Babysitting the queen

Posted on May 2, 2018 by Ron Miksha

Her Majesty, the Queen.    (Photo by Calgary beekeeper Stephen Bennett)

A friend left town for a few days. She had two queens, in cages, which she’d acquired for her hives. As it turned out, she used one of them but her second hive wasn’t strong enough to split. That meant that she had an extra queen. She didn’t know what to do. I told her that I’d  babysit the queen until she returned.

My friend was surprised that I could watch the queen for a week. The concern was that the queen wouldn’t be very mobile and wouldn’t be laying eggs – for a whole week! I reminder my friend that during the winter, queens aren’t very mobile and aren’t laying eggs for a month or more. I could keep the caged queen and her attendants in my office. It should be fine.

Part of the queens I raised one winter in Florida, the day before handing them off to a northern beekeeper.

Queen breeders often have to keep queens in cages for a few days before shipping one to a new owner. When the queen arrives at her new home, the receiving beekeeper may feel obliged to use the queen the same day. Sooner is better than later for a couple of reasons. The queen might die while waiting in custody, though that’s unlikely. The main reason you want to quickly introduce the queen to her new colony is because each day in a cage means that a thousand or more workers won’t be developing in your new colony. Bee season might be short in your neighbourhood. You normally want to get your queen into the new split or into a hive with a failing queen as soon as possible.

But sometimes things happen. In this case, the hive wasn’t yet strong enough to nuc out and the weather was unseasonably cold. Splitting a hive too early and using the extra queen would be a mistake. So, I took the job of babysitting the queen for a week while we waited for the hive to strengthen, the weather to smarten, and my friend to return to Calgary.

The queen is the slightly larger insect, lower center. The other bees are her courtiers. The queen isn’t much larger than the workers but that will change when she finally gets her own hive – she’ll be about one-third larger when she begins egg laying.

If you have several queens to hold indefinitely, you should set up a bank hive and prepare the cages, queens, holding racks, and nurse hive appropriately. On another occasion, I’ll explain how to bank queens in a colony. But for now, here’s how to babysit her majesty.

The queen was accompanied by eight attendant bees. It’s their job to groom and chat with the queen who would otherwise become bored and unkempt. I kept the attendants with the queen in her cage.

I made certain that the bees were always at room temperature and in the shade. (Not too hard to do in my office.) The queen was in a little brown bag. Someone had punched air holes into the little brown bag. I kept her in it, but the air holes amused me. Humans need lots of air so we tend to think that bees do, too. They don’t.

I’ve written about this before, but I’ll excerpt this piece, just in case you haven’t read every single blog post I’ve ever posted:

There must be some oxygen requirements, but I’m not sure what they are. Recently, researcher Stefan K Hetz studied insect respiration. Here’s a piece from The American Physiological Society regarding his work:

“. . . insects, which have a respiratory system built to provide quick access to a lot of oxygen, can survive for days without it.

“The insect respiratory system is so efficient that resting insects stop taking in air as they release carbon dioxide, according to research by Stefan K. Hetz of Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. This allows them to keep oxygen and carbon dioxide levels in balance. Too great a concentration of oxygen is toxic, causing oxidative damage to the insect’s tissues, just as it does in humans. . .

“Insects are able to survive hypoxic environments,” explained Kirkton, the symposium chairman. “They can shut down and survive for hours or days. They have a low metabolic rate and can close their spiracles,” he said.

A queen and eight workers at the bottom of a brown paper bag are not likely to run out of air. A few holes punched in the side won’t exactly allow free air exchange anyway. But the holes make people feel better about the bees’ safety, so in that way, the air holes do perform a useful function.

OK. So, we have a queen, in a cage, in a bag, out of the sun, and at room temperature. Although I don’t overly fuss the queen’s access to fresh air, I do have a few other concerns. The cage has a bit of soft candy (made by mixing powdered icing sugar with syrup). This should keep the bees nourished for a week or so. But the soft candy sometimes turns hard in our dry climate and becomes difficult for the bees to eat. Or, if you save the caged queen for many days, the bees might actually eat all the candy and run out of food. To guard against these calamities, I collect a dab of honey on my fingertip and transfer it to the screen of the cage. The bees greedily take it. I just use a small drop – I don’t want the bees to get fat.

I picking up a bit of honey. In the cage, you’ll notice the white ‘candy’ used for bee feed. The bit that’s missing has been eaten by the caged bees.

Lightly touching the screen on this cage. The dab of honey sticks to the screen where the bees will quickly find and eat it. A water droplet is put on the same way.

Next, I tap my finger into a bit of water so that a droplet sticks to my finger. Then I touch the screen again, this time with the drop of water. You will likely see the bees stick their proboscis into the droplet which will disappear in seconds. I don’t over-feed or over-water the queen and her attendants. Never let the bees become wet or sticky. If you somehow decide that it’s in the bees’ best interest, you might offer a second or third drop, but only after the preceding one has been thoroughly cleaned up. I usually just give them a drop each morning and evening though that’s far from a scientific calculation of the bees’ needs.

The bees quickly took the honey and water. I’ll feed them again in 12 hours.

By the way, when you feed and water your pets, you should take their cage out of the bag and place it flat on the table, screen side facing up when you do this. Indirect light is fine, just avoid letting the cage sit in direct sunlight.  Also avoid too much heat such as might blow out of a heat vent.  The feeding process takes about five minutes and, of course, completely refreshes the bees’ air – just in case you are still nervous about the queen’s oxygen supply!

Posted in Bee Biology, Queens | Tagged | 3 Comments

Psst. Wanna make some money?

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Ron Miksha

Neil Bertram, my co-teacher of  Making Money from Honey,  is leading a group participation session about growing a hobby into a sideline bee business.

