It's package bee season once more at Ebert Honey Co., so I've copied a note from Phil. Call him at 641-527-2639 to make a package order (he returns all messages, so don't worry if the machine picks up). Remember that we DO NOT ship package bees; they must be picked up in Lynnville within 48 hours after their arrival.

Phil's note:
Here are the 2012 package prices. We seem to be on a never ending price
spiral. The prices of bees, transportation and cages have all gone up.
The only thing I can suggest is that you get together with friends and
make a group order. Here's hoping for a successful year for everyone.

Package Bee Information at EbertHoney.com

Prices for 1-9 packages (For price breaks on larger quantities, click the link above)

2-pound $72

3-pound $84

4-pound(1 Q) $103

4-pound(2 Q) $119

YOU MAY MIX AND MATCH FOR QUANTITY DISCOUNTS. YOU HAVE YOUR CHOICE OF
ITALIAN OR CARNIOLAN QUEENS.

THERE IS A $6 DEPOSIT ON EACH CAGE IN ADDITION TO THE CHARGE FOR THE
BEES.

APPROXIMATE PICKUP DATES ARE APRIL 6 AND APRIL 13. REMEMBER THAT THESE
DATES MAY CHANGE.

IF YOU ARE RETURNING CAGES, THEY MUST BE UNDAMAGED, AND I WANT THEM BACK
WITHOUT THE SYRUP CAN AND WITHOUT THE LITTLE QUEEN CAGE.

EBERT HONEY LLC
LYNNVILLE, IA 50153
641-527-2639 OR ehoney37@netins.net
www.eberthoney.com

Thanks to everyone across the US who ordered queens this year! I hope they keep your hives happy through the winter and provide lots of workers in 2012. I will bring in some Carniolans and Italians for splitting season next spring, and my Iowa-raised queens will be available in late May/early June as usual. I'll try to get an online ordering system put together to make the process simpler for everyone next year.

Mentioning splitting season reminds me of an episode from earlier this year. I had just brought in about 20 new hives and had nowhere to put them at the moment, so I dropped them in the driveway for a couple of weeks. I split them right there and hauled them to other locations for the honey season. Here are those hives with excluders and 3rd story splits ready to head for their new homes and new queens.

We are well along with the 2011 honey harvest, and treatments for varroa mites are underway. The honey yield is nothing amazing, but not real disappointing either. Honey prospects looked great at the end of May. June, however, proved to be cooler and wetter than honeybees tend to like when it comes to gathering honey in Iowa. July had a few banner weeks, but August has not seen much activity. Now it's time to strip the boxes and deal with the parasite load in order to get our bees through winter. I'll discuss our experience with a couple of the new medications in a future post. For present, Apiguard continues to work, and HopGuard looks promising. We've already witnessed the failure of Apistan and CheckMite as mites developed resistance, so it's good to see Apiguard continuing to be effective.

Luckily, we produced a record number of cut comb sections despite a rather 'fair' harvest that will average under 100 lbs./hive.

Here is an image from just before we pulled out of one of our southern yards with the honey boxes on-board:

The other day Alex and I went up to pickup some bee equipment in northern Iowa. One of the items we loaded up was an old 50-frame Woodman extractor. They were produced in Michigan, and they were built ultra-solidly. Between three guys, we decided it would be much better to tilt the trailer to slide it on rather than attempt to lift it. The plus side of the heavy construction is that it doesn't flex the way modern extractors often will.

While I do like the direct drive boxes that motorize new extractors, I love the simple mechanics that make this one work. It basically comes down to a drive wheel that turns against a friction plate that spins the reel. I don't think it matters too much that Woodman was absorbed long ago because there are still businesses out there that can provide these basic components. Here is the drive system:

To regulate the speed, you just adjust the lever to determine where the drive wheel hits the friction plate. Simple simple.

I did put it up for sale for now, but if there are no takers I think I'll try to use it in the future. We always go to Old Threshers in Mount Pleasant to sell our products, and this extractor has a similar feel to some of the things we see restored there, but fixing this up shouldn't be too hard--and the reel can spin extremely fast

The San Diego adventure concluded last night, and I recalled that one of our first site-seeing stops was also a honeybee moment. It happened on the retired aircraft carrier Midway. It is a floating museum that opened in 2004 and seems to get a huge amount of traffic.

Up on the flight deck, I sat down on a bench and discovered a rather small stowaway:

The wind blew strongly across the deck, and she crawled next to my shoe to take advantage of the windbreak. Then she crawled onto my shoe:

I took her ashore thinking that she might be able to recover enough to fly home if I got her out of the sea breeze. It's funny how often honeybees pop up when your eye is programmed to spot them in any situation

Alex and I are out in San Diego for a few days because he is competing in the State Games of America in track and field. We went to the Olympic training facility outside of town and toured the area for a couple of hours. Here is the visitor center--alas that the souvenir shop was closed!

It turns out that everything blooming at the training site seems to attract honeybees. Everything from tree to ground cover seemed to be humming with our friendly insects. Here are a couple of the more colorful pictures I took today:

We'll be back soon, and I'll resume shipping queens on Monday!

I use the three-deep method of building queen cells. The basis of the system is a queen-right colony that has two deep boxes at the bottom, and then an excluder and a third deep on top. This works well for building because the hive is constantly under the influence of swarm impulse, but it also means that beekeeper has to find the cells that they build IN ADDITION to the cells that were grafted. Normally I find them without any problem by going through the builder every week to remove the cells.

And yes, you have to check every frame, including those honey frames on the outside of the box.

A few weeks ago they built a cell on the side of a frame. It nestled into a depression in the comb. With all the bees, I never saw it. Then I came back and found a massacred rack of cells:

Then I discovered the chewed-out flap of the emerged queen cell, and the killer virgin that caused all the destruction. She came out of her secret cell and proceeded to dispatch all the cells on the rack.

In this case, I had more cells in development but it's always sad to lose any queens this way. Lessons in vigilance and careful timing never seem to stop in the beekeeper's world.

I decided that I had better get some more Carniolan queens on hand for people that need immediate shipment. It's great to be sold out of the Iowa queens in advance, but a lot of people need quicker delivery. Therefore, I have shipped in a supply of quality Carniolans that will be available for $24 each during the month of July/early August. We've used these queens for years in spring splits before the Iowa weather allows us to produce our queens, so we can vouch for them due to extensive experience with them.

I'm still taking orders for the 2nd half of August on the Iowa Queens.

Thanks again for all the calls--it's fun to hear from people all over the nation looking for a good Carni!

And because every blog needs a picture , here's a picture of me with the winning bidder (Minoa Uffelman) holding 5 lbs of Pure Iowa Honey at the Agricultural History Society's annual conference in Springfield, Illinois this past June. Income from the auction supports graduate students traveling to the conference.

I have a lot of coneflowers at my place, and it has been fun to watch the bees working them intensely. I never noticed many honeybees on them in the past, but they seem to like them in the Cedar Rapids area. Then again, I've never had this type of flower in my yard, so I have many more opportunities to catch them at work.

The good news is that the weather has cooperated with the bees lately. After a cool and wet June, July has been warmer and sunnier. (Today there is rain on the radar.) While there is not yet a respectable crop in the boxes, the honey season is showing some promise. We've been cutting up cut comb for over a week, and there are dozens more boxes that should be finished in the next couple of weeks. Let's hope the honey keeps coming!

On the queen front, I am now booked until July 25 for new shipments. That is, new shipments can go on July 25th. I continue to be booked a week or two in advance. Mondays in August are still open.

