Posted by: Pam B. Newberry | December 7, 2010

Too Cold for Beast or Bee!

Bkyard Pic on Dec 08 2010

Backyard - Dec 08, 2010 - Cold 20 Degrees outside!

Brrr, is it ever cold here in the mountains of Virginia. Winter is a hard time for many animals and humans — especially those without a home. Honey bees are at their most vulnerable at this time. Winter is the most hazardous period for a honey bee colony. In the past, most beekeepers reported a typical loss of 10% to 20% of their total hives. Now, the loses are more around 40% to 60%. That means if you have four hives, you most likely can expect to lose at least half of the hives. The better prepared a honey bee colony, the more likely it will make it through the winter.

In my last post, I mentioned I’d begin sharing the duties of the beekeeper for each month. Since there is so much to share, I’ll be sharing the duties for the month we are in along with how Hobbit King and I are learning and doing as new beekeepers.
December is the month that the beekeeper leaves his or her bees alone! I’m so glad, cause as you can tell with the bitter cold temperatures and snow on the ground, I really wouldn’t want to have to work with them right now anyway. We were told in our bee class that you don’t disturb them for any reason if you can help it. If the bees had a good fall gathering, their stores of honey should be bountiful enough to help the hive get through winter. If you must go into a bee hive in December, you need to plan it very carefully.  First, make sure it is a day above 50° F and not windy. And, just like any other time of the year, but more so during the cold temperatures of late fall and early winter, you need to get in and out of the hive as quickly as possible without disturbing the cluster.

Speaking of cluster. Did I tell you about the honey bee cluster? I may have mentioned it in a quiz a few posts back, but let me tell you honey bees are smart. Very smart.  The honey bee colony has evolved over time to where it has adapted for the best chance of survival in winter. For instance, the winter cluster is what the entire colony does to stay warm in the hive. Imagine, a bee hive doesn’t have a mechanical heating system. The bees do the job. I personally don’t have a picture of a bee cluster, but I hope to acquire one from our own bees real soon. In the meantime, you may want to do a search on the Internet to find a picture, there are loads of them out there. See the links on the right of the post for sites you might want to visit.

When bees cluster, they move as close as possible to each other as the temperature begins to drop.

Typically, this is in early fall when the temperatures outside starts to drop below 50° F. The bees suspend brood rearing. The most fascinating aspect of how the honey bee has evolved for winter survival is that the bee’s life span changes from a mere 30 to 35 days for the summer bee to winter bees that live for three to seven months. Imagine, your life span depending on the temperature outside. Except for the cold, sounds like being born in the late fall is a good time to be a bee. The honey bee cluster puts off an enormous amount of heat. This heat does not heat the hive, but only heats the area around the cluster. In early winter, the hive temperature at the cluster can hoover around 76 to 80° F, and by late winter it can be greater than 90° F.

The cluster stays the warmest in the center. As you move to the outer edge of the cluster the temperature begins to drop substantially, but tends to stay rather consistent. While the ambient temperature is very erratic and totally dependent on the outside temperature. The cluster forms to provide insulation and maintain the temperature for the colony. There can be as many as 30,000 or more bees in one cluster!

Every colony must have a good queen and colonies must be protected from climatic extremes. This is why the cluster must not be disturbed. An abundant storage of honey for the bee is critical because as the honey bees cluster, they don’t move far from each other. This means that as a honey bee is in the cluster, it doesn’t always eat. The honey bees in the center of the cluster do the most work, moving their wings to give off heat. The honey bees on the outer edge, near the honey stores, gather food to eat and move to the center to replace the spent honey bee who is now hungry and cold. This exchange of bees is how the cluster is able to maintain the temperature of the hive.

Fifty-five to sixty pounds is the amount of honey a hive must have to enable it to make it through the winter. So, it is critical that the honey bee keeper is aware of a hive’s needs, doesn’t take more honey from the hive than is necessary, and provides for the honey bees when they are unable to build proper stores of honey. This means that if a hive is lacking winter stores, a beekeeper can feed the hive with frames of honey, entrance feeders, baggies, or jars with holes in the lids that are placed directly on the top bars of the brood nest. This must be done prior to the dead cold of December. It is so important to make sure your bees are ready for the blistering cold and wind. If your hive is weak, it is critical you place a cover on the bottom board of the hive. This enables the hive to keep some heat in more carefully, especially if the number of bees in the colony is down.

