The Boojum Beeyard: Beeyard Work Day!

Spring is in full bloom and there was lots of work to be done in the beeyard lately. Our colonies are booming and it was time to put on the honey (medium) supers. A honey super, also called a medium, are just like hive boxes but are about half as deep. We place these with medium frames on top of the hive box. The bees naturally want to move upwards in the hive and will store their honey up above their brood if they can.

Why is a honey super so much more shallow than a hive box? Because those frames get heavy when they are full of honey! By using a smaller box and frames, the honey super is much lighter and easier to carry when full of honey than a deep super would be.

Kurt also brought up a captured swarm, so we needed to "hive" it, or put it in a full size hive body. So we added yet another colony to Boojum's Beeyard. Check out the photos from our beeyard work day!

First we opened the colony that needed a honey super to look for a good frame of brood.

photo: Robyn Young

Wow, look at all the capped over brood on this frame! We'll put this into the hive box that we want to put the new swarm into. Having brood in there will encourage the new colony to stay (they will now have young to care for).

photo: Robyn Young

See the pollen patties on top? Beekeepers can buy these cakes of pollen to help feed their bees, especially early spring before many flower sources are available. This colony is doing so well it has barely touched the pollen patty we put in there a month ago!

photo: Robyn Young

We inspect the colony, finding that it is indeed healthy and ready to be supered.

photo: Robyn Young

 Jaimie, an intern here at Boojum Institute, joins us for the inspection:

photo: Robyn Young

photo: Robyn Young

This metal grate is called a queen excluder. The holes are big enough for worker bees to get through, but not the queen. We put this between the hive body and the honey super. That way, the workers can fill the honey super with honey and the queen can't get up there to lay brood. That's how we make sure there's no baby bees mixed in with the honey!

photo: Robyn Young

Here's a nice photo of the bees "bearding":

photo: Robyn Young

Here we are putting the frame of brood into the empty hive box. Now it's ready for the swarm:

photo: Robyn Young

This smaller box is called a nuc box. We use it to temporarily house captured swarms:

photo: Robyn Young

A closer look at the nuc box full of bees. A gentle puff of smoke masks the alarm pheromone and calms them.

photo: Robyn Young

photo: Robyn Young

The swarm's queen is on this frame, do you see her?

photo: Robyn Young

The new home for the colony. We transferred all the frames from the nuc box into the new hive body:

photo: Robyn Young

Getting ready to "pour" the bees into their new home:

photo: Robyn Young

And there they go!

photo: Robyn Young

Now we put in some empty frames to complete the operation:

photo: Robyn Young

The swarm has been relocated! We've given them brood to care for and gave them pollen and sugar syrup to supplement them, all to encourage them to stay in their new home!

photo: Robyn Young

Thanks for checking in with the Boojum Bees!

The Boojum Beeyard: Splitting Colonies

The early blooms of spring color the landscape and our two colonies are booming. The first Honeybee and World Health classroom presentations of the year are already scheduled and we need to get the observation hive ready to travel. The colonies seem healthy enough to do some splits.

Beekeepers can make more colonies by splitting healthy ones. Frames of brood and food are removed from a colony and inspected carefully for the queen before being placed in an empty hive box, or deep.

The existing hives are smoked and opened up. We have two hive boxes with some empty frames ready nearby.

We find frames with bees, brood, and food stores and place them into the empty hive boxes. We have also placed a frame feeder in the deep (far right). We will fill it with sugar syrup to help supplement the new split.

We search each frame for the queen. We have two colonies to work from and therefore need to locate two queens.

One queen will be placed in the observation hive with a frame of brood. The other will stay with her colony. Look at this frame full of honeybees! How many bees do you think are on there?

We will need to get three new queens for the splits, unless we want to let the bees rear their own. Since we are in southern California and have a high risk getting Africanized queens, ordering Italian or Carniolan queens would be best.

The new splits will be without a queen for a few days. They will start getting anxious and build queen cells, relocating a young larva into each one. The nurse bees will feed the separated larvae royal jelly. This will cause the larvae to pupate into queen bees.

The observation hive is complete with a queen and two frames of bee brood and food stores. The third frame is empty, giving them some room to expand. These honeybees will travel to classrooms all over, providing an exciting lens into the world of science for the students.

A good day in the beeyard! Boojum Institute's executive director and chief apiculturist Kurt Merrill surveys the apiary and the work we accomplished.

The Boojum Beeyard: Mite Treatment

  We emerged from winter with two healthy hives at the Boojum Beeyard. During the first inspection of the year, we noticed Varroa mites in both colonies. Though it wasn't a bad infestation, we decided to treat using food grade formic acid. Formic acid is a naturally occurring substance. It is found in the venom of most stinging plants and insects. For instance the sting of the nettle plant is from the formic acid. It is also found in the venom of bees and ants. It has many different uses, but beekeepers use it against tracheal and Varroa mites.

The formic acid comes ready to use, in acid soaked pads.

The bees are in the bottom box, called a deep. Another deep and an empty medium super are placed on top. The pads which are saturated with formic acid are placed in the upper level of the stack.

Time to button up the colonies. The lid is replaced and the formic acid is now fumigating the colony. The bees are unharmed by the acid and the mites are exterminated.

Though it does not harm the bees, it is still an acid and all the proper safety guidelines need to be followed.

Now we let the treatment do it's job. We will be coming back in a couple of weeks to do some spring colony splits.