Most hobby beekeepers keep bees for fun, not profit.  But almost every beekeeper whom I’ve ever met tells me that, well, it would be nice to hear the cash register jingle once in a while. Bird-watchers or golfers rarely expect to make money from their hobbies. But most beekeepers think that their bees should gather money along with honey.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with making money from honey. In fact, from my observations of beekeepers over the years, those who want to make a few dollars (or at least cut their grocery bill) are almost always better beekeepers than those who ignore bees they’ve parked behind the house where they become diseased, infested with mites, swarm indiscriminately, or become the victim of marauding skunks and elves. When a beekeeper cares about her thousand-dollar investment and hopes to sell a hundred pounds of honey a year, appropriate attention is paid to the bees.  I’m not saying that money-making should outweigh good beekeeping. But good beekeeping usually results in  a surplus of honey and some money might be made.

A friend and I teach a crash course in beginning beekeeping. We also teach something we call “Making Money from Honey” which sounds like a crass course in beekeeping. We address the reality that some people are in it for the money. Some of our students hope that bees will supplement their income, at least in a very modest way. Others have kept bees for a while and want to expand their hobby into a business. We are very direct. Chances of making a lot of money are pretty slim. That’s the main message we convey to our course participants.

If you don’t love bees and don’t like hard physical work, don’t pursue bees for money.  Almost any other occupation pays better. It takes discipline, hard work, and good money-management skills to make money from honey. If you have these talents and money is your main goal, don’t waste your time keeping bees for money. Drive a truck and build up a trucking company. Use a hammer and create a construction business. Work your way up from sales clerk to corporate manager at a chain store. If money is your main consideration, don’t plan on getting wealthy from beekeeping.

I’ve seen dozens of people disappointed by their failures as beekeepers. Sometimes situations spin out of control – short crops because of drought or rain or frost, an unlucky accident, falling honey prices. And sometimes the failure is the result of poor money management, lack of discipline, or both.

However, there are successful beekeepers – and even a few wealthy ones. In all cases, these people have poured every ounce of their effort into beekeeping – they skip holidays, rise early, work late, and (this is important) live in poverty for years while every spare cent goes to bee feed, queens, and hive boxes. They’ve also survived inevitable bad luck. Not everyone can keep their eye on a goal that occasionally gets obscured by flood waters, swirling clouds of dust, or smashed trucks.

So why do people show up for a course about making money from honey? Well, if you really love bees and beekeeping, you can still reasonably expect to make a few dollars. I spent fifteen years of my youth making my entire living from bees. I lived cheaply and worked hard, but I enjoyed what I did. My money-from-honey co-teacher, Neil Bertram, keeps about 300 hives of bees and produces over 60,000 pounds of honey every year. Both of us would tell you that (after expenses) we never make minimum wage. But we like beekeeping too much to quit.

Our course covers a lot in seven hours: growing from backyard hobby to sideliner to commercial; equipment choices and shop/honey house considerations; finances, projections, expectations, difficulties, setbacks, and success; how much money to expect from bees in a typical year; handling and marketing your products; case histories of good and bad beekeeping businesses; and the beekeeper personality and lifestyle. Of course there is even more. I created a cool spreadsheet which participants can take home – you enter your number of hives and stuff like the cost of queens, bee equipment, trucks, labour, container costs, and so on and you put in your honey price per pound. That spreadsheet returns an idea of probable profit or loss.

Our next course is coming up this Sunday, May 6. Not everyone can come to Calgary to learn the economics of beekeeping, so I’m writing a book which will include some of what you’d learn from the workshop. Making Money from Honey: The Book should be ready by autumn. Drop me a note if you’re interested in it and especially if you have some suggestions or anecdotes to share.

Posted in Beekeeping, Books, Commercial Beekeeping | Tagged , , , | 20 Comments

First day with the bees

Posted on April 29, 2018 by Ron Miksha

On Friday evening, just after the sun had set, we installed two packages of bees. Earlier in the day, we arranged six drawn-out deep brood frames (purchased from Scandia Honey, a very reputable bee farm in our area), two new plastic frames, and a feeder with about four liters (one gallon) of sugar syrup in each chamber. The bees would need the sugar syrup – our equipment included no combs of honey. If you have saved some disease-free combs of honey, you should use three or four in the bee box that receives the package. If like us, you are starting with all new equipment, you must provide some feed.

The bees were placed into hives at around 9:30 in the evening. By 10:00 pm, it was dark. As a result, all the bees stayed, settling into the brood chambers as snug as bugs, clustering, exploring their new dives, breathing Canadian spring air.

🐝 🐝 🐝 🐝 🐝 🐝 🐝 🐝

I like installing packages in the evening. Over the years, I suppose that I have opened three or four thousand packages, usually by myself, alone on the southern Saskatchewan prairies where I once had my main honey farm.  That was quite a few years ago. In those days, I was fairly amble and had lots of energy.

Here’s how a week of packaging went for me.  It would start in Florida.  On a Monday, with the help of friends, I’d fill a few hundred cages with my own bees from apiaries I had among the orange groves near Orlando. I’d load my truck with the packages as it got dark, then start driving north. On most of those trips, I travelled alone.  By about three in the morning the next day, I would have driven my bee-laden 6-wheeler into the Appalachians in Tennessee.  At some big truckstop along I-24,  I’d sleep for three hours, curled up on the seat.  Then, I’d drive all day and before midnight on Tuesday, the bees and I would be in the Dakotas where we’d stay at a cheap roadside motel. The bees waited on the truck, chilling overnight. I’d  get a shower and some sleep, then wake before dawn on Wednesday and drive further west and north, into Saskatchewan.

If things went well, I’d arrive at my little house on the Saskatchewan prairie by late-afternoon on Wednesday. As soon as I got there, I’d unload all the packages into my dark cold wooden honey house. After the truck was empty of bees, I’d load about a hundred lids, bottoms, and brood chambers (which had honey among their nine frames) and drive out to a couple of bee yards and set the boxes on the ground.  By then, the sun was setting so I’d race back to the warehouse, load a hundred packages, drive back to bee yards and install those hundred colonies. Then I’d return to unlock my house (it had been empty for six months while I was beekeeping in Florida).  I’d finally fall into bed where I’d sleep until late the next morning.  Then I’d spend the rest of that day, Thursday, carrying more brood chambers into the field. Thursday night (and usually Friday evening) were spent installing the last of the packages.

