2019 Pollen and Nectar Dearth

July 20, 2019July 20, 2019 Lazer Creek ApiaryLeave a comment

The Sourwood trees (nectar source) and Devil’s Walking Stick (pollen and nectar source) are on the cusp of flowering, and last week bees were not interested in pollen substitute or sugar syrup, but now they are ravenous waiting for late summer blooms to start. We’ve noticed a recent decline in resources stored in hives and queens have slowed down laying brood, so they and we knew the dearth was coming.

We’ve had a lot of success with Bee Pro pollen the last two years. I have four pollen feeders out around the farm and each needs to be refilled at least once a day. Two feeders are covered, and I only use the uncovered trays in times of high demand as the bees don’t like it as much once it turns to mud during our afternoon thunderstorms! As you can see from the above picture, I need to refill feeders before foragers are out and about and estimate how much they’ll consume before the rains come. There’s no way I’m getting between them and what’s on the tray without a bee suit, and there would have to be a better reason than that to suit up in 100 degree heat! However, despite the recent weather forecasts, the rain hasn’t even moved the rain gauge even though thunder has sent us indoors the last few days, so little pollen substitute has gone to waste.

20190720 Syrup Tank — Water tank for sugar syrup storage.

We’ve moving away from open feeding syrup as we only want to feed our bees and not every nectar-sipping insect in a 5-mile radius. Hubby is setting up the tank for first time use: as it is set up in the picture, the pump will cycle syrup to keep the sugar and water well mixed , and it will also pump syrup through the red hose into a smaller tank that sits on the ATV or golf cart. The smaller tank has its own pump, so we’ll be able to easily refill internal feeders or feeder pails. That will be a big improvement over loading up gallon milk jugs and liter soda bottles with syrup in the kitchen and driving them around to hives we are already feeding. For one thing, it will keep me from spilling sugar all over the kitchen floor!

We’ve had some robbing problems when internal feeding late summer in the past, so we’ll have to keep hives strong enough to fend off invaders when using division board feeders. We have some entrance feeders to use with weaker hives, but we don’t want to block entrances completely in this heat. As with everything else, supplemental feeding is a balancing act and I’m glad that I’m home during much of summer to keep an eye on things. We merged a couple of weak, queenless NUCs into other hives this week rather than risk them dying while trying to defend a feeder.

Hubby has also been researching beneficial sunflowers as another July pollen and nectar source. We placed some hives on a neighbor’s sunflower field a couple of years ago, and the hives came back with no resources and sick bees. Apparently it’s good to know what kind of sunflowers you’re looking at. Bee Culture reports that sunflower pollen is beneficial for bee health, but other sources report that some sunflowers produce a sticky substance in which bees can become stuck which reduces the number of field bees. As the aforementioned hives had surprisingly few foragers, we’re guessing our neighbor plants sticky sunflowers! We’re going to plant some Lemon Queen sunflowers as articles consistently recommend them for bees. We may even try to plant some this year….. or maybe not as another thunderstorm just moved through without leaving a drop of rain.

As always, natural food sources are the best and supplemental feeding means we won’t pull any honey even if we think it was stored while nectar was still flowing.

All this thinking about feeding bees has made me hungry, so I guess it’s time to head into the kitchen and prepare something for us. We were both so tired after planting 30+ shrubs and trees yesterday that we didn’t eat a real supper, but more about that another day.

A Mule for Christmas (and other distractions from grading).

December 29, 2017 Lazer Creek ApiaryLeave a comment

During a job interview many years ago, I was asked whether I’d rather be an art critic or an artist. I’ve never figured out what that had to do with being a computer programmer, but I do finally know the answer — I want to be an artist — or at least be creative! I only spent 90 minutes grading this morning before the urge to empty the compost pot became the most important thing in my life, and that led to seeing a bee flying, which led to visiting the bee yard, which led to taking pictures, which led me back to the computer and this blog! To grade, one must be a critic, and I find it hard to “criticize” according the criteria on a rubric. Yes, I agree that it’s a fair way to grade, and, yes, students knew what the expectations were for their oral exam, but the happy feelings that blue skies and sunshine evoke makes it hard to give a student a failing grade! Never mind that my dominant learning style is hands-on activity, my second most dominant is visual, and my least dominant is listening — and here I sit with 17.5 hours of oral exams to listen to. I should not have procrastinated, and I probably shouldn’t be blogging, but just like every other year I’ll get through it somehow.

It’s only 48 degrees out this morning, but the bees are foraging and we want them to have as much stored as possible going into the predicted 20 degree nights next week, so it wasn’t just procrastination that led me down to the bee yard. Cold as it is, there were so many bees on the pollen feeder station that I couldn’t get to the trays and had to scatter the pollen-sugar mix where the bees can get to it but the dog can’t. (Maggie climbed a stack of shipping pallets to get to a pollen tray yesterday — you’d think we didn’t feed her sometimes!) I so enjoy standing there listening to the sound of happy bees, especially on a day as beautiful as today. We are just so lucky to have this little piece of heaven to call our own.