The Boojum Beeyard: Relocating a Colony

The weather at the Boojum Beeyard has been mild and beautiful this week. Pretty soon, it will be swarm season. When the colonies come out of their winter clusters and their queens start laying eggs again, the hive populations grow. Then the swarm season begins.

Beekeepers love swarm season, because they can gather new colonies fairly simply. Last year we gathered several swarms, adding to the number of colonies living at Boojum. One of the swarms last year had started setting up their hive in a discarded TV box. Instead of exterminating them, the person who had these bees move into the box at his house called our chief apiculturist, Kurt Merrill. Kurt was able to take the bees safely away. Here are some pictures he took while transferring the colony from the cardboard box and into a hive box in the Boojum Beeyard.

The box was wrapped in mesh to contain the bees and transported to Boojum in a truck:

photo: Kurt Merrill

 A new home has been prepared. Time to put the bees in the empty hive box:

photo: Kurt Merrill

  When the box is opened you can see the freshly built comb inside:

photo: Kurt Merrill

The comb is carefully transferred to the nuc box. The bees can use the honey and the wax to help restart them in their new home.

photo: Kurt Merrill

Most of the bees have been transferred to the hive box. See them "bearding" on top of the frames? Also shown are the basic tools of a beekeeper. There's the smoker, which we use to lightly puff smoke over the bees to calm them and mask the smell of alarm pheromone in the air. There's a knife for cutting the comb away from the cardboard to salvage as much of it as possible. Also pictured is the soft brush, which is used to gently brush the bees into their home without harming them.

photo: Kurt Merrill

Most of the bees have been transferred safely to the new hive box. The nuc box full of honeycomb will be left nearby so that the bees can salvage it.

photo: Kurt Merrill

The brood comb from the swarm colony is pressed into the comb built on old frames and placed into the new hive box. This way the bees can save their brood. This comb had queen cells. Do you see the elongated, peanut shell shaped cells that hold developing queen pupa?

photos: Kurt Merrill

Transfer accomplished! The bees are bearding around their new hive, as workers are busy setting up their home inside and fetching honey and wax from the nuc box to their new hive in the Boojum Beeyard!

photo: Kurt Merrill

These bee accepted their new home and stayed with us, adding another colony here at the Boojum Institute!

Bee Knowledgeable: Honeybees in Winter

The weather has dramatically cooled here where the Boojum Institute is located in the mountains of Southern California. The summer season has officially passed into autumn and this last pattern of storms has brought quite the chill. For the last week, we have had nightly low temperatures from 34F to 38F (1-3C).

So what is happening in the bee yard with this weather and temperature change? We discussed some of the behaviors in honeybees as the seasons cycle around the year in our post Seasons of the Honeybee.

Photo of some beehives in winter:

 photo: Boris Romanov

Honeybees, like most insects, are exothermic or cold-blooded animals. This means that they cannot maintain a warm body temperature on their own. Exothermic animals must find heat fro their environment. For example, reptiles are exothermic as well, and they find warmth by resting on hot, sun-warmed rocks. Humans are endothermic, or warm-blooded. Our bodies naturally generate warmth from within.

Most insects hibernate, or go to sleep, when it gets cold. Honeybees do not. They are unique in the insect world for this. While an individual honeybee is exothermic, the collective colony is actually endothermic. When the temperature drops below 54-57F (12-14C), honeybees gather in a group forming a ball of bees called a cluster. The bees within the cluster all shiver their fight muscles. Honeybees are able to detach their flight muscles from their wings. This way, when they vibrate those muscles with their wings detached, their wings do not move. The muscles simply move against each other and this generates heat. When the entire colony of bees does this within the hive, they can generate enough heat and maintain the hive temperature at around 70F (21C).

Infrared photo of beehives showing heat distribution within the hive:

 photo: Boris Romanov

The bees will cluster over their stored food. As the bees eat the honey from one section of comb they will move to another, full section of honeycomb. The entire cluster will move from one section of honeycomb to another as they eat their winter stores. The honey and pollen they have stored for the winter gives them the energy they need to constantly shiver their wing muscles and keep their colony warm and healthy.

The cluster of bees can adapt as the weather changes. As the temperature gets colder, the cluster will contract. The bees will pack as tightly together as possible, contracting the cluster and generating the maximum possible warmth. When the temperature warms some, the cluster will expand and grow larger. It is the same number of bees, but they allow more space between individuals and do not generate as much heat. By expanding and contracting the cluster, honeybees are able to maintain an almost constant temperature within the hive.

There is one more element that allows bees to survive the winter without hibernating. Towards the end of summer, the new bees that hatch are actually “winter bees”. They are physiologically different than summer bees. Where summer bees are lighter and smaller for long flights and foraging for food, winter bees are born larger and fattier. The fattier bodies allow them to survive the cold with less food. Their blood is also different. The winter bee has a different blood protein profile than summer bees. This also helps them to survive the colder temperatures.

During the cold, winter months, honeybees will stop producing brood. The eggs and brood require higher temperatures to develop and hatch. So in most climates, the queen stops laying eggs and brood production stops while the temperature is too cold outside. Also, the healthier and larger colonies have a better chance of winter survival. The larger the cluster they can form (basketball size), the more warmth they can generate. The smaller colonies can only form smaller clusters (softball sized) and therefore generate less heat and have more bee deaths over the winter.

Here is a photo of bees clustering:

photo: Guia and Mark Hoffman

For a more in-depth look at what happens in honeybee colonies over the winter, check out this fascinating article at Beesource:
The Thermology of Wintering Honeybee Colonies