Southern Saskatchewan – I placed the brood chambers in the field earlier in the day, then returned to the apiary as the sun set to start installing packages.

For about ten years, I carried four hundred packages each spring from Florida to Saskatchewan. It took three evenings to put those 400 packages into their new homes. On the weekend, I’d start unwrapping my other colonies, several hundred more hives which had spent the winter sitting out alongside the alfalfa fields of southern Saskatchewan.  (I ran a combination of overwintered hives and new packages every year.)  You can see that this was a small business, so I did most of the work myself – though friends in Florida and Saskatchewan often dropped by to help.

Something important in this narrative which you probably noticed is that not all of the packages weren’t installed the same day that I arrived in Saskatchewan at the end of my 3,800-kilometre drive from Florida. This means that hundreds of packages had to wait a day or two before being released.

🐝 🐝 🐝 🐝 🐝 🐝 🐝 🐝

Waiting to install a package makes a new beekeeper nervous. It should. Each day that the bees are in cages delays that hive’s honey season, slows its development, and maybe stresses the colony. But don’t be so consumed by earnestness that you try to install during the heat of day. Installing a package while it is sunny and warm may result in the bees taking wing with their queen and disappearing, en masse, forever. I hear about this happening to someone every year. Sometimes the ‘swarm’ is captured and settled into the hive you’ve gifted to them, but sometimes you just stand there, waving goodbye to $225 and your summer hobby.

Wait until evening. During the day, store the package in a dark cool building (or the coolest corner of your basement). Give it a bit of sugary syrup for moisture and sustenance. In theory, well-fed bees can wait indefinitely.  It’s better to wait until evening than to put the bees into their new home in the morning on a warm sunny day. Darkness is a wonderful sedative. Your bees have been contained, carted, carried, tousled, tussled, and trucked. They can chill until evening.  Especially if they have enough to eat (which you can supplement with a little sugar water).

It was late in the evening before our packages reached our house this Friday. It was becoming dark. We released the bees into their new homes and they settled quickly. That night was unusually mild, a rarity for Calgary in April. I was glad that it stayed above freezing all night. I knew that the bees would be warm enough to explore their new home and find the sugar feeders inside their hives.

When I took our dog outside just before six on Saturday morning, it was becoming light. There wasn’t any sign of life at the hive entrances, but that was OK. If we didn’t have a dog, there wouldn’t have been any sign of life at our door, either.

The next time I went out to look at the bees, it was nine o’clock. The sun shone splendidly on the hives. There were about a dozen bees flying about. The temperature was around 12 degrees (55 F). I was surprised that bees were in flight because the hive boxes had reduced entrances and the hive bodies have thick, insulated walls – I figured that the bees wouldn’t even know it was warming up outside.

I was even more surprised at ten when a few hundred bees were flying about.  They were exploring. The colonies had an anxious sound, much like you hear when robbing is happening. For a few moments, that was my concern – neighbouring hives, kept in some unknown back yard near us, had discovered our twins and were attacking. But this was just the anxious worry of a new father. My youngsters were not under attack. The bees were orienteering, learning their surroundings, and puzzling over the sudden lack of manuka bushes and the scarcity of kiwis, keas, and wekas. As Dorothy was rumoured to tell Toto, these bees were not in New Zealand anymore. Their unusual hum indicated their confusion.

By eleven in the morning, several deer entered our property (a frequent occurrence, even though we live in a central suburb amid a million Calgarians). The deer kept their distance, not from fear of bees, but out of deference to the humans in the back yard.

Also at eleven o’clock, the bees’ flights took a strange twist. Their ‘robbing buzz’ was replaced by another pitch. This time it was neither the worrisome tone I’d heard earlier nor the quiet hum of satisfied bees.  At the same moment, my daughter pointed out that the bees’ flights had changed markedly, too. Rather than disoriented swirls near the hives, they were flying straight upward, at least three times the height of our house. With sunlight reflecting from their bodies, they glowed like sparkling embers and then drifted from view.  We continued to see bees launching themselves high into the sky throughout the afternoon. When we lunched on our deck, a few bees visited us. They were curious, not menacing, and they allowed us to eat with nary a word of ill will. But by then it was quite warm (25 C, which is nearly 80 F) and the bees’ hum was gradually becoming more content.

Several times my kids peeked at the hive entrances. Though the temperature was warm and the bees’ flight was heavy (though chaotic), my kids reported that none of the insects were carrying pollen. I wasn’t surprised – there were no larvae in our just-installed colonies. Almost certainly, the queens were not laying eggs yet. And even if the queen had dropped a few, it would be three days before those eggs would hatch into hungry grubs. Feeding progeny is a bee’s main motivator for finding pollen. The bees wouldn’t need much pollen for a few days.  But then, at 6:18 pm, Daniel came running to me with this photo. Pollen. A sister, auguring a prosperous future, had arrived with a bundle of protein.

🐝 🐝 🐝 🐝 🐝 🐝 🐝 🐝

If you are the proud parent of a freshly hived mob, you are probably too busy to read the preceding 1,538 words. Assuming that you simply skimmed the story, let me cut to the chase.

Install your bees at day’s end. If you install during the day, the bees might not settle – they may even end up in a pine tree on your neighbours’ lawn. Night quiets the beasts. You may need to darken and cool (say, 10C, 50F) the package and sprinkle some sugar water on the cages’ screens until evening, but waiting is worth it.

If the weather is fair the next day, you should see oodles of workers engaged in orienteering flights. This can resemble a frightening problem, but it’s probably normal. At first there will be heavy air traffic near the hive, then it will expand as the bees’ knowledge of the landscape expands.

Don’t be disappointed that the bees aren’t bringing in much pollen the first day, even if other hives in the neighbourhood are hauling it in by the corbiculae-full. Your new package doesn’t need much pollen just yet. But if you see some, smile and feel smug.

Finally – and this is the hardest thing – don’t bug the bees for a few days. They are nervous and confused. Your untimely meddling may spark a palace insurrection. It’s not uncommon for anxious bees to kill their own queen when they are disturbed. That may seem strange, but until the first heirs are being fed, the queen is looked upon with great suspicion by her subjects. The bees know that they are broodless and are susceptible to tragedy in their precarious new environment. It’s not surprising that they may blame their queen for their predicament. Your fingers on their combs will simply reinforce how awful their life has become.