Here is an image of the fresh cut comb--it is my favorite bee product, even though I actually eat more of the liquid honey. It's often a challenge to produce high quality sections, so it's pretty wonderful when bees and beekeeper are able to work together and make it happen

Thanks for all the calls on queens so far this year--it seems to increase every summer. I'm working on getting more mating nucs in a new yard to help keep up with demand. Right now the earliest date I can ship new orders is June 27 (Monday). It's a good idea to order several days in advance if possible.

I also wanted to post a couple of pictures that Alex took of a Carniolan queen laying eggs in a new comb. A lot of the queens are really extended this time of year because they are laying so many eggs, but this one seems a little longer than usual.

Hi everyone,

The queen yard is back in action. Queens will be available throughout the summer--I wrap up queen production at the end of August. The breeding pool is predominantly Carniolan.

The queens are $18 each (plus shipping/handling), and they are all marked. I ship throughout the continental USA. Monday is the usual shipping day, but sometimes I send a few out on Tuesday or Wednesday--especially if it's an express delivery.

I have relocated to the Cedar Rapids area, and people are welcome to call ahead in order to arrange pickup if that is desired.

So far, the weather has cooperated well enough for afternoon mating flights, so fertilization has not been a problem this year.

Good luck as the honey flows get underway!

The long-awaited warmup seems to be here. We're looking at 30s-50s for the next several days, so the bees should have multiple chances to fly in the next week. Dad and Alex are going around checking survival rates. Some yards are almost all alive, and several yards are pretty depressing. In another few days we should be able to calculate our survival rates and make more precise plans. It looks like we'll be keeping some packages this year.

The big melt hasn't come yet, but it's probably going to be messy when it arrives. Some of the snow piles are ten feet high along the roads. It always amazes me how our gravel roads can transform into several inches of sloshy mud.

Right now we have to pull or walk in the yards with syrup buckets, but soon we'll be able to drive in and pump syrup directly into the division board feeders. Hopefully the bees won't be too hungry this spring, but the pump makes life easier when there are lots of hungry hives.

Here is the portable syrup system on the back of the flatbed:

This is the tank and pump in a smaller F-150. Since it sits on a small pallet, it is easy to load with a forklift.

The next few weeks are an important time to investigate whether or not your survivors need feed. The syrup truck makes one or two visits to our place every year. This is from last April:

We know that winter is winding down when the package requests start coming in every day. This week is supposed to be in the 20s and 30s, so there will probably be a a fair number of people checking what is alive here in Iowa.

We've recently posted the package prices for this spring.

2011 Package Bee Pricelist

These are the package prices for quantities of 1-9.

2-pounds with queen $68
3-pounds with queen $80
4-pounds with 1 queen $99
4-pounds with 2 queens $115

For the full chart of prices and quantities and ordering details, please refer to:
http://www.eberthoney.com/PackageBees.html#Packagebees

Remember that we do not ship bees--they have to be picked up when they arrive in April in Lynnville (Iowa) or Hamilton (Illinois). See our location at: http://www.eberthoney.com/Location.html#Location

Good luck as everyone checks their winter survival!!

A friend sent me this today It's rather perfect.

Today I have a nice image of how Alex is feeding the hungry hives. The boxes are offset in order to easily slip the nozzle into the lower feeder before filling the one in the top box.

It looks like we'll have another shipment of syrup coming in during the next week, so let us know if you're interested in coming by to pick up winter feed. We sell it by the bucket or barrel.

Ether rolls have shown a big jump in mite counts as the later brood emerges. Instead of 5-10 in the jar as we had in past weeks, he's encountering 15-20 more regularly. One had over 70. Several yards are getting another Apiguard treatment. Hopefully we can do some good in those locations before the temperature drops too much to intervene.

All of our bees got their Apiguard treatment before the beginning of October, so hopefully we'll have some strong colonies going into winter. A stretch of rainy weather in the second half of September slowed down Alex's efforts to get them all treated. Happily, there are signs that many of the hives will have another cycle of young bees to help them get through the winter.

Here is an excellent frame of October brood--something we can't always count on in an Iowa autumn:

Now that mites are taken care of to the best of our ability, the next step is to push the feed into the colonies that need some more weight in order to survive. It is going to take quite a bit of syrup to see some of them through the cold months. A number of the hives further from home have division board feeders in top and bottom. Check out the populations that some of them are carrying into winter:

We normally winter in two deeps, but there were a couple of medium boxes that still had brood in them, so they'll probably stay out through winter. But again---lots of bees!!!

It's been a while since the last update. I'm back at Mount Mercy University for the new academic year, so my involvement with the bees is pretty limited at the moment.

The honey harvest is almost over for us. There are three yards left with honey still on the hives and awaiting mite treatments. The average is going to be in the 80-90 lb range. We didn't get around for the second round of splitting in time to stop a few yards from building cells. As a result, we just split the swarming doubles into singles and let them develop their own queens from the cells. The positive side to that process is free queening. The negative side is that a single with a cell is one month behind a single with a mated queen. This year, singles with a cell did not develop in time to gather a good crop. I calculate that the result was at least 5000 pounds of lost honey. If you sell 5K lbs on the barrel market, you come up with $7-9K. If you market through profitable farmer markets and specialty shops, it might be more like $25K.

As for the three yards left to pull, later September is a point in time where the odds of irrecoverable damage from mites may develop. I've embedded a link that narrates the mite lifecycle that is the source of so much damage.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7304562435786960616#

My favorite part of our business is taking care of bees. They're just interesting--it's so much fun that we forgive them for inflicting a little pain from time to time Most of our revenue, however, comes from honey sales.

Our dad started out with a hobby business that mostly sold out of the family home outside of Fairfield (IA). After a move to Lynnville and a daily commute to Des Moines, he gradually picked up a number of grocery stores where we still market "Pure Iowa Honey". He still does most of the distribution by running our delivery routes on alternate weeks. Alex and I handle some of the deliveries from time to time.

Here is the storefront of our latest grocery store: Coralville Hy-Vee in Lantern Park Plaza.

It's a satisfying feeling to see your honey on the shelf, and grocery stores are often willing to let in a local producer to fill a niche on the shelf. The thing to remember is that managers hate to see shelf space go empty. If it happens too much, be prepared to see a new product that has replaced yours when you do get around to checking.

One other thing about marketing honey in little bottles with tidy labels on a grocery store shelf has always been a bit strange to me: The transition of honey going from a box carried on a hot summer day into a bottle sitting on a shelf in the middle of winter.

We are making some progress on mite control for this fall. We stripped the boxes off two more yards yesterday, gave them Apiguard, and went to two other yards to give their second treatment of Apiguard. One of the good things about treating in August is that warmer temperatures make the bees more active and the Apiguard disappears quickly. In one location near Montezuma, it only took five days for many of the bees to devour the applicator card. September temperatures can turn much cooler and Apiguard crystals might stay in the hive for ten days or more.

Apiguard is our main mite treatment, but Dad and Alex used some drone frames to capture some of the mites in a few yards back in the springtime.

The open space with no foundation invariably gets filled with drone comb, and the queen generally cooperates by laying it full of the burly boys. Since drones develop for a few more days inside the cell than workers, varroa mites have evolved to prefer drone brood over worker brood. The idea behind the drone frame is that once the drone cells are capped, a good portion of the mites have found their way into those cells. The success of the operation depends on pulling out the drone frame before they emerge on the drones' 24th day. Failing to pull the frame, however, results in actually boosting the varroa population rather than reducing it. This method is best suited for spring when the bees are typically building comb and inclined to raise large numbers of drones.

