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.

Bee Knowledgeable Answers: Varroa Mites

The honeybee has a specialized enemy called Varroa destructor. This mite can only reproduce and grow in a honeybee colony. 

1) What is a varroa mite?

photo: Agricultural Research Service

These mites are tiny. An adult mite is 1-1.8 mm long and 1.5-2 mm wide, reddish brown in color, and has a flat, round shape.

The adult female mite goes into a honeybee brood cell and lays eggs on the bee larva. The mites develop as the young bee develops and attach themselves to the bee as she hatches from her cell.

This photo shows a Varroa mite on a bee larva:

photo: Pollinator

A Varroa mite on a honeybee pupa:

photo: Agricultural Research Service

2) How does it harm honeybees?

They live attached to the bee, sucking the bee's blood and leaving open sores. This weakens the bee and exposes the bee to diseases. It attaches itself to the body of a honeybee and, like a flea or tick, sucks the hemolymph (honeybee "blood")  from the bee. This weakens the honeybee and spreads disease, called varroatosis. The disease causes deformed wings and the bee is unable to fly.Varroa mites are one of the leading causes of death to a honeybee colony.

Magnified photo of a Varroa mite attached to an adult honeybee:

photo: Christopher Pooley

3) What can humans do to help?

There are many different ways that beekeepers have developed and use to help kill and control the infestation of Varroa destructor.

There are several different miticides that are used to fumigate the bees. These methods can range from strong chemical treatments to all natural solutions. The more natural, organic solutions include the use of essential oils, oxalic acid and formic acid. These do not harm the bees, but kill the mites that are attached to adult bees.

Other methods for eliminating mite problems are the use of screened bottom boards on box hives. When the bee cleans itself and knocks the mite from her body, the mite falls through the screen to the ground and cannot easily climb back up into the main body of the hive to reattach itself to a bee. Small cell foundation is another method of beekeepers. Using a smaller sized base cell foundation encourages the bees to build smaller cells for their brood comb. This gives the mite less room inside the cell with the developing bee and discorages mite reproduction.

Beekeepers also treat their bees with powdered sugar, poofing it onto their bees and into open brood cells. This encourages the bees to clean themseves vigorously, dislodging the mites. The powdered sugar also makes it hard for the mites to hold on and climb, causing them to fall to the bottom of the hive and not be able to climb back up.

Beekeepers and breeders are also breeding bees with more natiral mite resistance. Russian bees are naturally more mite resistant. Breeding these genetic traits into other strains of honeybees helps create new breeds that have a better defence against this old honeybee enemy.

Bee Knowledgeable Questions: Varroa Mites

Honeybees have a specialized parasite that preys on them and causes sickness and death. It is a mite called the Varroa destructor. Think about the following questions and see what answers you can find...

1) What is a Varroa mite?
 

2) How does it harm honeybees?
 

3) What can humans do to help?

The Boojum Beeyard: Winter's Rest

The cold winds blow and snow lies thick on the frozen ground. Most of the natural world takes this time to hibernate, conserve resources, and prepare for spring. Bees are no different. They are clustering and conserving their numbers as best they can so that they may survive the winter.

Soon it will be warm enough for the bees to leave the colony. Anytime the temperature rises above 50F (10C) they will make cleansing flights to expel their waste. When the temperature stays consistently warm enough, scout and forager bees will hunt for any available resources.

Check back soon, we will be checking on the Boojum Bees as winter gives way to spring!

Bee Knowledgeable: Honeybee History Facts!

The honeybee has been heralded throughout history. Here are some fun facts about the honeybee in history!

• Evolving from short-tongued, spheciform wasps, honey bees first appeared during the Cretaceous period about 130 million years ago. About 120 million years ago, the honey bee developed its morphologies specifically to collect pollen and nectar such as increased fuzziness, pollen baskets, longer tongues, and colonies to store supplies.

This bee was captured in tree sap 10-15 million years ago and is now entombed in this chunk of amber. The pollen on her back is from an orchid, and is the earliest example of orchid pollen found to date.

• The American Museum of Natural History in New York holds the oldest bee remains known to exist (over 80 million years).

• The earliest record of honey bees and people interacting is a rock painting found in Spain (about 6000 to 8000 years old).

• The honeybee was the symbol of Lower Egypt and papyri dated 256 BC tell of a beekeeper with 5000 hives. Honey was an ingredient in over 500 Egyptian medicines and beeswax and propolis were important products used in the embalming process.

Egyptian hieroglyphs featuring bees.

• The Greeks and Romans were keeping bees 3000 years ago. They called honey "nectar of the Gods”.

Coin from ancient Greece featuring a bee.

Bee Goddess

• Scrolls of the Orient, the Talmud, the Torah, the Koran, the Bible, and the Book of Mormon all mention the honeybee and the healing foods she creates and keeps in her hive.

• Honeybees did not exist in North or South America, Australia or New Zealand until Europeans settled there. By the mid 1600's, records show that the honeybee population was widespread on the East Coast and the bees spread to the West Coast before the settlers. Native American called the honeybee "White Man's Flies".

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!