Posted in Beekeeping, Commercial Beekeeping | Tagged , , , , | 7 Comments

Welcoming some new friends

Posted on April 28, 2018 by Ron Miksha

The bees arrived. It was getting late. I was getting anxious. But just after the sun settled for the night, my friend Mark arrived with our two packages. He brought us 13,637 worker bees and two queens. We counted them. The queens, that is. These bees were part of a shipment that came through our local bee club, which ordered 202 packages from the folks at Scandia Honey who brought the bees from New Zealand.

Why New Zealand? It’s warm there. Queen breeding and beekeeping are in full swing. We’d gladly buy the bees from the tropical parts of Canada, if Canada had tropical parts.  Until global warming fully kicks in, we’ll have to import our bees from the world’s hot spots.  With the bees offloaded from Mark’s bee-mobile, we immediately set about welcoming our imported foreign workers to their new homes. Every time I release immigrant bees, it reminds me of how my own grandparents arrived in the Americas from central Europe. Those folks were every bit as penniless as these New Zealand bees. (But that’s a tale for another day.)  My grandfolks did OK. I hope these bees will, too.

Earlier in the day, my son Daniel and I placed two single-storey brood chambers in the back yard. This is a new project, new equipment, new bees. Regular readers know that I’ve owned several honey farms over the years and thousands of hives and I’ve been tripping over bee boxes for about fifty years. But this time is different, just like all the other times before were.

Since many readers of this blog are new beekeepers, I figured it would be helpful if I re-experienced the joy of starting a couple of hives at home, reporting on all the mistakes I make each and every day.  I’ll still write about beekeeping news, science, and culture from my usual ten-mile-high view, but from time to time, I’ll come back to these backyard bees and describe beekeeping from ground level.

Before the bees. We set up two boxes like this – the feeder is farthest from view, then two drawn-out used frames, a gap, another drawn comb, and (closest to us) two new black plastic frames. The gap in the center is where the bees from the cage will be released, then three more drawn combs will be added into that space.

In our back yard, we found an almost perfect place to bee, so we settled hive chambers atop bottom boards, and covered the caverns with lids. As this is a new bee project, my 15-year-old son wanted to try the fancy-dancy new plastic rims. He says they look like space-age bee boxes and he’s right. I wanted to give these thick-walled boxes a try because they are well-insulated and we won’t have to worry so much about our cold summer nights. Nor, I’m told, will we need to winter-wrap these units later in the season, the way that I had always done with wooden equipment. Along with the fancy boxes, we picked up new-age plastic frame-feeders and some solid one-piece plastic brood frames.  My son Daniel filled the feeders with some sugar syrup just sweeter than equal parts sugar and water. And that’s where things sat for a couple of hours while we waited for the bees to arrive.

We released the workers from their cages urging them into their new boxes. Freedom for the bees.  It’s rather liberating. We release the honey bees out of those cages and allow them to occupy our boxes – or not.  The bees are always free to leave. They don’t have to stay with us. They can fly up into the trees or drift off to explore the vast prairies that surround our city.  Their new home has a door and the door is always open.  Go, if you must, but stay if you like.  However, it’s getting dark, there’s a chill in the air, the home we are offering to the Kiwi immigrant-bees is warm and safe, just the right size, and it has a well-stocked pantry.  They’ll probably stay, but they are free to leave. Their choice.

Installing packages, as we call the process of settling foreign bees into Canadian houses, takes about five minutes for each hive.  I’ll let our photos from last night’s adventure tell the rest of the story.

The worst part of last night’s job was separating the twins. We received two packages. The cages were vigorously stapled together. They might as well have been welded or super-glued.  Seriously, this was rather brutal.  Neither the bees nor I liked the shaking, twisting, jiggling and prying required to pull the units apart. Someone should do something about that.

Now you can see the cage hovering over the gap where the bees will be released. I’m pulling out the feeder that came with the package. It’s basically a plug that keeps the bees in the cage (and holds their food while they are traveling). Once the can was pulled free, honey bees gently tumbled into their new home.

Here you can see the cage’s feeder/plug in my hand while Daniel shakes the bees into the hive. By the way, have you heard of the ‘barefoot beekeeper’? I’m wearing socks.

Daniel had shaken the bees into the gap, I placed the three missing gap-frames back in their spot and now Daniel is getting the last few bees out of the cage and into the hive.

This looks like a small weak hive. It is. There are a lot of bees which you can’t see, but a two-pound package has only about ten percent of the number of worker bees that are in a strong colony in summer. But if the queen is good and if the honey gods are merciful, this package can make about two hundred pounds of excess honey in July and August. That’s the closest thing to magic that I know of.

… and we are done.

Posted in Beekeeping, Tools and Gadgets | Tagged , , , | 12 Comments

The Perfect Place for Bees

Posted on April 27, 2018 by Ron Miksha

Keeping bees on the roof is a good way to hide them from nervous neighbours.

An easy way to intimidate a new beekeeper is to read the list of requirements for a perfect apiary.  Here’s my list. It’s not comprehensive. But even as a starter, it’s menacing:

Your bees should be:

In partial shade: avoid searing, scorching, blinding, bright, direct sunlight, especially in the afternoon when wax is most likely to melt, but also avoid the dark side – let the morning sun greet your hives to rouse them gently and early, Ben Franklin-style;

Facing south: when south-facing bees fly out, they have the entire top half of the globe to forage, but if you face them north, they just get polar ice caps. (I guess this is for northern-hemisphere beekeepers. If you’re a Kiwi – lucky you – just flip these instructions.);

Protected from wind: dampen your index finger, stand outside, point to the sky, and experience the wind. Arrange your hives so that they face the lee side of your finger. If the wind often switches directions, consider putting your hives on a rotating table (any discarded lazy-susan will work) and bolt a weather vane in the center so the apiary spins freely;

Near water: without actually submerging your hives, have plenty of water nearby;

On a gently-sloping hillside: this is to allow damp air to drain downhill (seriously, it says this in all the best bee manuals), but most beekeepers put their hives on a gently-sloping hillside just for the view;

Away from pesky neighbours: you might be tempted to face the hive entrances toward your meanest neighbour and then sit back to watch what happens, but this might backfire if your neighbour is careless with matches at night.

