The New Bees Are In
Yesterday I picked up three packages of bees from a guy in my bee club who schlepped a whole lot of packages up from an apiary in Georgia. I got three not two hives with queens because my one remaining live hive to examine the "live" hive for the queen who clearly hasn't been laying well and to "terminate" her. Yes , though I hated to think about it , I would have to kill her by squishing her.
My son Josh helped me hive the bees. The first two went smoothly and when we took down the third hive we didn't find any sign of a queen's activity: no eggs, no brood, nada. So I prononounced her dead, de facto, and installed the new queen, thus saving me the moral conflict of deliberately killing a beautiful creature. I put the old bees on top and the new bees with the new queen on the bottom separtated by a sheet of newspaper. This is so that they will slowly comingle odors and slowly eat away the barrier and mix. You don't want a sudden confrontation when addind new bees to an existing colony.
Anyhow, they all seem to be settling in nicely. They have old honey from last year's bees to sustain them while they lay in new stores and they have drawn comb to deposit their various things in (pollen, honey, brood, etc.) saving them the labor of making new wax. They are all set to start storing honey. So I am hopeful I will have some sort of crop this year. I'll keep you posted.

Showing the bees to a play group

From the Rooftop

From the Rooftop

New bees coming this weekend! Can't wait. Will keep you posted

Sunday, March 26, 2006

Tracheal Mites

By asking around, the consensus is that my absconding bees had tracheal mites, a tiny parasite that lodges in the bee's trachea and is only detectable by dissection and observation under a microscope. Furthermore they at their worst in Winter when the bees are inside the hive and inspection is not common. So it's a real difficult nuisance to diagnose. The good part is that they are treatable with various natural medications like menthol and grease patties which don't harm the honey.I liked the idea of selling honey from "totally unmedicated bees" but that is no longer realistic. Luckily I can avoid some of the nastier chemicals because I don't have varroa mites or foulbrood which requires antiobiotics.
posted by John at 1:00 PM 0 comments
Monday, March 20, 2006

DISASTER!

I lost two of my three hives this Winter. I had pneumonia in February and wasn't able to feed them supplemental sugar syrup at a crucial time when their winter stores are running out.So when I went up on the roof and saw only one hive flying I assumed that's what happened. A hive of dead bees. But this week when I finally fed the surviving hive, I opened the "dead" hive and found NO BEES! Not dead not alive. They had pulled a Houdini and just vanished. They left no sign of their departure unlike the Roanoke Virginia colony's mysterious scrawl of "Croatan" on a tree. And, no, bees don't go to an elephant's graveyard to die, like in the myth. Nor did anybody in the neighborhood report a swarm hanging in their tree last Fall when they might have absconded, so who knows.........??At any rate THE GOOD NEWS:I have one strong hive and I have ordered two new packages for the empty hives so we'll just start up again and see. I doubt a bumper crop like last summer but time will tyell
posted by John at 11:23 AM 0 comments

How I Got into BeeKeeping

I was sitting at an outdoor table at the Hungarian pastry shop across from the Cathedral of St. John the Divine on Manhattan's Upper West Side one September about five years ago when a bee landed on my table. I knew it was a honey bee because I had grown up in the country and had been a nature counselor at a summer camp in the Catskills where I had taken the kids to an apiary I had always been fascinated by bees (at a distance) and had even imagined raising them some day in the future when I had grown old and moved to the country. But this little bee really got my attention. A honeybee in NYC?? Where did it come from? It must be possible for bees to live in the City. And then.........why not? Why not investigate? So when I got home I got on ther Internet and started googling. Boy, did I find out a lot. And I just took off. I ordered eqipment, joined a local bee club and got my first three packages ( a smallish box of wood and wire containing three pounds of bees (12,00-14,000 critters) each and a queen. I successfully hived them and have never looked back. I extracted honey that first summer and have increased my yield each year.
posted by John at 5:07 PM 0 comments