Other duties for the beekeeper during December is to take inventory of supplies and order equipment to replace worn or damaged parts. Paint equipment to maintain and keep the extra hive parts ready for use. The beekeeper begins to plan for the coming year. If you are an established beekeeper, than you can look for new apiary sites and renew old pollination contracts, if you’re into that sort of level of business. 

Wow, that’s a lot to be thinking about and December is supposed to be an easy month. Hobbit King and I have talked about all that goes on as we’ve headed home from our bee class. This past Monday night, we didn’t get to have class because it was so cold out. Imagine the poor bee. It is stuck with it’s buddies all winter and can’t venture outside until the temperature gets up to 50° F. Otherwise, the poor things die on the spot. Now, remember, I told you that the bees still eat for survival. They also still have other bodily functions going on, so when a break in the weather happens, they scamper out of the hive so they can have what beekeepers call “cleansing flights!” Yep…for real. Kinda funny when you think about it. The sad part is, it is common to find dead bees in the snow after a warm day of cleansing flights during winter where they didn’t get back to the hive before it got too cold again.

You might be asking yourself, well why don’t you insulate the hive and protect it form the cold? Well, the main reason is it can have a negative effect by holding in the cold temperatures and preventing the hive from warming naturally on its own as the temperature changes. Warming outside allows for cleansing flights and cluster shifts for feeding. So, without the temperature fluctuations, the bees won’t know they can take care of business, so to speak, and they can die.

Now, in addition to honey for bees to eat, they also need about three to five frames of pollen. Pollen provides protein for winter brood rearing as the hive begins to prepare for the coming spring.

Aren’t bees just fascinating?!? I find them remarkable. I’m going to “bee” adding some bee facts that you may find interesting periodically as I learn more about them. If you know of any, please share and let me know by dropping me a line or leaving a comment.

Here’s the first one….let me know what you think….

Special Bee Moment: Tidbits of the Honey Bee — Facts when you need them — News when you don’t!