 Of course there are other things to consider. Not mentioned on most lists is the comfort of the beekeeper. Let’s face it, bees are just insects and you are probably a human. Bugs can put up with mild discomfort, but why should you?  Plant your bees somewhere that you’ll enjoy hanging out. If you have to struggle past thistles and thorns every time you need to scare away rabid skunks, your bees will soon be overrun by rabid skunks.  Make your beekeeping afternoons a delight and you and the bees will benefit.

Most of us are stuck with what we’ve got. You might have a nice roof-top apiary, or hopefully, a back yard. It might have a slope. Or not. Maybe it gently rolls northward and gets pummeled by chill winds. Maybe it’s along the path of your city’s annual marathon, or a well-trodden horse and carriage route. You may have your sights on the perfect apiary site that’s cited in bee manuals, but probably not.

Here’s the bee spot in my own back yard. I took this picture last week. This evening my packages are flying in from New Zealand.  Can you quickly spot any potential problems with my future apiary site?

Besides the snow, which is pretty-much year-round here in Calgary, this is actually an OK bee site. The snow was a half-metre deep last weekend, but it’s melting. This spot slopes slightly southward, gets a bit of morning sun, is hidden from neighbours in our mini-forest, and best of all, it’s fairly accessible, just a hop and skip from our dog run and deck.  But no bee spot is ever perfect and we have to constantly compromise.  The bottom line, if there is one, is that you’ve got to work with what you’ve got – and that’s not always perfect.

Posted in Bee Yards, Beekeeping, Humour | Tagged , , | 8 Comments

Pollen Specks

Posted on April 26, 2018 by Ron Miksha

Yesterday, I saw the first pollen of the year carried by bees in our area.  It’s almost May! Local bees have been without fresh pollen for over six months.  The pollen specks which I saw were pitifully specky. If you have trouble seeing corbiculated pollen in the photo above, just look where the arrow is pointing. It’s not an impressive meal for a hungry mob, but even a little fresh pollen is as good as gold for desperate bees at this time of year.

I was visiting friends about fifteen minutes from my home, just a bit west of Calgary, on the beautiful Tsuu t’ina Nation.  The land is slightly higher in elevation and closer to the Rockies so it can be a tad cooler than my backyard. It was early evening, we had just finished poking through my friends’ hives, doing a quick status check. I didn’t see any new pollen stored in the broodnests, but after we closed up the boxes, we spotted the dribs, drabs, and specks of pollen which you see above. The beekeepers whom I visited had been feeding a pollen supplement. Protein from a box is essential at this time of year, but nothing beats natural pollen from wildflowers. It was great to witness bees heisting these tawny harbingers of spring. It filled me with hope that our winter is ending.

In our area, at this time of year, the pollen is mostly from crocus and willow. That’s what brightens the bare brown desolation of April in Alberta.  Snow still chills the ground in icy mounds which litter our landscape, yet honey bees have found some food!

It’s been a cruelly long winter, but honey bee colonies have an advantage over other pollinators. Honey bees can fly any day of the year that the temperature is slightly mild. December, January, February… May. It doesn’t matter. Give them some sun and ten degrees above frost and honey bees spew forth upon the landscape, every one of them a pillaging little Attila.

I was reminded of the bees’ ability to fly early in the season when I saw a Washington Post piece a few days ago. The Post people had interviewed Dr Andony Melathopoulos, a friend of mine who does scientist stuff at Oregon State. Here’s a bit from the newspaper:

“Honeybees are among the first of the bee species to become active each year,” said Andony Melathopoulos, a bee specialist with Oregon State University Extension.

“Unlike all the other bees in the U.S., they winter as a colony so they can jump into action as soon as it gets warm” — approximately 55 degrees Fahrenheit, he said. “In the middle of the winter, all the rest of the bees are in some form of dormancy, either in the ground or in hollow stems.”

Thinking about this, the ecology seems rather puzzling. For millennia, North America had no honey bees. The continent’s native bees (bumblebees, masons, ground-nesting miners, wood-boring carpenters, hole-inhabiting leafcutters) start their season with a single, dazed queen and no workers. These bees become active later in the spring than honey bees. Our honey bees occupy nests of thousands, staying warm and active in their cluster even on cold days. In our area, they survive as a clustered, cloistered family for two hundred wintery days. When a mild spring afternoon finally arrives, hundreds of foragers race out to exploit scattered tufts of willow and rare prairie crocus blossoms. This might be a week or two before the first native bees rouse from their slumber. Honey bees have an advantage when it comes to a willow or crocus blossom. They jump it the moment it smiles.

So, the puzzle is this – why would North America have flowers blooming but not have native bees adapted to be active when they first open?  This seems a rare mismatch of nature.

Perhaps it’s because willow and croci are also native to Europe (where most of our honey bees developed). Maybe at the bidding of some long-quieted breeze, seeds of those plants drifted to North America, ages before the honey bee followed. The plants were stuck with their early-blooming habits even though North American native bees weren’t active early in the spring to pollinate them. Or maybe it’s possible that neither willow nor crocus absolutely require bees to reproduce but instead (like prairie grass and many other plants) they are self-pollinators, married to the wind.  In that case, honey bees are just grabbing something that’s not really being offered to them.

It is also possible that the flowers are being genetically manipulated by our recent hoards of honey bees. Maybe, in the years since our bees arrived, the earliest willows get a pollination advantage and it’s their offspring that encroach more and more on the landscape. Perhaps, in bygone days, willow and croci were more attuned to the native bees.  I don’t know the answer, but hopefully someone smarter than I will read this and explain the little puzzle to me.

That is I, on the right. And that’s snow on the ground behind my friend and me.
Yet, the amazing honey bees found pollen in the barrens!