The rain falls again. We've had torrential rains overnight all week, and today it is falling during the day. 90+ degrees and high humidity have spawned thunderstorm after thunderstorm. I was en route to pull honey with Alex when the skies opened again. Dad started going around with sticky boards a few days ago to assess our varroa load, and it looks like we need to get rolling with stripping the hives and inserting the treatments. I used to aim for Sept. 1 for that job, but our bees seem much healthier in springtime if we begin treatments in late August.

Here is a picture of the sticky board coated with vegetable oil about to go under the hive. When the mites fall off the bees they are trapped and we can estimate the overall mite load. (There needs to be a protective screen on the sticky board or the bees will just clean it off, hiding the actual mite count.)

The pallets we've constructed in the past couple of years have screen-bottoms, so we just slide the sticky board onto a couple of slats positioned under the screen. Then the mites fall through and the bees can't clean off the board.

For our other styles of bottom, we just paperclip a screen on top of the sticky board. Sometimes the bees still manage to clean them off when the screen is too tight against the board.

These days, varroa management is the main issue in keeping bees alive from year to year, so we try to stay on top of the parasite load.

Well, we've made it into early August. The colony average will be respectable, but it will take a few weeks of extracting to find out the exact pounds per hive for 2010. We pulled the honey off of several yards twice--or even three times. We know those yards will turn out to have a strong average.

Here is a colony from the edge of New Sharon that got quite full:

It is satisfying to know that some really full supers await the final pull, but also disappointing that there was not an additional box to keep the hive from filling all the way up. Several hives in this particular yard had nowhere to put fresh nectar. I put out an additional box in hopes of an August flow (it happens every few years in our area, and we usually get at least a few pounds of honey from the fall flowers.). Then again, sometimes the August boxes come off as empty as when we put them on. Three inches of rain in the past week shut down the main nectar flow, but we have temperatures in the upper eighties and nineties that might give us a chance for a a higher yield in the next couple of weeks.

Anyway, we can't complain about the overall crop. Given the fact that we got 1-2 inches every few days during the month of July, I wouldn't have been surprised by a 65 lb average. Hotter summers than 2008 or 2009 helped our bees overcome the excess rain this year.

Here is the same box as above, but from bee-level We'll take these boxes in another week and start giving the hives mite treatments. The joys of late summer and fall!!!

I've noticed that a number of people coming to the blog site are looking on information about how to super for honey. That's a topic that supports numerous philosophies, and they're related to the flow patterns in your particular area. For us, we want supers on by the end of May and beginning of June. We usually put out space for 80-120 lbs on the first round of supering. Then adding additional supers becomes a matter of individual hive performance. Here are some images that show what we often see as we go around:

In this super, the bees are just coming up into the box to store. The combs on the left are getting "whited" with fresh comb as they poke the first droplets of honey into the combs. If the box below this super is in the same condition, we would just leave them to get filled and be satisfied with signs of activity.

In the image below, the bees are getting more serious about storing, but putting most of the honey on the left side of the super--they're just deciding to work the right side too. Occasionally they like to fill one side of three supers rather than fill entire boxes. They will eventually work their way across the box if you stop adding supers until they cooperate Moving one of the storing combs to the empty side of the hive will also encourage them to work more of the box.

Below is a strong hive that is whiting the entire box at the same time. This type of hive can fill the boxes quickly and are the best candidates for drawing foundation when their honey boxes are getting more full.

Drawing foundation is always a bit risky in a honey flow--sometimes a hive will reject the wax-making process and swarm instead. Then you lose honey and bees. But, when you have a strong hive that is running low on space in a good honey flow, they will normally come around to drawing wax. The hive below is the type of hive that I would choose--lots of whiting on the combs, not much space in the honey supers, and not showing the brown/yellow staining suggesting they have been full for a week or two. Hives that have been full for some time are more likely to swarm if you try to force them onto foundation. Hopefully the hive below will just continue with their wax secretions on foundation instead of the older combs!

[That said, my absolute favorite way of drawing deep foundation is only possible in years with above average honey flows. I like to harvest the first honey supers from strong hives, and then place the deep foundation directly over the two-deep brood nest with no excluder. The queen doesn't like laying in the new wax when there are two boxes of dark combs below, so you very rarely get brood in the new-drawn combs and can simply take it as a honey super.--There will be more brood in the new cells if the honey flow drops off.]

The super below is not quite totally full--there is a little space in the middle that could be drawn out further. But noting the abundance of honey and also the burr comb between the top bars shows that the bees would have readily started another super if it had been there. We probably lost some honey to the brood box as the bees ran low on space. In the middle of such a strong flow, I would prefer to give this hive two more boxes, which would give us 10-20 days before needing to come back. One box can fill in 4-7 days on a strong hive in a strong flow.

The key for us is to stay AHEAD of the bees. If we waited until 700 hives have their boxes full, it would take days to get around with more boxes--and maybe a couple of weeks if we have to extract boxes first before having more empties to go out. In the meanwhile, we would lose thousands of pounds of honey for lack of storing space. For example. Let's say there is a great day when the hives all gain 2 lbs of honey, but the supers are all full. That means we lose 1400 pounds (2+ barrels) to the brood nest, the queen will have less space to lay her eggs (resulting in less populous hives three weeks out), and swarming impulse is raised. We want the hives working multiple boxes at the same time and to never get completely full. I'm becoming optimistic that we will cross the 100 lb average this year but some of the 2010 splits have some catching up to do.

We have a neighbor just west of our place who has allowed us to keep bees in his pasture/timber lot for the past twenty years. These days we do not use the area for honey production--now it is a queen yard.

Here are some of the 5-frame nucs I've set up to raise the 2010 queens for sale:

I think I started the queen project back in 2004--experimenting with a few dozen cells to figure out grafting, cell-building, development of the queens, and the art of picking queens off the frames to mark them on the thorax with my handy paint markers. After more than twenty years around bees, I had never picked up a queen until I started producing them. I usually take them by the wings--sometimes by the thorax. The next step was getting used to catching workers to place as attendants into the queen cages!

I use the full-sized frame equipment for a few reasons. The queen nucs pull a lot of deep foundation for us, people are welcome to purchase nucs through the summer, I can use a queen nuc to requeen our own hives, and I get a number of new hives to overwinter when I collapse everything together in late August/September. But it is true that I generally cut them back to 1-2 frames of bees between queen cycles though--hunting for queens in lots of bees takes minutes rather than seconds. I've already given the postal employee some free honey for staying late waiting for me to show up with the queen shipments!

Altogether it has been very educational and usually a lot of fun. (Two-week runs of bad weather that annihilate all hope of successful matings are what takes the fun out of it.)

Next year I need to greatly increase production to provide you with the queens in demand--but thanks for the orders to date and I'll continue to produce as many as capacity permits in the next couple of months!

Back in late May we put out our 6 5/8 honey boxes and started to await the first honey flow. We often get some kind of surplus going into the overwintered hives somewhere between mid-May and the beginning of June.

Here's an image of a yard setup for supering: Most of the hives are getting two honey supers, and a few of the splits are ready for a box of deep foundation along with a 2-gallon bucket of syrup.

This year the early flow was exceptional--probably the best I've ever seen. Some of our strongest hives put away 80-120 pounds of honey before the wettest June in Iowa history got underway. Now we've had about a week of sunshine that has given us hope for a crop off of the 2010 splits as well.

The good news is that we have already extracted some honey and put the first boxes back out to be filled a second time. Our last bumper crops were 2005 and 2006--It would be wonderful to break the 100lb/colony mark again. Unfortunately there is another 1-3 inches of rain in the forecast for the next couple of days which might kill the flow again. Hopefully we can dodge the heavy precipitation and stay on track for an impressive July.