What does any of this have to do with a mule? Not much, but our Christmas present to each other this year was a Mighty Mule gate opener. Well, it was hubby’s Christmas to me, and my gift was to graciously concede that it is money well spent! Even on a good day, having to get out of the car and walk across the gravel to unlock the gate becomes tedious. If I’m wearing anything other than my trusty work boots, the likelihood of a twisted ankle increases with the height of the heel. Rain makes the process even less fun. Last week’s thunderstorm actually made it somewhat hilarious. If we do end up moving here before retirement, we need to somehow be able to get out of the gate in all weather still looking presentable enough to show up at work.

It took hubby a while to install the gate opener, partly because of the instructions, partly because of all the adjustments and settings, and partly because the dog and I were hibernating in the camper instead of helping for much of the time. By the end of the day on Christmas Day, he had everything working, but then spent most of the next day trying to get it to work right! The gate opens fine, and even closes after 30 seconds. The problem was that it randomly re-opened. That doesn’t offer much security and is likely to run the battery down. I searched the Internet for answers on our way to the family dinner and found that many people have problems with the wand that detects when a car pulls up to the gate to leave. Hubby spoke with tech support and tried many things, but the final solution was along the lines of Hotel California — guests who have the code can check in any time they like, but they can never leave! The wand is going back for a refund and hubby will research other solutions.

Well, it’s time to listen to at least a couple more exams — 7 down, 30 to go! It makes me want to curl up with the dog and just take a nap.

Hive equipment · Lazer Creek Apiary · Queen Bee · Supplemental Feeding

Pollen Substitute and Regicide

July 28, 2017July 28, 2017 Lazer Creek ApiaryLeave a comment

I guess I need to start by telling you that the pollen substitute did not cause the regicide — I was an accessory to that crime, but I have no idea of how hubby actually disposed of the evil queen once I helped catch her! We have another hive that has just become more and more unreasonable over time, and they now go straight for the upper thighs when we even approach them, never mind get started with a hive inspection. We had purchased a new queen — one that was purported to be from a calm strain and also a strain that is very good at dealing with Varroa Mites. After we removed the old queen, we waited 24 hours to re-queen, placed her in a queen introduction frame, sprayed the frame and the frames in the hive with Honey B Healthy to mask her pheromones — and they still killed her. Talk about frustrating. We’ve had other evil hives turn nice, so we haven’t given up on them yet, but I have had quite a few choice words for them over the past month.

The production of new brood has fallen off in all of our hives over the past month, and we really want to build them up before the fall flowers (Goldenrod and White Milkweed, mainly) start to bloom. We’ve noticed that all of the hives have a lot of nectar and honey stored, but very little pollen, so we decided to give the pollen substitute another try.

Now, when we put this stuff out in spring, the bees showed no interest whatsoever. This time, they are flocking to it like the dog to canned food! We already saw an increase in bee bread in the frames of hives we inspected yesterday. I placed the first batch in bird feeder that gave the bees plenty of access at the bottom, but provided shelter from rain. I only put a small amount in and the bees crawled through the holes, through the inch high pollen, and became trapped in the feeder. I understand why a little better now that we’ve watched them roll the powder around, roll around in the powder, and generally behave like little dung beetles rolling the powder up into little balls which they then take home with them. By the end of the first day, they had moved all the remaining powder to one end of the cookie sheet — and there was not much remaining.

Of course, my English hive has to be different and they are showing little interest in the powder that I laid out in a tray especially for them up in their private garden! I did experiment with some supplement with sugar water and giving them a protein shake — they loved that. Maybe they are just spoiled. Maybe they like soup. They were in the supplement dish this morning trying to get to the rain water-supplement mush.

When we were updating our hive inspection spreadsheet last night, we started a new page to track available resources by date. Hubby had noted last year that the pollen death starts around the same time that the pink and white Crepe Myrtles bloom in our garden. There was also a nectar dearth last year because of the drought, but this year the bees keep bringing in nectar, but not enough pollen. We now know to watch for this next year and maybe get the pollen substitute out sooner.

We continue to battle small hive beetles, but we’ve cut the brush back from around the hives again and we know that helps. I plan to put some landscape fabric down to minimize what can grow back, and we’ve also discussed relocating the hives over time. The area right behind the hives is so very uneven, with trenches that are above knee-height, that we can’t bush hog in there until we do some leveling and clear some of the timber-harvesting debris. We can’t continue to weed eat that much, but that’s what it takes to keep the blackberries and vines at bay. The hives that are coming back from the sunflower field we definitely be in the other cleared lane and we’ll put some DE and landscape fabric down under the hive stands before we even go get them. There is still so much to do and there is so little summer left — we really need to spend some time panning for gold down at the creek so that we can stay here forever!