Posted in Beekeeping, Climate, Ecology, Honey Plants | Tagged , , , , | 6 Comments

The Fragile Earth Egg

Posted on April 7, 2018 by Ron Miksha

I try to stay on topic. This is a bee blog.  But it’s hard to think about bees when our weather is so crummy. It has been extremely cold!  Winter is officially over, but only on the calendar. A few days ago, my 11-year-old daughter said that winter leaves, then the next day, throws the door open and shouts, “And one more thing!”  (Don’t worry, she’s not picking that up from her parents.) Anyway, I guess winter has a lot to say this year.

I’ll write about bees next time.  For now, I’ll just prattle about last weekend, which was a happy one for me. If you saw my post last Friday, you know that it was my birthday (and it was Apitherapy Day!).  I was given some great gifts – a book written by Steven Pinker, a CD by insensitive Calgary pop star Jann Arden, and some crafts made by my kids, like the painting below which was from my 15-year-old. It’s my first-ever oil portrait and I rather like the style, if not the substance. Next time I get lost, I’d love to have my missing persons’ posters feature this portrait.

My son didn’t ask me to pose for my portrait. Instead, he furtively snapped the picture you see to the left.  Then he spent a few hours making art and presented the result as a surprise birthday gift.    As an artist, he is creative but methodical. You can see how he printed the photo in black and white, then gridded it to get the proportions. He kindly made my hair less gray but I think that he could have given me less forehead, too! You can see that he has an impressionist style, but for the forehead, he went for realism.

I have no idea how he became such an outstanding artist. He has sold several paintings (his Jerusalem was great and sold back around Hanukkah). I suspect he’ll put himself through astrophysics school by selling paintings – like this one.

If his talent arrived genetically, it was from his mom. I can hardly assemble a stick-figure, even though I’m pretty good with figures. (Maths are my strong suit.)  Here’s my best (and only) stick figure:

My very first stick-figure!

My birthday was on Good Friday, so last weekend included Easter. My kids painted eggs – I’ve never understood why the Easter celebration includes decorating eggs, followed by looking for them (while eating chocolate bunnies and marshmallow peeps) on Easter morning. I’m guessing that there’s some obscure conflation with redemption from original sin symbolized in the egg hunt. Maybe a reader will be kind enough to explain it to me. Nevertheless, this year, I joined my kids by painting an egg – you can see it here.

It’s my fragile Earth egg.  As they say, you can take the beekeeper out of geophysics, but you can never take the thrill of plate tectonics out of the beekeeper.

Back to our cold spring weather. Yesterday was brutal. It began at minus 24 °C here in Calgary. The high was about -11 °C, but the wind was wicked – it felt like minus 40 to me.  I hope it warms up soon. We have a couple of packages of bees flying in from New Zealand in two weeks. (Boy, will their wings be tired by the time they arrive!)  The forecast teases that it will be above freezing by then.  I hope so. Meanwhile, here’s what our breeze-way looked like this morning, April 7, 2018:

Posted in Culture, or lack thereof, Humour, Strange, Odd Stuff | Tagged , , , | 14 Comments

World Apitherapy Day: Bee Carefully!

Posted on March 30, 2018 by Ron Miksha

One or more of these women are rumored to use bee venom on their face. Is it the Dutchess of Cornwall or the Dutchess of Cambridge? News at 11. (Credit: Wikimedia)

Today is World Apitherapy Day.  Apitherapy, which means using bee stuff for health, can include eating pollen, propolis, wax, royal jelly, bee larvae, and the like – or rubbing them on your face. But for many, apitherapy is bee sting therapy. Stings are sometimes promoted as a treatment for autoimmune disorders, like MS and rheumatism. Less frequently (but with more notice), bee venom is an ingredient in skin creams. It’s rumoured that the Duchess of Cambridge learned about it from the Duchess of Cornwall – as you can read here. (And here, here, and here.) That’s nice, but such gossip needn’t make the evening news. However, a recent death due to a bee sting administered as apitherapy is newsworthy.

Just winking?

I don’t want to deflate the  World Apitherapy Day balloon,  but if you’re not careful, bee sting therapy can be fatal therapy. Most long-time beekeepers have been stung thousands of times. (That’s not an exaggeration.) We may forget that, for some people,  a bee sting can be much worse than a bit of swelling, redness, and pain.  A single bee sting can kill.  Although bee stings therapy may work wonders on some auto-immune syndromes, stings might send a patient into systemic shock.  That’s what reportedly happened in Spain.

A 55-year-old woman was undergoing bee sting therapy to treat stress and muscle fatigue.  Her fatal sting was not her first bee sting – she had reportedly been getting sting therapy monthly for two years. Her fate is really unusual. If a severe reaction occurs, it is usually within the first few treatments. Sadly, although she had at least 20 previous sting sessions over many months without incident, the woman suddenly developed a “loss of consciousness immediately after a live bee sting,” according to the Journal of Investigational Allergology and Clinical Immunology:

During an apitherapy session, she developed wheezing, dyspnea, and sudden loss of consciousness immediately after a live bee sting. An ambulance was called, although it took 30 minutes to arrive. The apitherapy clinic personnel administered methylprednisolone. No adrenaline was available. When the ambulance arrived, the patient’s systolic pressure had dropped to 42 mmHg and her heart rate had increased to 110 bpm.

The woman never regained consciousness and later died from organ failure at hospital. Such bee-therapy fatalities are rare. Only one other treatment is known to have ended a life. However, a meta-analysis of several hundred studies showed that a significant number of therapies have caused serious reactions. The figure given in the analysis (Risk Associated with Bee Venom Therapy: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis) indicated that 12% of people undergoing bee venom therapy from live stings (as opposed to physician-administered controlled injections of bee venom) experience serious reactions.

In two of the courses which I help teach – Making Money from Honey and Beginner’s Beekeeping, I always show a slide about bee sting therapy. For the beginners’ group, I mention it because many new beekeepers know the health benefits of a jab of bee venom, as seen on YouTube. For more advanced beekeepers, I mention bee sting therapy as something they may have considered as a source of income (and a way to help people). In both courses, I strongly advise against stinging anyone. Intentionally inflicting bee venom so that a client may gain health benefits might be considered “practicing medicine without a license.” And you could kill someone.

