees are fascinating creatures, so profoundly alien in their endeavors and yet, so similar in their goals.  We all just want to survive and thrive.

I came to think of individual bees as cells, much like a red blood cell. A single honeybee cannot survive on her own.  The hive can lose a few cells, but cannot survive if it loses too many.  Every bee is a cell, with a job to do and a path to follow.  The hive, as a whole, is a distinct organism whose blood flows throughout the world.  They are the living proof that we all share the same circulatory system.

I've gathered up some of my old, abandoned hives and I am trying to decide what to do with them.  It looks like a pile of junk, but there is real potential there.  Most of these could be full of bees in a couple of months if I want to invest in them again.  The price of buying new bees has more than tripled in the past five years though and they can be hard to find.  At $150 each to reestablish a hive, this could be a large investment.  Aside from the money, I am not so sure my heart can afford it either.

A lot of this can be salvaged and I have more hives stacked in FB's Quonset hut that are in excellent condition.  Some of them are still brand new, not even painted yet.

Some of it is beyond repair and not worth bothering with.

And some of it is just down-right sad.  I found several frames of comb that had been full of capped larva.  Each one of these cells holds the remains of a dead baby bee.  This hive died just days, even hours, before all these babies would have hatched out.  They probably froze because there were not enough adult bees left to keep them warm.

There should have been.  This came out of a hive that was chock full of bees and honey going into the Fall.  There was still at least 50 pounds of honey in this hive when it died in late winter, more than enough to feed them through the rest of the cold.  But, there were no bees.  None.

The hives were all over at FB's place and I have not been able to keep a hive alive since the farm down the road from her started growing corn.  I do not think that is a coincidence.  A toxin introduced into the bloodstream cannot be removed.

We plant seeds that have been coated with poison and that poison travels into every cell of the plant.  From there, it travels into every cell of every creature who consumes that plant.  From one bloodstream to the next, from the pink coated seed in the ground to the larva in the hive, the poison is in the blood.

And so I come to that age old question, to bee or not to bee?  Do I scrounge up the money and the fortitude to buy enough bees for just one or two hives and try again here on Hellwind Hill or do I list it all on craigslist and let someone whose heart is more whole try where I failed?

I'll make it up to you

I knew I'd get a little grief for not having pictures of Gabe and the bee tree:)  I wanted to focus on Gabe yesterday so I didn't take the camera with me.  I am going back Thurs. afternoon and maybe Tanner and I will go out and get a closer look at the bees, then I'll have some pictures to post.  I'd like to get a good look at the hive, it's so difficult keeping bees alive now that I would like to see what is working for them.  I suspect the biggest advantage they have is isolation.  They are in a pretty remote spot, far away from any  houses or farms.  The worst killer of honey bees is the pesticide that is used to coat corn seeds.  The chemical is drawn up into the plants "bloodstream" and concentrated in the pollen.  The bees collect the pollen and bring it back to the hive and they all die.  I have not been able to keep a single hive alive for more then a season since the farmer down the road started growing corn several years ago. 

In the meantime, let me introduce you to my friend's farm, Natural Borders Farm, where we raise grassfed beef and lamb.  The first calf of the season was born a few days ago...

Back in the saddle

I had a great ride with Gabe this afternoon.  We went out on the trails for about two hours and Gabe did fantastic.  He's even starting to pick up a nice neck rein.  We rode through an area with a couple of really spectacular old hemlocks.  One of the trees had a hollow trunk and had an active honeybee hive in it.  The trainer knew I would be interested in seeing it since I keep bees.  He said that there have been bees in that tree for the last twenty years.  Honeybees are in such terrible trouble, it was an unexpected gift to find an active bee tree. We marveled that those couple of trees had never been logged and neither of us could figure out why they had been left.  It's a miracle that they are still standing.  Maybe those bees have managed to protect their home all these years, it's a very old hive.

The weather has suddenly remembered that it is March and it was horribly cold yesterday and last night. Today though, was in the 30's and sunny and ended up being a great day for riding in the woods. The trainer told me that if I ever want to part with Gabe, I should call him first. It's a good sign when the horse trainer wants to keep your horse:)