Bee Season. Message from the President. In this issue

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1 S P R I N G Bee Season Newsletter of Beekeepers of Shawangunk (BOS) Message from the President Endangered! For the first time ever in the continental United States, a bee has been declared an endangered species. The final rule about the endangerment of the rusty patched bumble bee (pictured above) was published in the Federal Register on January 11, Once commonly seen in 28 states from Connecticut to South Dakota, the District of Columbia, and 2 Canadian provinces, it is now found in dwindling numbers in 13 states and one Canadian province. Seven species of Hawaiian yellow-faced bees are already on the list. A loss of habitat, disease and parasites, the use of pesticides, and climate change that affects the plants bees feed on are all to blame for the decline. The Monarch butterfly is undergoing a similar fate, with a population loss of 80% over the last 2 decades. A decision to add the Monarch to the list is due in June Will honey bees be next? Aside from being good stewards of our own backyard apiaries, here are a few things we can do to help support our honey bees. Plant native flowers, even in urban areas. Avoid the use of pesticides (you might want to talk with your neighbors about this, too). Leave grass and plants uncut after summer to provide a habitat for overwintering bees. Upon my arrival back home from a trip to Georgia last week, I discovered that a few of my bait hives had new occupants. Peeking in, I saw 5 frames were nearly drawn out with a bit of wild comb in the corner. Catching up on other work was the first thing on my full agenda, but retrieving caught swarms was indeed a priority. After skimming along the surface of a dozen items on my list, I grabbed all the necessary hive components to move the swarms to their new, permanent homes. I had nearly reached the first bait hive, now buzzing with activity, when I heard that familiar roar of yet another swarm approaching the area from the west of my apiary where feral bees always occupy a few bee trees. What was about to happen I ve seen before, but it never fails to shock the senses and is certainly one of the rarest types of swarms. (Cont d p 3) In this issue Endangered! p. 1 Physics of Bees p. 4 Playing with Electricity p. 2 Revisiting Warre p. 6 Photos: Christy Stewart, U.S. FWS website; Editor: Kristen Georgi

2 Bee Season THE LOREM IPSUMS SPRING Playing with Electricity This Ought to be Fun By Bob Mooney My first electric fence came to my bee yard because of a rowdy youngster who hadn t read the black bear code of behavior book. I had been hit by bears several times over the years, but always in the spring when bears typically come out of their long winter s nap and are starving for a protein snack of bees and larvae. Most of the honey in supers is usually left untouched. The frames that were taken and cleaned off were the ones filled with bees and brood. Often the booty was carried into my woods to be eaten. It was evident that several trips had been made. The line of destroyed frames went progressively deeper and deeper into the woods. My guess is that the bear carried the prize away from all the stinging bees until most of the bees gave up, and then ate the protein morsels. This went on until he had enough food, or the grief and pain of the stinging bees persuaded him to leave. I can only hope that some of those defender bees got to the bears eyes, tongue, or nose as they gave up their lives for their queen and colony. I think this must be the scenario of an attack because with each intrusion, the bear only bothered one or two hives and left many of the others alone. I don t think that the bears hunger was totally satisfied. I vote for the bee army turning the tide of the battle and getting a pyrrhic victory. For the beekeeper, the arrival at the crime scene after a bear attack is one of the saddest sights of the hobby. I say hobby, because I got into bee keeping for fun, for joy, for the experience of doing good. Working those hives, the hobby beekeeper soon develops a loving connection to them. You get to know your bees and their behavior. When you come upon the battleground after a bear visit, you witness the slaughter and see dead bees all over the place, along with others still alive but confused as to what happened. You can t help but be depressed. And so after each attack I donned my bee suit, got my tools and began to put the hive back together. I replaced the totally broken frames and restored the hive to its location. Most of the bees that were still alive were huddled in small clumps on the ground or on frames in the tipped-over hive. These were young nurse bees. Many of these don t fly and need help getting back into the hive. I gathered as many as I could while constantly keeping an eye out for the queen. She may have been somewhere on the ground so I had to watch my step. If I didn t easily find the queen, I tried not to go searching too hard. They had been traumatized so much already. After a few days, I went back into the hive to see if any new eggs were laid. Finding them meant the queen survived and that hive would recover in time. If there was no sign of queen activity, I would need to get a new queen to save the hive, or merge the remaining bees and good frames with another hive. (Cont d p 3) The reader might wonder why I hadn t already installed an electric fence. One reason is cost. In those early years of the hobby, I was only keeping a few hives. What money I had available seemed better Photo: 2

