La Casa Grande Colectiva

Tag: honeybees

What do bees do in the winter?

Unless you have a beehive in your backyard, you don’t see a lot of honeybees during Winter. In order to survive the long cold between flower blooms, the whole colony balls up inside of the hive and conserves heat by rubbing against one another. This mass of bees starts at the bottom of the hive and moves up the center eating all the honey. If they built up enough of a stockpile and the beekeeper didn’t take it all in the Fall, there will be enough to last till the Spring bloom. We didn’t harvest any honey last Fall, in fact Robby added an extra box of honey for the weaker of the two colonies (note the white box).

Another factor that helps the bees survival over the Winter is death. The population of the hive drops dramatically from 50,000+ at the peak, all the way down to a few thousand. This greatly reduces the rate at which the colony consumes the honey stores.

Of course, with fewer workers around general hive cleaning maintenance is neglected, and the bottom board becomes a mass open grave. The bodies pile up next to puddles of excrement almost blocking the hive entrance.

On nice sunny Winter days some activity can be viewed around the hives. These photos were taken when the temperature was hovering around freezing, but the sun was thawing some of the accumulated snow. Bees were peaking out of the hole in the hive.

I sat and watched with my camera, eager to see where the bees were venturing out to, and for what purpose.

The purpose of her flight quickly became obvious. After scurrying around along the surface of the snow for a few minutes, this bee keeled over and died.

Perhaps in a selfless act, she sacrificed herself so the rest of the colony could have enough to eat and survive. Or perhaps she was denied access to the honey stores and escaped only to find the cold white doom outside.

A lot of what I’ve read about beekeeping suggests thinking about the entire colony as one living organism, and each bee, while performing a specific set of tasks, functions as the tissues and organs. So, like a bear who hibernates through Winter, the hive emerges in the Spring leaner, and eager to build up and stockpile of food. While thousands of dead bees littered around the hive seems grim, it is all part of the process of seasonal regeneration.

March 3, 2010
late summer hive check – mystery queen

Robbie and I opened up the hives a few weekends ago to take an inventory of the healthy hive and see how much brood the new queen has produced in the weaker hive. Sadly, we didn’t see a lot of honey in the honey supers (the shallower frames on top). We figured this was some what to be expected since our hive was just getting built up when most of the plants were producing nectar. It was a timing issue, and we were late getting our hives started.

You can see that there is some capped honey in the middle, but the bees have barely drawn out the wax comb towards the edges of the frame.

In the hive that recently had been re-queened, there was a clear sign that the new queen had been successfully introduced. You can see in the photo below that some of the cells have a dark yellow cap on them. That’s called ‘capped brood’, and in a few weeks fully developed bees will eat their way out and begin working right away.

The brighter orange cells are pollen stores.

When we first opened up the second hive we immediately noticed something strange. Right in the corner of the hive that we pried open with the hive tool, there was an unmarked queen hiding out.

There she is about as far away from the nucleus of the hive as possible.

You can see her elongated abdomen and short wings. We were hoping to find signs of the introduced queen and maybe spot her, and oddly the first bee we see after opening the hive is another queen. I suspect that before the first queen swarmed, the bees had already started feeding royal jelly to create a new queen. By the time she hatched we had stuck a new queen in, who has now taken over the colony.

If you spend a moment to think about it, a very interesting tale of courtly coups could be extracted from this. Is the native born queen entitled to the crown? Who is this imposter queen who has stolen the throne and banished the rightful heir to the far reaches of the queendom? Did we screw up the natural order of things by adding a new queen when the bees were busy rearing a new one?

We scratched our heads (through the veils), set the mystery queen aside, and continued looking for signs of the introduced queen. When we were finished and putting the frames back in we found the unmarked queen very close to where she was before.

It seems as though she still had a few workers attending to her.

September 9, 2009
Hive Tour 7/12/09

My good friends Kannan, and Mac helped me get a closer look inside out hives yesterday. Four weeks ago I put the second deep supers on each hive. The supers were full of bare frames, meaning the bees needed to build the comb before they could use them. Well, after checking out the hives I can say they are doing excellently. Lots of brood and some full frames of honey. There were even empty brood chambers where baby bees had already emerged. This means we probably need to add more space to allow the hive to continue to grow.

The diagram on the left is similar to our hives, (different lid and different number of frames) but it gives you an idea of how the hives are constructed. Its a fairly simple design. Wooden frames are suspended inside a box, and the boxes are stacked up. The bees then build honeycomb on both sides of each frame. I had some handy helpers, so we were able to take clean photos of each frame. I cropped all the photos in a similar way so you can flip through each cross section of the hive. As you get towards the middle you’ll notice that there is less honey and more brood. The queen lays eggs in a somewhat predictable pattern, and experienced beekeepers use that to judge the quality of the hive.
Vodpod videos no longer available.
full screen slide show of hive 1
Vodpod videos no longer available.
full screen slideshow of hive 2

July 14, 2009
Honeybees arrive

We installed two hives of honeybees today at La Casa. Fellow co-oper, Robby from across town will be using our yard (and pollen) to raise honeybees. Robby got his hive boxes from his grandfather who was a beekeeper. Robby’s been taking classes from the Central Illinois Beekeeper’s Association: CEIBA. Last night we picked up the bees from a queen breeder near Danville. They were sealed in boxes for transport in the van.

About 10,000 bees came with each queen. Five frames from a two healthy colonies, along with a two queens were put into boxes. Today we tranported the frames into the hives. Robby moved the first colony, and I moved the second. We had to wear full bee suits otherwise the bees would have stung us many times. It was quite a rush carrying the frames full of bees and being careful not to disturb them too much. We took a bunch of photos, and I’m just going to go ahead and post most of them.

Robby tried to calm the bees down with sugar water. There were hundreds flying around us as we were working.

This is what frames look like installed in the hive. There are ten frames in each section of the hive. We mixed the five frames full of honey and brood (developing bees) in with 5 clean frames.

Most of the frames are installed. Just a few more to squeeze in.

You can see the queen crawling around in this photo. There’s a little green dot on her back. Try this hi-res version if you want to see her up close. She has a longer body and smaller wings.

I suited up and moved the second set of frames while Robby took photos. This time we tried the smoker instead of sugar water. The smoke calms them down and confuses their communication.

Robby snapped this nice photo.

Calming them with more smoke. Only two frames left to move.

The other queen. Look for the green dot. Hi-res.

All put back together. Bees installed. The next move is to put more boxes with clean frames on top. The hives are designed to be modular, building up from the bottom box. Two big boxes at the base are where the queen builds up her colony. Then at some point smaller boxes are placed on top with a screen that lets only the workers past. Since only the worker can access the top boxes, no eggs are laid and they become full of honey. Since we’re starting this hive pretty late in the season, we might not get much honey this year. But its still a worthwhile project and if the hives survive the winter, we’ll have plenty of honey next year.

May 29, 2009