I don’t want this blog posting to be an anti-apitherapy diatribe. I think that there’s a lot of evidence that bee sting therapy can help some people some of the time. I’ve met people who claim that they are alive and active today because of bee stings.  But I still refuse to get involved in administering the treatments myself – I’m not a trained first responder. If something goes very badly wrong, the patient needs to be in the hands of someone with proper emergency experience.

Filip Terc apitherapy

Filip Terč, Father of Apitherapy 1844-1917

That’s my soap box speech for apitherapy caveats. You may wonder why March 30 is World Apitherapy Day. Today is not only my birthday (Happy Api-birthday, Ron!) but it’s also the birthdate of the most important early promoter of healthy bee stings –  Filip Terč, whom you see glaring at you adjacent to this sentence. Terč practiced medicine in Maribor, Slovenia, over a hundred years ago. As a young man, he suffered badly from rheumatoid pain until, at age 22, he was accidentally stung by an defensive mob of irritated honey bees. It changed his life. His pain was gone.

Terč began a serious study of the effects of bee venom therapy. He published the first clinical trials of the therapeutic effects of bee stings in the 1888 publication “Report on the Peculiar Connection between Bee Stings and Rheumatism”. He presented the results of treating 680 patients with the collective application of 39,000 stings. He claimed that 82% experienced a complete cure, 15% had partial recovery, and just 3% had no relief from their rheumatoid condition. Although his work was published over a hundred years ago and his results have not been disputed, the medical profession has reluctantly appreciated the link between rheumatism, auto-immune dysfunctions, and some of the elements of bee venom. With immune disorders ranging from multiple sclerosis to allergies on the rise, the use of apitherapy treatments are finally becoming more accepted and generally more widely available. So, with cautious caveats, celebrate World Apitherapy Day. (And all those beekeepers with birthdays today).

Posted in Apitherapy, Culture, or lack thereof, Outreach, People | Tagged , , , , , | 10 Comments

Ask Three ‘Experts’ (and get six answers)

Posted on March 18, 2018 by Ron Miksha

Dan Myers, Tennessee beekeeper, 1939.     (credit: TN Archives)

A few days ago, three long-time beekeepers were asked to sit on a panel and take bee-management questions from a large audience of (mostly) younger, newer beekeepers. The three beekeepers were all commercial beekeepers or had run commercial outfits. Altogether, they probably had 130 years of beekeeping experience. I’m not saying that a combined number of years means everything – the audience numbered over a hundred folks so the audience probably had over 300 years of experience.  But there they sat, these older, experienced beekeepers, taking questions.  I was one of the old guys on the panel.

I admit that being old and experienced does not necessarily make you good. One of our local Calgary bee club flame wars was a hot dispute about cooking varroa with heat. This was met by derision from some of us older beekeepers. “An old idea, tested and rejected. The heat will won’t kill many mites but can kill bees,” some of us old people said.  Well, the club beekeepers with very little experience who had read about this treatment on the internet wouldn’t give up. One of them finally wrote, “Arrogance of age is not wisdom.”  That really stuck with me. It’s true. Just because someone is old, they are not necessarily wise. But there is a strong correlation.

It’s awkward to be one of three on a panel when you respect and admire the other two panelists. It’s especially awkward when you know they are smarter than you. Someone in the audience asks a question. You sit there, microphone in hand and begin with “Well, it depends…” and you give your off-the-top-of-the-head answer. The mic passes to a better beekeeper who politely rebukes your answer with a good response that you don’t agree with, but you smile and nod anyway, knowing that their response to that question might be right, some of the time. Then the third panelist answers in yet another way.

One of the panelists was Neil Bertram, a youngish beekeeper with 30 years of experience and about 300 hives. That’s him, to the right. Neil consistently produces over 200 pounds per hive. One year he hit 100,000 pounds from 300 hives. Pretty good, eh? Neil is my co-teacher in our workshop “making money from honey” – Neil tells the participants how to do it right while I’m at the workshops for comic relief, telling the students how they might lose money by keeping bees. (I’m really good at that.)

The other co-panelist at the bee club’s “Ask the Experts” night was the luminous and accomplished Allen Dick, someone many web readers know. Allen has an extremely popular website where he dispenses great practical advice – the nuts and bolts of beekeeping. We both, separately and unbeknownst to each other, began our respective websites the same year, back in the 1990s, making ours the oldest two bee sites in the world.

I think that Allen’s website is better than mine (but thank you for reading this).  I tend to focus on bee squabbles, news, and interpretations of bee research while Allen Dick’s Honey Bee World has been a respected go-to site for down-to-earth beekeeping tips. (Though he doesn’t mind jumping into squabbles!)  If you want to know how to keep bees better, he has the site to search.

Allen Dick doesn’t attend the Calgary bee club meetings very often. He lives over an hour north of the city. So, with him in town, the bee club asked if he’d give a spring management talk before the panel took questions.  Here’s the old geezer at Wednesday night’s meeting.  He walked the new beekeepers through the bee routines that they need to know to get their hives in shape for summer.

Allen Dick, talkin’ bees to Calgary and District beekeepers

Panels are great.  When I’m asked a bee question, I often give two answers which will probably solve the issue, but a panel of three people yields six opinions. Isn’t that wonderful?  Here’s an example. Someone asked, “If I have two really good hives, should I put a third brood chamber on top or split them – but I don’t want more hives.”  I answered first, explaining that the bees likely don’t really need a third deep Langstroth brood chamber. There are lots of tricks to keep bees from swarming – foundation, rotating pearl brood down, inserting dry frames into the brood nest (weather permitting), and so on. This usually keeps all the bees home and maximizes the crop. Then the microphone passed to Allen. He agreed but added something that I would not have thought of until after the meeting was over and everyone had gone home.  Allen suggested splitting off a good new third hive from the two powerful  ones and . . . selling the new split.  He added that it’s easier to sell a hive than sell honey. That’s a brilliant answer. And that’s why it’s good to ask three ‘experts’.

