Bees in the Poppies

Bees in the poppies, covered with ivory pollen, 8:30 am.
Do they use it medicinally? Treatment for nosema? Indulge on winter mornings, rain falling outside? Use when the hive weakens, those last weeks of dwindling, small cluster, the chill creeping in? Are there bee doctors, prescribing the right pollen for sickness or depression?

Some dark-red and wine-purple poppies buzz with three bees at a time, while the morning haze still hangs over the grass.

Honey and the end of summer

Thanks to these gals, we got over 5 gallons of honey -- most of it off the big purple hive.

The bees are put to bed for the autumn, with boards under the bottom screens and the extra entrances closed up. I've been feeding them, and pink hive has has been enthusiastic about taking syrup, while purple hive mostly ignores it. Both hives have a full box of honey up top, some honey in the brood boxes, and pollen with a little honey in the bottom box or two... these are big hives and we haven't been able to take much out. They've been bringing in pollen up through last week, though I doubt they're finding nectar so dry and so late in the year. They worked the oregano and hyssop and mint and SEDUM as long as they were in bloom.

  I still haven't treated for varroa mites, though Gunther Hauk says that formic acid (sold commercially as mite-away) is nontoxic. Maybe in the spring. The pink hive is Carniolian, the purple is the Russian-wild survivor mix from Olympic Apiaries; both seem fairly mite-tolerant.

Excitement in the Bee Yard - Requeening

We are requeening our hives using Steve R's no-kill method. On the right, the Big Purple hive and the new purple nucleus hive. The nuc. hive contains the new Russian queen from Olympic Apiaries, along with ready-to-hatch brood and a lot of young workers from the Purple hive, and honey. Later in the summer we'll combine the two hives, with the nuc. hive and young queen on top.

On the left, the combined Blue swarm hive and the Pink hive from which it originally came.We are recombining the two so that the young queen in Pink can be the queen of the whole colony. Right now there's a double-screen board between the two colonies, but in 2 weeks we'll remove it and spray with syrup and Honey-B-Healthy to make them all smell the same (yummy) and stimulate feeding, grooming, and good vibes.

This method allows you to requeen without killing the old queen, or even finding her. Putting the new queen on top and making sure she has lots of workers and a strong colony on her side seems to be the trick.

Our bees got through the winter pretty well and had a big population build up in March and April. When we took off the bottom board it was easy to see the mites that had dropped during winter, and I started noticing a lot of dead bees under the hive and bees unable to fly because their wings were mis-shaped or missing.  Decided that we should treat for mites, and still not wanting to use chemical treatments I decided to go for the powdered-sugar treatment. A few bees inevitably get crushed when we start moving boxes around, but the bees seemed okay with the sugar treatment -- their first reaction looked like "hey, what are you doing?" and the second one seems like "oh, it's sugar...sugar is goood!"  It took them just a few minutes to calm down after we put the hives back together -- they all were inside grooming each other and knocking off mites and putting away some of the good stuff. Though I'm not happy about the cornstarch in the sugar -- undoubtedly GMO corn as even I am not insane enough to use organic powdered sugar to dump by the cupful on my bees.