Bees have an olfactory that is similar to a dog. The performance of the honey bee’s olfactory is as good or better as that of a trained canine. Honey bees can be conditioned and trained to sniff out drugs and high explosives, such as land mines.

 ~~~~~~~

BEE Quiz 2:

Here’s another “BEE” Quiz — The answers will be posted in the next blog:

  • A. Besides honey, what is a honey bee’s favorite food?
    1. Honey
    2. Pollen
    3. Bee Poop
    4. Royal Jelly
  • B. How many pounds of honey does a colony require for winter survival?
    1. 50 to 60 pounds
    2. 45 to 55 pounds
    3. 55 to 60 pounds
    4. None of the above
  • C. Why do bee’s cluster?
    1. Because they like to be close
    2. Because they must be close to maintain temperature and provide insulation
    3. Because they like to eat
    4. None of the above

 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

December is a wonderful month to learn more about bees and to try recipes with honey. I’ve added a recipe for you to try and provided a few links, too. Let me know if you try the recipe and share any you may have as well.

Until next time, stay warm and cozy…

Honey Kisses,
Hobbit Queen

2 Comments

Posted in Bee Class, Bees, honey bees | Tags: , , , ,

Posted by: Pam B. Newberry | December 1, 2010

You are What You Eat…And so is the Honey Bee

How many times have you heard the saying, “You are what you eat”? Did you know it is an actual quote made by Franklin P. Jones, which in its complete form is the following:

You are what you eat.  For example, if you eat garlic you’re apt to be a hermit.

You know exactly what Jones meant if you’ve ever eaten too much of an Italian dish laden with garlic. No one, not even your significant other will get close to you.

Now, imagine a honey bee. It loves all kinds of flowers that are full of nectar and when a flower is also full of pollen, it is a win-win situation for the honey bee. It, too, takes on the character of its food. (For a timely news story that demonstrates this, click on the Link to the NY Times Article: Bees in Brooklyn Hives Mysteriously Turn Red)

Have you ever had sourwood honey? It comes from the honey bee that gathered over 50% of its pollen from the sourwood tree at the right time of season. The resulting honey is light and sweet and oh so good. Yum!

How about dark honey? It is typically a result of honey bees foraging in fields of buckwheat or even from other plants, such as tulip poplar trees or kudzu vines. The resulting taste is strong and abrupt, almost like molasses. It is excellent honey to cook with and provides lots of good stuff, such as antioxidants.

Just as there are different types of honey based on what a honey bee eats, there are different types of honey bees. Yes, there is diversity in a honey bee world, too. Who would have figured that one? I mean, I really thought a honey bee was a honey bee. But not so.

During our second honey bee class, we learned that there are as many different varieties of honey bees as there are different environments. Like all other living things, and in my opinion, especially humans, honey bees vary in traits. Like humans, their temperament swings wildly apart.

You have gentle honey bees, and then you have very aggressive honey bees, the most notorious of which we call “Africanized” bees. There are bee colonies that are more disease resistant than others. A new type of bee is being popularized that was bred in Minnesota to be resistant to most of the common bee maladies. Tests are underway now for those bees to be reared in Florida. There are honey bees that are more productive than other bees.

All of these different traits are dependent upon the environment in which a honey bee colony resides. Different plants (as noted before) result in different tasting honey. All of these traits are also passed on to the next generation. Different genetic stocks have distinctive characteristics. Over the years, beekeepers have learned how to best use these distinctions to the benefit of the farmer. Whether it be to improve the pollination use of the bee, provide a better honey crop, or improve honey bee production (i.e., the case of breeding the honey bee to be resistant to a disease).

As we sat in class listening, I began to make comparisons to my own life. As a child, I grew up in a children’s home. In the old days they called it an orphanage though most of us at the time weren’t what you’d call “real” orphans.

Most of us had at least one parent. There were a few “real” orphans among us and we all thought they were the lucky ones, as they weren’t wearing a title that was given to them by bad luck. Yeah, I know seems strange, but that was how we kids thought about things. There were about 350 of us living together in different groups. There were young ones, those under eight years-old and tweens, as well as teenagers. We had different traits, we came from different parts of the state, we had different beliefs or religions, and we had backgrounds that covered everything from severe child abuse to abandonment to being given up by a loving parent who had nowhere else to turn. As a result, we tended to group ourselves accordingly.

Honey bees are identified as “stock,” a label like orphan. The word is used to define a loose combination of traits that characterize a particular group of bees.  A colony of bees can be very diverse within as well as between colonies of a region. Just as in human life, there are always exceptions, so it is best not to generalize the one trait you see today automatically as something you will see again in a nearby hive or even its splinter group or swarm. The following is a brief overview of the com­mon commercially available honey bee stocks as shared during our class:

The Italian bee

  • Italian honey bees, of the subspecies Apis mellifera ligustica, were brought to the U.S. in 1859. They quickly became the favored bee stock in this country and remain so to this day.

The German bee

  • Honey bees are not native to the New World, although North America has about 4,000 native species of bees. Honey bees were brought to America in the 17th century by the early European settlers. These bees were most likely of the subspecies A. m. mellifera, otherwise known as the German or “black” bee.

The Carniolan bee

  • The subspecies A. m. carnica, from middle Europe, also has been a fa­vored bee stock in the U.S. for several reasons. (Not sure when it arrived).

The Caucasian bee

  • A. m. caucasica is a race of honey bees native to the foothills of the Ural Mountains near the Caspian Sea in Eastern Europe. This stock was once popular in the U.S., but it has declined in regard over the last few decades.

The Buckfast bee

  • In the 1920s, honey bee colonies in the British Isles were devastated by aca­rine disease, which now is suspected to have been the endoparasitic tracheal mite Acarapis woodi. Brother Adams, a monk at Buckfast Abby in Devon, England, was charged with creating a bee stock that could withstand this deadly disease. He created a stock of bees, largely from the Italian race, that could thrive.

The Russian bee

  • One of the newer bee stocks in the U.S. was imported from far-eastern Russia by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Honey Bee Breeding, Genetics, and Physiology Labora­tory in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The researchers’ logic was that these bees from the Primorski region on the Sea of Japan have coexisted for the last 150 years with the devastating ecto­parasite Varroa destructor, a mite that is responsible for severe colony losses around the globe, and they might thrive in the U.S. The USDA tested whether this stock had evolved resis­tance to varroa and found that it had. Numerous studies have shown that bees of this strain have fewer than half the number of mites that are found in standard commercial stocks. The quar­antine phase of this project has been complete since 2000, and bees of this strain are available commercially.