This is just rude....and wrong. Spring seems to be here early this year. This is good. Varro Mites, bad. While making splits in the spring we keep an eye out for signs of Varroa Mites. Usually this means checking any drone brood that breaks between the upper and lower hivebody. If we see mites just riding on top of a bee or two it is a cause for concern and investigation. Varroa Mites prefer to stay hidden, so if they are visible while looking at a frame of brood, this can indicate a higher level of mite load than we want to start with in spring.

This however was a first. I have seen mites hitching a ride on the back of workers before, but never on the Queen. This mite was promptly removed, and the hive was given a mite treatment.

This is a sight nobody wants to see. Early spring or fall, the Varroa Mites should just leave the Queen alone.

On a brighter note, this is a picture of the first 12 splits of the year. This is how we make up for our winter losses. Each split is made up of three frames of brood that were set over a Queen excluder on top of the parent colony. The bees are originally shaken from the brood frame into the parent colony. The worker(nurse) bees crawl through the excluder and cover the brood. Usually the next day enough bees have crawled into the split to take it away to another yard and give them a new Queen.

It's nice to be finding good brood frames in mid April. Even if you only get a couple of weeks of an early start, that is still 2/3 of a brood cycle to build that population up for the summer. A summer we hope all those bees will have a lot of nectar to gather.

When spring arrives it's time to start splitting the strong hives to make up for the winter death loss.

What do people do when the weather forecast is for a severe snow storm? Run to the grocery store and buy a month's worth of food.

What do honeybees do when the last day in March reaches 79 degrees? They try to haul home a month's worth of pollen of course!
(video)

Even the upper entrance is busy beyond capacity.
(video)

This honeybee is storing the pollen away for later use. There will be a lot of mouths to feed. The Queen is laying eggs everyday.

Hello hello--an update from overseas!!! I'm presently over in Scotland doing some research in Edinburgh and preparing for a conference in Glasgow. A visit to Scotland has been on my radar for the past couple of years, so I'm extra glad to be over here at last. My previous plans always got axed because the visit kept getting cut down to the point that I would just continue doing work in England or Ireland rather than shooting up to Scotland. At last! Here are some pictures from Edinburgh. I leave for Glasgow tomorrow morning/afternoon.

Here is the National Library of Scotland where I've spent a lot of hours during the past week

I'm pleased to find that the library is actually in the middle of the sights and restaurants rather than tucked off in some corner of town--it makes it much easier to escape for a couple of hours of tourism without losing an entire day or something like that. So here is the view from Edinburgh castle hill:

And here is the National Portrait Gallery--I walk past it every morning on the way to the library. I would not have guessed that they would have a very respectable collection of Dutch and Italian Renaissance paintings!

Mostly I've been working with treatises written in the 1600s and 1700s here in the Moir Collection--but there were a few items published in the 1800s that were pretty great too. Hopefully it all works out well in the book!

Along with brood production, spring pollen gathering is another good sign of happy bees.

Looking around it is not evident where some of this early pollen comes from, but on nice flying days they start bringing it home. The brood need their protein to grow big and strong.

First things first. Are the bees alive and healthy? Hopefully they are because then they can proceed to produce the first frames of brood to start boosting the bee population. Getting new bees is important as the overwintered bees get older by the week. This also lets us know the queen is not only present, but doing what she does best, laying eggs.

New brood is a good sign for the survival of overwintered beehives.

It is nice to start seeing good patches of brood here in March. The weather has so much to do with how the bees come out of the winter months. And Iowa weather can be crazy in March. Well, actually about any month. Look at Jorge's post on about the 14th.
Overwintered Bees 2010.
In the course of about a week our snow has vanished and this week we have had days in the mid-50s for temps. There have been years when the first week of April was still in the low 30s.

And with the brood of course comes the emerging young bees ready to carry out the seasons honey and pollination activities.

New bees will also help the hives survive should we get any more un-bee-friendly weather. There will be some tree pollen that comes about shortly, but it will be some time yet before the dandelions and nectar become readily available.

The bees look good this March. The overall death loss will be +20%, but there are a number of good-looking clusters that ought to split very well. Some of the larger hives have a couple of frames of brood underway already, and the temperatures suggest that the brooding will get going pretty quickly this year.

Here is one of the overwintered hives from near Prairie City:

We didn't really get out to the hives until the beginning of March. The temperatures never really broke out of the high twenties in February, and we usually depend on a warm snap in Feb. to get the hungry ones fed when it is warm enough for them to put down the feed out of a division board feeder (we have a DB feeder in every hive). We probably could have saved several large clusters by going around earlier--the larger population hives can take the syrup decently even in the upper twenties. It always feels horrible to have a fine hive that dies because you didn't give it enough food.

When visiting the Prairie City yard, I did get to indulge in one of my favorite early-year adventures--digging bees out of the snow Several of the hives in the middle of the line are totally drifted over and out of sight.

And below we have some pictures after I have had a good time digging out the bees. Notice how the heat of the hives has melted away several inches of snow around the colonies--I basically just took off the snowcap to inspect them

Luckily, the bees don't suffocate under the snow, and a number of people believe that the snow cover helps maintain a steady temperature that ultimately benefits the bees. Still, I have to think that those bees were ready for a cleansing flight after being shut inside for three straight months!!

Hopefully your bees are looking strong too, but if you are looking to order 2010 package bees from us at Ebert Honey, I'll offer a heads-up that truck space is running out pretty quickly. Good luck with spring beekeeping!!

So it has been a number of months since the last update in what has been going on in the bee world of Ebert Honey LLC. This is mostly due to the fact that I started to teach European history at Mount Mercy College in Cedar Rapids, so I have spent a ton of time developing classes since the middle of August, and the blog has been neglected since then. The good news is that our bees looked really good going into the winter--Alex fed them up for the winter months and we are hoping that good survival will give us more spring bees than we have ever had before. There have been some serious cold spells this winter, so we're also hoping that not too many got caught against the lid of the hives when it was too cold to move over to more food on the adjacent frames.

As usual, I am missing the bees the further we get into winter, so it will be a happy day when spring returns and the bees are active once more! Tree pollen and dandelion honey are always a welcome sight as the year gets rolling again.

In the meanwhile, Dad (Phil) is taking orders for 2010 packages as usual. Prices aren't set yet, pending news from California, but the truck seems to fill up earlier every year. Hopefully your bees will survive in good health, but let us know if you are looking for bees to pick up in April in Lynnville! (contact info at www.eberthoney.com)

The weather says it will be 43 degrees in a couple of days--but it also says there is a 90 percent chance of precipitation, so maybe the bees won't have the chance for a flight day. Fingers crossed for a warm weather break!!!!

(My life at Mount Mercy College)

I have good news for everyone that has visited the Ebert honeyhouse: Comet, the mighty beekeeper dog, continues to thrive.

Actually, Comet tends to stay out of the way whenever bees are concerned, but he never misses the chance to run ahead of the truck when we drive to the queen yard. Then he commences to play in the creek and grass until he hears us open the door of the truck.

Luckily, there is other good news that is more related to the bees. It finally stopped being miserably cool and wet. Yes, it seems that everyone except the beekeepers were happy about seventy degree weather in July. No, it was not good for us. It was starting to look like the short honey flow at the end of June and beginning of July would represent the bulk of our crop. It would have been even worse than last year. Now we're back into the eighties and sunshine, and the bees are very busy. It's anyone's guess how long an August flow will run in our area, but there should be several more good days for most of the yards. Fingers crossed! (Toes too...)

There is not a lot of Dutch clover still in bloom compared to June and early July, but the wetness has kept some decent patches going in scattered locations.