Having three professionals on the panel, all of whom are hedging and interpreting questions differently, can be eye-opening for some new beekeepers. One of the harder things for novices to accept is that the world of beekeeping is loose and fast and everyone may be right and wrong at the same time – depending on the situation. Every question has multiple answers. Experienced beekeepers often respond with, “Well, it depends…” leaving the novice beekeeper wondering why there is no single correct answer.  Although there are important “correct” concepts (“don’t kick the hive” and “bees don’t fill supers that are left in the shop”),  most bee things are complicated.  This is worth remembering if you are new to bees.

On several occasions, I’ve had new beekeepers ask for a step-by-step guide complete with dates which they can place on their family calendars, like so many anniversaries and birthdays.  “March 4th, start feeding the bees pollen” and  “June 23rd, place first honey super on hives”.  But those dates vary every year.  Shocking as it may sound to some folks, there’s no recipe book for keeping bees. There are certainly some (almost) inalienable beekeeping truths. But every year is different. Every apiary is different. Every hive is different. The good news? If you keep your lights on, your eyes open, stay curious and adventurous, and live long enough, you will probably become an experienced old-timer beekeeper yourself.

Posted in Beekeeping, Friends, Outreach | Tagged , , , | 10 Comments

Hobby Beekeepers Get an Extra Hour

Posted on March 11, 2018 by Ron Miksha

Most folks I know reset their clocks last night. This is great for hobby beekeepers who race home after work to don gaudy bee suits and ignite smoker fuel, hoping to beat the setting sun. Not so fast, Beekeepster. You can slow down and still enjoy a whole extra hour of afternoon beekeeping.

Most North Americans moved their clocks’ hands forward last night. Others in the northern hemisphere will do this a week or two later. Meanwhile, some folks in the southern hemisphere do the deed in the opposite direction. Others never change to Daylight Saving Time, so they aren’t moving any time soon. It’s a gemisch of spinning clock dials, but the world’s biggest mess is in the United States, on the Navajo Nation in the state of Arizona.  We’ll get to Arizona in a minute. But first, the whole notion of springing forward in the spring and falling back in the fall shall be examined.

Ben Franklin, America’s inventor/ambassador/kite-flyer/publisher/scientist/statesman/postmaster proposed the idea back in 1784 as a way to save money. His father was a candle maker. From an early age, Ben realized how expensive it is to light a house at night. Instead of “early to bed and early to rise” making a man wealthy, Ben figured that pushing the clocks ahead in the spring could do the same trick. Thus, he invented daylight Saving Time. While ambassador to France, Franklin told a Paris audience that their city would save 128 million candles a year if people simply moved their clocks one hour. But his idea wasn’t adopted anywhere until 1916, when Germany and Austria used clock setting as part of their war effort. The USA began saving time in 1918, but not every American state joined in.

Saving time really does save money. Roosevelt instituted War Time from February 1942 to September 1945 – non-stop Daylight Saving Time. In 1973, Richard Nixon decreed an extra-long summer savings of time during that year’s fuel crisis. That summer, people used Saving Time for an extra few months, saving millions of dollars and tanker loads of oil – 3 million barrels a month, according to the US Transportation Department. With such success, one wonders why we don’t move the clock back two hours and keep it there. But there are dissenters.

Maybe you don’t move your clocks at all? For a few years, I lived in Saskatchewan, Canada. It’s one of the few northerly places that doesn’t bother with Savings Time. It’s a cow thing – Saskatchewan cows rarely wear watches, so the cows of Saskatchewan saw the idea as so much BS. They knew when they needed milked and the farmers had no choice but to stay with natural time. But within Saskatchewan, there’s a group of untimely dissenters: The Hutterites. Years ago, I was their Honig Mensch and became good friends with some of the folks on those communal farms.

Sask Hutterites

Saskatchewan Hutterites – from another time zone. (Image: Miksha)

Hutterites don’t use Daylight Saving Time, but they don’t use Saskatchewan’s permanent Central Time Zone, either. They use Slow Time. When I visited Hutterite colonies, I was careful not to show up at the communal farm during daily prayers, which were at 5 pm, slow time. This Mennonite-type group set their clocks to their own unique slow time, which is an hour behind the rest of Saskatchewan. This way they coordinated prayer time with other Hutterite colonies across North America. However, Slow Time put their clocks at the same time as Quebec, in the Eastern Time, 3,000 kilometres away, which I thought was highly anachronistic.

Saskatchewan’s Central Time Zone began at the edge of each Hutterite colony. The permanent Central Time Zone of Saskatchewan, with immobile clocks that never experience ‘savings’, has its merits. Saskatchewan bees have the highest annual per colony honey production in North America (about 180 pounds per hive).  Keeping bees on a stable clock apparently kicks in the extra nectar.

Elsewhere, back in August 2015, the wizard of North Korea magically moved his country even further back in time, making news by retro-shifting clocks thirty minutes. Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un created the new Jong-Un Time Zone where Un-time not only stands still, but occasionally even runs backward. That’s not all. Water, I’m told, sometimes flows uphill in Pyongyang.

Saskatchewan’s Hutterite colonies and North Korea’s kingdom are not the only places with idiosyncratic time shifts. There are other enclaves of other-time peoples, particularly in Arizona. Get this:

1) Arizona does not change to Daylight Saving Time when the rest of the United States does.
2) However, within Arizona, the Navajo Nation does move clocks ahead to Saving.
3) However, within the Navajo borders, the Hopi Reservation does not change its clocks.
4) However, living on a ranch in Hopi country is a family where the mother works on the Navajo Reserve, so that house moves its clock.

This results in a complicated situation where a family’s clock is ahead of their neighbours’ clocks that are behind a surrounding community that is ahead of a state that is behind a country that moves ahead.  For the rest of you, enjoy the extra hour with some bees. (But don’t forget to give it back in November.)

Mixed times on the Navajo Nation (Wikimedia)

Mixed times on the Navajo Nation (Wikimedia)

Posted in Culture, or lack thereof, Friends, History, Humour, Reblogs | Tagged , , , , | 5 Comments