 ~~~~~~~~~~~~

Aren’t bees just absolutely fascinating? Can you see the parallels with our existence? Amazing!

It’s hard to believe that December 2010 is already here. The month of December is one of the only months during the year that bees are left totally alone. Next blog I plan to provide you with a listing of the duties of a beekeeper in raising honey bees each month durng a year. I also hope to prepare for you another quiz. So, study up on honey bees, Visit the links to other honey bee sites, and come back for a visit with me. I hope to add some awesome recipes for you real soon that you may try during the holiday season.

Don’t forget to sign up for an e-mail notification of when I update my blog. And, by all means, leave a comment; share a thought; provide a good link; or may “bee” share a picture. Til next time…

Honey Hugs with Cheers,

Hobbit Queen

P.S. If you missed my Thanksgiving post, go back and check it out, as I placed the answers to the last quiz in that post! 🙂

4 Comments

Posted in Bees, Honey, honey bees | Tags: , , ,

Posted by: Pam B. Newberry | November 26, 2010

Happy Thanksgiving 2010!!

“Food, glorious food, that’s what I live for…” from the movie Oliver

What better time to think about food and the honey bee then at Thanksgiving time.

Yesterday our family had a wonderful celebration with blood kin and friend kin. We ate, drank, and were merry. At the same time, it was bitter sweet. This past year, we’ve lost several family and friends. In particular, we lost my husband’s mother. Over the past thirty years, she always prepared an aspargus casserole and she never allowed anyone else to make the dish. So, yesterday, we, my husband and I, prepared the dish to share in memory of her.

You should’ve seen us in the kitchen trying to read my husband’s notes on the recipe that he was able to write after repeated questioning of his mother prior to her passing. In true mother-n-law form, she had never written the recipe down because she didn’t want it to be made by me or anyone else. We laughed when we discovered my husband didn’t get the recipe down exactly correct. 

His notes read it required two cans of long spear aspargus. Two cans were sitting on the counter. My husband began to put the casserole together only to come to a point when he said, “Uh, I think we need two more cans of aspargus.”

“You do, why? The receipe says two cans.”

“Yeah, but it says ‘repeat’ here.”

I looked at him puzzled. He continued, “I meant when I wrote this you go back and put two more cans of aspargus in and continue with the receipe.”

Needless to say, we didn’t have any more cans in the house. We called a neighbor to see if she had any, and of course she didn’t. Luckily, we had a store open in our little town and Hobbit King made a mad dash to get more aspargus. We were able to finish assembling the casserole only to come to the part where the receipe is supposed to say what temperature you cook and for how long. Yep, there was no information. So we guessed.

We took the casserole out of the oven in time to take it to our family dinner. It was bubbly and seemed to be brown on top, like mom had said it should be, but when we went to serve it, it didn’t look the same. No one said a word as they took their helping and placed it on their plate. It was so obvious that it was not quite done because as you lifted it out of the casserole the cheese just kinda hung there, the aspargus was stiff, and the soup was like glue. I looked at my husband and smiled. He whispered to me, “I guess she really could cook it better than us.”

I’m learning that honey bees are a lot like that, too. They forage and gather and each has a special job they do. Then they die. Along comes another group of honey bees, workers, to replace them and to help keep the hive clean, or forage, or protect the opening of the hive. As I learn more about the honey bee and it’s colony, I marvel at the parallels. The way they care for their brood as we care for our young. The way they care for their dead as we care for our loved ones who have passed on or are dying. Life is full of such cycles and Thanksgiving is a time to reflect on them, to give thanks for all that we have encountered or will have the privilege of doing.

May you have the blessings of life during this holiday time and throughout the rest of the year. I’ll be away from blogging the next few days. I’m off to enjoy family and friends.

Happy Thanksgiving to Each of You!

(Answers to previous quiz: 1. D; 2. A; 3. E; 4. C — hope you had fun!)

Cheers with Honey Hugs,

Hobbit Queen

Leave a Comment

Posted in Other Things | Tags: , , , ,

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »

Categories