As we begin to harvest this week, hopefully the boxes keep getting filled. Today will be the third day of honey pulling.

The other day Alex got a really good picture of what happens with laying workers:

The image shows the craziness of what goes on when a colony goes queenless for too long. Some of the workers start dropping unfertilized eggs, but they often plant several eggs in each cell. I've seen over a dozen eggs in some cells, but there are usually fewer than that. Of course the bees will abort multiple larvae in single cells--there just isn't enough space. Still, it's interesting to see three or four larvae for the short time that they are all curled into the based of a cell.

It is important, however, not to assume that anytime you see multiple eggs in a cell that it is laying workers. Young queens sometimes deposit more than one egg in a cell, and in the springtime the queen sometimes does the same thing on the fringe of the broodnest--just trying to get out more eggs than the bees can take care of at the moment. Laying workers almost never appear until all of the missing queen's worker brood has emerged.

I should really take a picture of the lumpy frames that develop when drone larvae pupate in worker cells that are too small for them. It's a mess, but not permanent--those cells will be fine for workers once there is a fertile queen.

There are two safe ways of requeening laying workers that I use. If there are a lot of bees, you can give them a queen cell and it is accepted. It is also possible to give them a new queen with a couple of frames of her own brood and bees. But trying to introduce a new mated queen in a cage is pretty risky--they usually will not accept her on her own.

Several years ago I decided it would be fun to try raising queens. My first cells were not very impressive, but I got the hang of it pretty quickly. Occasionally there is still a graft that fails, but nothing is 100% I suppose.

When I first started with mating nucs, I thought it was important to arrange the nucs in distinctive ways that would make it easier for the virgin queens to find the right home on the way back from their midair mating flights. It turned out that they know their way back home better than I ever would have guessed. Last year I had extra full-size equipment, and I got a good mating percentage on 4-way pallets sitting close together (about 80% as I recall).

Normally I do not use full-size equipment. We have a number of 4-frame nucs that I usually use. Here you can see that the two outside nucs have their entrances facing one direction, and the middle nuc is flipped around to face the other way.

I keep a few lines of nucs that were started on different batches of cells. I often mix around the different colors of nucs, but I don't find that it makes much difference in practice.

Here's a line that is all light green.

I'm not doing this on a grand scale, but it's useful to have queens on hand. It's also fun to ship them around the country--it's one of those interesting activities that never entered my mind for years and years.

Well, it's starting to feel disturbingly cool for June. It is pretty comfortable for most people to have the temperature below eighty degrees, but I start to worry about the bees. Sometimes they bring in some June honey when the temperature is in the mid-seventies. I recall a summer many years ago when it was never terribly warm, rained at night every two or three days, and the bees still managed to produce a decent crop. The recent rain hasn't just been at night however. I see some nectar coming into some of the parent colonies--even into some of the honey supers rather than the brood chambers.

In any case, the main honey flow rarely comes before July in our area. There should be a few more weeks before it's time to get really concerned. Still, I think if it warms up we could get a nice honey flow right now--every time the weather turns for the better they are really getting out on the Dutch clover. Some of the pastures look like it rained flowers on them.

Despite the relative coolness, the bees have thrived to this point. Here is an image of a heavy load of pollen with some nectar in a nice fresh comb. It is proof of their energy despite some cooler temps.

We have been through a lot of queens this year. The splitting season didn't start out in a very encouraging manner, but things turned around within a couple of weeks. Luckily, we had plenty of customers looking for queens even when we were not quite ready to use them. Our earlier queens went into a queen bank and then got shipped all over the country.

Looking into a nurse hive. It's important to put in plenty of bees and some brood to make sure the queens are fed properly. You can see the tops of the cages in the middle of the box:

Here is a lineup of plastic cages covered with nurse bees:

Pulling out a queen to be shipped:

Our first Iowa-raised queens are emerging this week. Hopefully we'll have good mating weather and the queen yard gets filled up quickly!

We are in the middle of supering the overwintered parent colonies right now. A good portion of the bee yards have a strong honey flow that has gone on during the past week--hopefully some it winds up in the honey boxes rather than staying down in the brood chamber. The black locust bloom seems to be especially strong this year.

Before we put the supers on the parent colonies, we usually crack the brood boxes to make sure that they aren't on the verge of swarming. We split a number of hives twice, so the majority are happy to stay home for the moment, but there's always a few that grow quicker than the others and start to think about moving into a nearby tree.

When the cells are still open, it's usually possible to pull out a few frames of brood/honey and keep the old queen active. Here are a number of cells that are starting to get elongated--they have larvae and a pool of royal jelly inside:

By the time the cells get capped, it's much harder to get those bees to stay in the hive--a lot of times I just split the boxes and make sure there is at least one cell in each box. That way you just lose the old queen and some of the bees from one box instead of losing a lot of bees from both boxes. It is always an option to hunt down the queen and put her in another box that has lots of space, but it's too time consuming for us to search through overpopulated hives to find the queens in hives that are about to swarm (though sometimes I do it anyway).

Here is a capped cell:

The reproductive power of the bee has been extra impressive this year. Overall, the weather has cooperated in our area--fairly warm temperatures and good spring bloom. I had split a number of singles that we started in late April and early May. Yesterday they were totally packed and ready for a second brood box. I'm afraid that the huge amount of brood rearing has also helped the varroa mites get a headstart on the year. We'll hope for the honey crop first.

We ended up having a good splitting season. Winter loss was considerable, but the surviving bees came through strong enough to start a lot more hives. We will be safely north fo six hundred colonies this year.

In the images below, I am shaking the bees off three frames of brood and putting them in a third deep box--then we set the third box over an excluder to allow the bees to come up but keep the queen down. Then we can take that third box, give it a new queen and end up with a new hive for the season. This hive had a lot of bees.

This picture is from a hive that I split into four different colonies--it had 12 frames of brood and a ton of bees!

And for the fun picture of the spring--Alex discovered an old plastic queen cup that got turned horizontal, and the bees used it to raise a drone! I like this picture

I hope your splitting went well also!

It has been a busy month since we dealt with package bee orders. I'll try to put up a few entries in short order to cover everything that has been going on. At the moment we are in the very last stages of splitting the overwintered colonies to make new hives, but most of them are building up for the much awaited honey flow. I've seen quite a bit of nectar coming into the broodnests right now, and black locust is having a strong bloom this year.

But for today I want to look back at some apple pollination pictures. We delivered bees to two orchards on the first Sunday in May. Alex and I did one load in the morning, relaxed for a few hours in the afternoon and then delivered another load at twilight. It made for a long day but everything went smoothly. All the bees came out of the orchards looking much stronger than when they were set in the trees.

Pulling orchard bees

Bees in the orchard

A bee at work in the apples

Here I'm hauling the hives out of a Pella orchard.

Lifting them up onto the truck

And away we go!

We are now finished with the annual package bee deliveries. The larger load arrived at our place at 200 a.m., so there was not much sleep that night!

Alex, Dad, and I carried the packages from the back of the truck into the garage. By the end of it, we had more packages than ever to distribute. They were stacked too high to get good pictures at first, but after some of them were taken away, the other pallets became visible.

It always seems like a mountain of bees to distribute, but within 48 hours they are gone. We've had to get our paperwork better organized as more customers go on the package list every year--we also sell buckets of syrup, honey, and some feeders at the same time, so the three of us keep busy on package days.

Good luck with your bees!

Our threat of snow last night passed us over. Windy and a bit chilly today, but no really bad weather to delay spring too much. I have not been out to see the bees as I've been working consistently on finishing my dissertation--it's always possible to make time when necessary but Dad has kept on top of checking the bees and picking up the dead ones. The live ones evidently have not required a lot of syrup. It has helped me keep focused on getting this phd finished.

The prospect of a strong splitting season looks encouraging. Here we have some of the good colonies--a number of them have a few frames of brood in progress. Sometimes the brood-rearing doesn't really get going until late April, so we hope to use a lot of queens in starting new colonies this year.

The hive below has barely survived the last three winters, but this year the population looks quite strong--hopefully that means most of the other colonies will follow suit in gaining strength as the coming weeks unfold.

The Lonely Hive, Survivor of many winters:

Strong overwintered colonies:

It's that time of year again. We're still in the middle of winter but it's time to start thinking about how many packages will be needed for expansion or to replace winter losses. The phone is already starting to ring with inquires and people who want on the list for this spring.

We do not have the 2009 prices finalized yet, but current indications suggest they are shaping up to be comparable with last year. If anyone wants to pick up packages that come through our place in Lynnville, February is the best time to reserve but we normally have space on the truck through March as well. We require a 50% deposit to finalize orders. We plan to offer 2 pound and 3 pound packages with a Carniolan or Italian queen again. 4# packages with 2 queens are gaining popularity also--you shake half the bees into separate boxes and give each one of them a queen. A syrup sprayer is your best friend when you're gauging when you've shaken half of the bees out. It's much easier to estimate when the bees are clumped together rather than flying around. The stickiness also keeps them out of the air as they fill their bellies and clean the syrup out of their new home.

It will probably be one more month before we get into the colonies. With any luck, we will have a break of warmer weather sometime after the middle of February. Late February and early March is the time when we really need to check on feed in some of the colonies. Last February that break in the weather didn't really materialize, but I still got around with a sled in temperatures in the upper twenties and thirties.

As for now, it is eight degrees above zero with a fresh blanket of overnight snow.

Here I have a picture of a native Estonian beekeeper selling her wares in the Christmas Market in the capital city of Tallinn. She was very friendly and gave me a beekeeping price-list in Estonian language "just in case."

I've been back in Iowa for a number of days now. In mid-November I headed to the UK to do some work for my graduate degree, and then I had Christmas in Estonia and New Year's in Sweden. Below I have an image from the Irish farm where I looked at some letters in Jim Ryan's collection (he has a ton of information on the Irish Beekeepers' history).

Today there are several inches of snow on the ground. It's hard to believe that in about a month it will be time to open up the hives again and give some of them a shot of syrup. I keep hoping most of them will live through the winter--mites were under control and we had great feeding weather in the fall. More young bees went into this winter than last winter.

The Welcoming Christmas Tree on O'Connell St, Dublin

This is the abandoned gate lodge at Jim Ryan's ancestral farm.

The last ten days or so have had a pretty regular rhythm. Feed the bees, block the entrances, and wrap the hives. We actually started blocking the entrances a few weeks ago. Once the nighttime temperatures start dropping into the fifties, the mice start looking for sheltered homes. Beekeeping equipment seems to serve them very nicely. Today we went to southern Iowa and visited a yard where three empty sets of bottoms and lids all had mouse nests recently built in them. Maybe they worked as good traps to keep them out of the actual hives. It's always annoying to put in the blocks and then go back in spring and discover that you trapped a mouse or two inside the hive. They really make a mess of the frames, chewing through the wax and woodware.

Mostly, the bees look strong. I like to see 6-8 frames of bees in the cluster to consider them strong for winter. There are still a few hives with two boxes of bees. On the other hand, there are a few yards that have a number of hives in the 4-5 frame population range. Those are strong enough that they might survive, and the chance is good enough that I don't want to combine them. The weaker ones always make me nervous though.

It was 76 degrees today--November 3. Winter didn't set in very early this year. Evidently a big change is coming in the next couple of days, but the fall has gone pretty well. With any luck this winter won't be as brutal as the last.

Loading up the division board feeders with corn syrup. The syrup in the 2-gallon feeder buckets started to granulate for some reason this year--we've never had that problem before. With warm temperatures, it's safe to dump the cloudy syrup into the division boards.

And then wrapping them up nice and cozy for the winter.

I can't say that I especially want to say anything more about small hive beetles. They don't look like an organism that ought to be able to do a lot of damage. Rather small, hard-bodied little critters that shouldn't bother anything. But then, it's not the adults that are the problem except for the eggs that they lay. And they lay a lot of eggs. It's possible to run across larvae in the thousands.

All of that is just to say it seems proper to put up a couple of pictures that show the beetle itself. The picture in the previous post only shows the larvae.

The first image gives an indication of size. So small yet so nasty (a consistent theme in bee pests apparently).

Note the disc-shaped antennae--they are very obvious when you run across an adult hive beetle.

We are basically done with the honey harvest. There might be an odd box that comes in for extracting in the next couple of weeks, but we are essentially finished. The crop turned out much better than seemed to threaten in July, but it is a long way from the 120#-150# crops we've been lucky to get in the past few years. At least it wasn't a total disaster. With a wholesale market that's lingering around $1000 per barrel, we sure don't want to buy all the honey we need to satisfy our customers. So, things could be worse.

On the downside, we had a new visitor to our honey house. Small hive beetles. We had seen a few traces of them in the past year or two, but there had not been any problems. This year we had some honey with some drone brood mixed in it sitting in the building for two or three weeks. The beetles found them and tried to make a mess of things. Hopefully we just have to turn over the boxes more quickly in the future--I knew that letting them sit is an invitation for beetles but we just hadn't experienced any infestation in the equipment until this year. Fortunately, we were moving through the boxes as soon as the larvae started developing, so our losses were very few--just a few burned frames. Still they are nasty little pests that make a disgusting mess of any equipment that they spend much time inhabiting.

I will hope no one else has to deal with images like these very often:

First we have a pile of the small hive beetle larvae collected on a dripboard.

Then one of the irritating varroa mites on the thorax.......

And finally the infamous wax moth damage--one of the larva is visible.

:

A couple of days ago we went out to clear some yards of honey boxes and put in Apiguard. At one of our locations, a swarm was hanging in the tree next to the hives. September swarms aren't very common in our area, but there are a few of them every fall. I've always been surprised that more of them don't swarm when we break down the hives to two boxes after the honey flow. Here is one that decided two hive bodies and a honey super was not enough space for this fall.

Bees in trees.

Alex got lost in the tree while bee-hunting.

All boxed up.

It's now September, so we're getting serious about getting the boxes off the colonies and getting in the varroa medications. Even if the honey crop didn't average anything particularly high, at least the bees look quite good in terms of population.

The temperature is only in the fifties unfortunately. It looks like fall is arriving rather swiftly. Apiguard vaporizes pretty well in the seventies, but fifty degrees is lower than I would prefer.

Anyway, here are some images of mite treatment with Apiguard before I head off to extract honey today.

One of the nice colonies full of bees--and full of a few too many mites.

Apiguard treatments.

Well, it looks like all of the yards will have produced something this year. Not much, but at least something. Hundreds of our honey supers are on moth crystals instead of hives, but we did not get totally shut out of a crop. We can probably classify it as "fair" rather than very poor. So, now is the time the boxes start coming off and the mites need to get killed. The varroa numbers are climbing, and below I have a couple of images that Alex took the other day when we stripped a few yards.

This is what we don't want to see in the drone brood between boxes--little red devils.

And here are the little uglies, up close and personal.

It's finally heating up and drying out. The planting ran so late that there will be soybeans blooming through most of August. I also saw some bees on the first yellow flowers to open a few days ago. There is some chance we could get another 20-50 pounds this month, it's just so rare that I don't want to hold my breath. The other factor in play is that our varroa mite situation seems to be escalating. We'll start sampling soon, but I've already seen them in the hives more than I would like.

I've gotten about three barrels of honey extracted, plus what is in the processing system. There was a time that seemed like a lot of honey for us, but now I remember 2005 and recall that we had 100 barrels processed before the middle of August. Not quite the same circumstances this year.

Today I'm going around to check a few yards. A couple of days ago it appeared the honey was starting to come a little quicker, so I'll get a sample of what's going on in other places. I also need to get some of our surplus honey boxes out on the hives to keep the wax moths from finding them. We don't use queen excluders on our doubles, so the risk of moths finding pollen and dark combs in the honey boxes is pretty high.

I was planning to go and check a few yards today. I didn't really expect to see a lot of honey given the latest weather, but I was curious to see if a few of them had blown over from some recent winds. So what happens? Late yesterday afternoon winds (some around 75 mph) blew through parts of central Iowa and dropped at least 2.5" in Grinnell. I'm sitting out today in hopes of things drying up enough that I won't tear up the ground driving into the yards....also trying to avoid getting stuck of course. There is allegedly a good chance of more rain after 1 a.m. tonight. Smashing.

Several years ago I recall getting ready to go back to Iowa State with a very poor crop on the hives in August. Then the honey started coming in the next couple of weeks, and that saved us from a hopeless crop. We are getting to the end now--if things don't pick up soon we will be semi-skunked. Some yards still have basically nothing.

For today's illustration, here is Alex in the midst of a memorable spring-time attack.

Yesterday I drove around to see what transpired while I was away to England and Sweden, but the news wasn't the best. We're closing in on August and there hasn't been a really good flow in all of the yards. About 1/3 of them have had a significant amount of honey fill the boxes, but there is a long stretch to go before a respectable crop hits the barrels. Five inches of rain in the last week hasn't helped our prospects. On the fortunate side, I did pull half a dozen boxes of cut comb yesterday. At least we have a start on the Iowa State Fair demands.

Also, the building has made great strides toward completion in the past couple of weeks. We still need some finishing touches on the basic structure, but the main thing is the electrical work. Hopefully the electrical guys can make it in the next couple of weeks as well.

Here is our newly lengthened building--quite the increase....

This is the future extracting room--it seems we might not get to use it until next year though.

And a little extra storage space should help ease congestion in the warehouse.

The odds for a good crop are increasing. Some of the strong colonies have already begun to gather a couple of boxes of honey. Most of the splits still have very little or nothing stored away for us. The bloom is pretty good, and we definitely have enough soil moisture to sustain the flowers if we could manage a couple of weeks of hot weather to work some magic.

In other news, our building has finally started to take shape after a few months of waiting for the rains to ease.

This morning Alex and I moved several pallets into their permanent spot in a new location. The landowner has hosted our bees in one spot or another for the last fifteen years--now some land juggling has us at his future homestead. In total contrast to the homebuilders that wanted our bees off their land earlier this spring, Rusty asked us to put bees at the site where he wants to build a new home and dig a pond. Twenty-four colonies sit in the clearing I made yesterday, so he shouldn't have any shortage of honeybees to watch from his porch.

As soon as we got done with the morning move, the rains returned in earnest for a couple of hours. Clearing skies permitted me to start some more queens in the afternoon, but the forecast tells me that substantial rain is on the way for the next couple of days. We're starting to have some pressure to get the bees supered before Anthony's wedding this month. There may be supering in the rain if the weather persists in this manner. Ick.

We had hoped that the building expansion for our honey house would get underway in February or March, but last week the weather cooperated enough to allow some dirt work.

When the addition is complete, we will have twice the space to work with. One section of the new building will house the extracting line, meaning we won't have to bottle and extract in the same room. That will free a lot of space and permit for larger equipment for bottling or extracting if we ever go that route.

Otherwise, the rain is back. Cool wet spring keeps hanging around--not great for bees to say the least.

After a slow, slow start to the beekeeping season, we have managed to run out of queens. There were an excess of them on order, but we distributed so many that we have run short ourselves. Enough to finish splitting should arrive on Friday.

I did not have much luck with the lot of queens that came from Mark Sundberg. I think that about thirty percent of them failed. The majority of the failures had no evidence of a queen two weeks after introduction, but in several cases the yellow queen was just walking around the comb not doing anything---not even drone eggs. In the end it seems lucky that the MN queens arrived second, otherwise I would have lost a lot of time on my splits with even more failed queen introductions. I will probably look elsewhere for MN Hygienics for next year. Perhaps he will have some explanation. Our Koehnen queens give us an acceptance rate that is normally over ninety percent.

Tomorrow I graft the first homegrown queens of the summer....one month behind the typical schedule.

The weather has turned in our favor over the last several days. The bees are gathering fresh nectar and loads of pollen. It's a long road to full-strength colonies, but things are finally headed in the right direction. Some of the parent colonies that declined after I split them have turned the corner toward recovery. I also had a pleasant surprise when Alex and I visited ten of our two-pound packages that I installed four weeks ago. Most of those packages are now 6-8 frames of bees. Much better than I anticipated from my package observations in another location a week ago. Lastly, the splits I made on the first round have expanded sufficiently to warrant a second hive body. Hopefully things keep moving in a positive direction.

On the downside, here are a couple of photos from the latest American Foulbrood incident:

In the first you see the ropy brown goo of a recent infection, and in the other photo a few scales are visible in the base of some cells.

BiggestMeow's comment in the last entry mentioned our yard that sits at the bottom of a river levy....Well, that yard no longer holds any bees. Now to divulge the circumstances of vacating that yard On two occasions, we fished the bees out of a few feet of water, but this year the story had a different spin.

Things about this winter were different to begin with....I'd never hauled corn syrup to the bees on a sled before. Basically the entire first round of feeding went over snow and into hive. Nothing like trudging through a couple of feet of snow to save your bees from starvation:

But things went even stranger when our usual flooding problems at the levy on the South Skunk River took a new twist. Instead of splashing through muck and water to get the bees to dry ground, we busted them out of the ice. The whole operation took place in a sloppy mess of snow, ice, and frigid water. The lesson here? Keep the bees off the floodplains!!

Here you can see Phil attempting to liberate the hives without slipping into the arctic pool:

And here is the image just before we started hauling them away. Those hives are still sitting next to the east side of the house. At least this miserable winter gave me some exceptional photo opportunities

Hinegardner Orchard in Montour requested that we take bees for apple pollination in short order, so Alex and I loaded the 4x4 and headed north. With the flatbed out of commission, the job is considerably more laborious. Ideally we used the Swinger to load several 4-way pallets, and then Dave Hinegardner unloads them with his tractor forks. Due to our unfortunate circumstances, we stacked two layers of 10 colonies into a standard bed and unloaded by hand......the unloading took place in a raging thunderstorm. My whole purpose in transporting them last night was to avoid the bad weather in the forecast, but the sky turned ugly as we headed north.

When we pulled into the dark orchard around 9.00 p.m., Dave waited for us with headlights shining and proceeded to lead us to the various drop locations. Somehow we managed to unload everything without falling into the mud or slipping on the truck bed....hopefully things go as smoothly when we pull them out next week--but I don't mind if we skip the rain this time around!

No weather worries as we finished loading the colonies destined for apple blossoms.....

Sunshine and warmth were the good news today. I had begun to wonder if the dandelion bloom would amount to anything, but I saw some respectable patches of yellow today. We'll hope the progress continues and the bees find some nourishment and vigor.

The bad news? Alex and I broke down with the flatbed at about 11:00 a.m. this morning.

We went to fetch the last couple of pallets from a bee yard we lost to a family that bought the land and plan a house about 100 feet away from the bees' location. I don't blame them for not wanting bees that close to their new home. They apparently have children as well, and most people have no clue about how to get along with bees on a day to day basis. Unfortunately, we are on quite a streak with losing yards and needing to relocate.

Back to the bad truck business. All spring I've been driving the half-ton 4x4 to get around in the snow, mud, and wet grass. The 4x2 flatbed doesn't handle those conditions with any grace at all. The last time I drove the flatbed was the day I got it stuck, but today everything dried out and I wanted to get those bees to their new home.....I told the family in March that I would try to get them out by the beginning of April. The bees made it to the new location, but the truck died a couple of miles from home. A sudden loss of power followed by a knock in the engine signaled our new dilemma. Barring a miracle repair, it looks like truck shopping just moved to the top of the agenda.

We've also sold off the bulk of our MN Hygienic queens. Splitting hit a wall, so about half of the MN Hygienics went to people calling for queens. Now we have a few of the MN queens scattered hither and thither instead of having large numbers installed in a number of yards. Marla has shown that hygienic colonies are less hygienic if mixed with large numbers of non-hygienic colonies. So that evaluation is basically off the list, and AFB remains as much a concern for us as ever. The situation would be brighter if the hygienics came before the Carniolans, but the sequence of arrival did not cooperate.

Here is some of that lovely orange pollen.....

And just for fun, here is what happens when the robbing gets out of hand....bees all over everything

It appears our colony count will wind up a little lower this year. A few years ago we were around 700, but the long winter has a number of the hives looking quite weak. That is a sad fact considering that forty percent of last year's hives didn't even survive the winter. The first round of splitting only added 100 colonies to the 2008 total. I'll start going around again in a few days, but I'm guessing that 525 represents the maximum I can scrape together. Too many brood boxes sit in the building waiting for bees. The bees looked excellent going into winter, and my mind anticipated a summer of 800 rather than 500. So it goes. This might be the motivation I needed to head south for the winters.

On the bright side, I suppose I won't feel quite so crushed for time as I write my history dissertation in the coming year. Some comfort I suppose.

The dandelions started to bloom a couple of days ago. I thought it might take a little longer before the bees got to visit them, but they are starting to come back to the hives with a fair amount of orange pollen. Now we have to hope the weather starts to cooperate so those flowers don't go to waste!

Yesterday we installed Minnesota Hygienics in some splits--we ordered 100 from Mark Sundberg. Marla Spivak suggested that his queens mate with hygienic drones instead of the usual genetic mess. Most of the big queen breeders have little control over their production queen matings. The breeder queens are usually purebreds maintained through artificial insemination, and their production daughter queens (which we buy) are purebreds as well. The problem is the midair free-for-all that hybridizes the offspring workers. Then beekeepers decide to experiment with MN Hygienic, Carniolan, Russian, etc. and wind up basing their opinions on a hive with worker bees that are 50% mongrel Italian. Not a sound manner of evaluating any line of bees. Anyway, these MN Hygienics will decide whether or not we want to shift toward Marla's line in the long term.

I'm a little skeptical about moving away from Carniolans because the Italians take a lot more feed in spring and fall--Carniolans step down their brood rearing at appropriate times. Then again, I never want to see American Foulbrood again, and it seems unlikely that a Hygienic Carniolan line is on the near horizon. Also, our ability to feed hungry Italians has improved in the past few years...now we feed bulk corn syrup, have many division board feeders installed, and we purchased a syrup pump a few weeks ago. The next year or two will show how we get along with these bees.

I awoke and encountered a dampened world. Last night I pulled up to the Ebert Honey House at 11:30 p.m. and needed to make a decision. I could go home and rest from a day of splitting and moving bees, or I could gather some more equipment and move another dozen colonies to their new location. The variable in question? Rain or no rain. I bet "no rain" and lost. It didn't get so wet that I could not get into a few places to work today, but those dozen splits still sit over excluders at the bottom of a hill. Curses. Tomorrow I will attempt to finish the job.

We had some of the best weather of the year this afternoon. The bees went a little crazy filling their pollen baskets--one of them tried to land at the entrance but ended up on her back and basically immobilized. Now the brood will really get roaring.

After the interminable winter and frequent rains, splitting new colonies from the old hives is behind schedule. I finally got some nucs made this afternoon, but first I shook the last thirteen 3lb. packages that came out of California via Larry Draper. I will feel relieved to put queens in the nucs tomorrow. It feels better to have them installed than sitting in a shipping box or a queen bank. With any luck the rain will hold off another day and I can hit a number of yards and really make a dent in our stock of homeless monarchs.

Our splitting method doesn't take a lot of expertise. We just pull three frames of brood from the decent colonies, shake the bees off the frames, and put them in a brood box over an excluder. Then the bees come up to cover the brood and we can take away the new box, give it a queen, and leave the parent colony to rebuild strength. The main advantage to this method is saved time--you don't really look for the queen. Stronger colonies can spare more brood, but then there are the really weak colonies to account for as well. I am really curious to calculate our hive count at the beginning of June. Let us hope for many bees!

For the record, seventy degrees is too warm to have a two pound package totally blocked up. The bees were more than ready to have some fresh air at those temperatures. I had partially unblocked the entrance before I opened the lids, otherwise a lot more bees would have wound up in the air. I sprayed them with syrup again to keep more of them down on the frames.

I also have the distinction of my first accidental queen murder. I rapped a queen cage on the top of bare frames to knock the bees off. Guess who walked underneath the cage as it struck wood? Goodbye queenie.

Speaking of questionable maneuvers, we got the flatbed unstuck yesterday afternoon. We hauled the Swinger over to pull it out, and one of the newish trailer tires went flat as soon as we arrived. Just a lucky streak? Now I must admit that I forgot to take the camera for a picture of the sunken truck, but I'll make up with a couple of package bee pictures.

Now it looks like a rainy day, so I'm off to organize some boxes for splitting when it turns dry again.

At 6:00 Sunday morning six hundred packages from California arrived at our place. Half the garage was filled with cages. A couple of days later the bees are all at their respective homes and the garage sits empty. The neighbors stopped to ask why so much traffic flowed into our driveway They came back with a camera to capture the bee garage for posterity.

I spent yesterday shaking our fifty packages in heavy wind. I thought it might go a lot worse, but the bees went into the hive bodies instead of the air. This was our first experience with 4lb packages containing two queens. I used a garden sprayer to wet them with diluted syrup and did my best to get two pounds of bees into each hive. It seemed to go quicker with two packages of bees held in one box--fewer parts to handle in the course of shaking. I always fear that the packages won't like their new home and end up hanging in the trees, but I kept them out of the air with enough syrup to keep them from flying during installation. The only downside to my experience yesterday involved shaking until dusk, and that meant the occasional loose bee stopped flying and started crawling into all the openings in my clothing. Ouch. Today I'm going out to unblock the entrances and release the queens.

The other project for the day? Free the flatbed before the rains return to night. We shall see.

We are now in day 4 of the flatbed sinking into the mud twenty miles from home. Twenty-five yards from the line of hives the tires started to spin, so I backed around to face downhill. The plan was to go do my work and have an easy escape, but instead the hillside sucked the truck into the ground. Two-wheel drive truck no move. Now we shall see how many dry days we need to pull it out. In the meanwhile, everything gets transported in the less convenient half-ton hauler.... I'll try to remember to take a picture before we pull it out--it's a candidate for one of those things to laugh about later.

Truck no move.....