3 Bee THE Season LOREM IPSUMS SPRING Playing with Electricity, Cont d spent on equipment or bees than on a fence. Another reason was that all of my early bear attacks were in the spring when the bears first came out of hibernation. I was able to rebuild those hives, and the bees had plenty of time to recover and were able to make it through the next winter. Another reason that I probably wouldn t have admitted then was that I hate electricity! Well, not electricity exactly because I use it for everything, but I hate working with electricity. From working on lawnmowers and doing my own house repairs, I ve had a number of eye-opening events that left me leery of ever doing that again. Why install a fence now? Last year I had two attacks in mid-summer! The damage was about the same, but the bears got 3 hives and in one case killed the queen. This set the hives back more than usual and since it was after our main nectar flow they hives had to be fed with syrup in order to make it through the winter. In any case, the $400+ cost of an electric fence became more tolerable, especially since I now have more than a dozen hives in my yard. So off to Tractor Supply I went. Once the fence was up I gave it 5 days for sun charging, then connected the wires to the unit. I know it s stupid, but my body tensed and a bit of sweat squirted out of every pore. No sparks, no shock, no electrocution! All was fine, and after hooking up the ground wire I stood back and looked at my marvel. The solar unit clicked away, the needle on the gauge popped a few times and landed in the green zone, fully charged and waiting for the next bear. Who said a bumbler can t get a job done well? It took a few minutes before the glee and gloating wore off when I noticed that I had installed the entire fence backwards! I had done it from the inside of my bee yard and probably should have done it from the outside. As it is now, I have an electric fence that looks like it was installed to keep my bees in the yard rather than to keep bears out. I m sure I ll be the laughing stock of all my fellow beekeepers who visit my operation. I just hope the bears don t get as much enjoyment from my mistake. Message from the President, Cont d Usurpation swarms occur when a swarm forcefully merges into an existing colony. The mass takeover happens in a flurry of activity and only spans a few minutes. The overwhelming rush of the advancing swarm seems to demoralize the existing colony. Some fighting is seen at the entrance but the usurpation is completed surprisingly fast. After waiting for an additional day, the colony examination showed only one queen and a very full box of busy, contented workers. The conquest of territory is familiar to many species, with humans being no exception. Swarms, whether reproductive, congestive, absconding or usurpation, are a natural part of the life of the honey bee. We beekeepers know all too well the upsides and downsides of the swarm. To the amazing honey bee, it s just part of life. Tom Hutt 3 Photo: Bob Mooney

4 Bee THE Season LOREM IPSUMS SPRING The Physics of Bees: Balance, Chaos and Catastrophe By Kristen Georgi Picture this: I m standing on one leg in a meditation pose, focusing on my beehives, trying to achieve the perfect balance, when a law of physics hits me. There is no such thing as perfect balance, especially in Nature! Everything is always changing. Even if I can achieve balance for a few seconds, circumstances conspire against me to throw me off. The honking geese flying overhead disrupt my supposedly clear mind. The chilly breeze makes me want a sweater. I start to wobble. The idea of the balance of Nature, where a small change is counteracted by another change that restores equilibrium, is an ancient concept that has largely been discredited by modern science. In place of the balance of nature idea, physics has given us chaos theory (which says that Nature is unpredictable, but there are patterns), and catastrophe theory (which says that a series of gradual small changes trigger a series of rapid, large-scale changes). Chaos and catastrophe have all kinds of applications, like meteorology, epileptic seizures, sports performance and the stock market. But what does this have to do with bees? Think of it in terms of varroa. The balance of the hive is disrupted by infestation of varroa mites and the virus they carry. Because the virus can destroy the hive, beekeepers monitor the mite count and apply an assortment of treatments with an array of applications to counter it, in other words, to restore balance to the hive. Treatments Chaos: The Lorenz attractor include synthetic chemicals (Apivar, Apistan, CheckMite), essential oils (Apiguard, Api Life Var), acids (MiteAway Quick Strips), Oxalic Acid, Hopguard). There are also mechanical approaches to control the mites, such as a screened bottom board and drone brood removal, or genetic approaches requiring requeening with resistant stock. The problem is that none of this is working for our bees. When the initial condition (as they say in physics) of a theoretically mite-free hive is changed to a mite-full condition, we haven t been able to restore lasting balance with chemicals, essential oils, acids, mechanical, or genetic approaches. As a fourth-year beekeeper who came through the winter of 2016 with the loss of only 1 out of 9 hives, I feel like I m finally starting to understand. The behavior and genetics of our hives are different and seem unpredictable, but there are patterns. Hives go through a series of small changes, and then catastrophe strikes. To me, it seems that chaos theory is clearly at work with swarms. There is a pattern in the hive. Overpopulation stimulates unusual or chaotic behavior, the need to make a fight or flight choice to swarm. It is this pattern of bee behavior, coupled with hive conditions that make circumstances ripe for a swarm that is predictable, although the actual occurrence of the swarm is less easily predicted. This is because other conditions that change the outcome may exist, like the old queen dying, or 2 queens hatching from 2 new queen cells. Swarms demonstrate catastrophe theory, too. In the hive, gradual changes happen as bees fill the Drawing: 4

5 Bee Season SPRING 2017 THE LOREM IPSUMS The Physics of Bees, Cont d SPRING 2016 comb with pollen and nectar and the queen lays brood. These gradual changes are normal behavior that becomes overdone, resulting in overpopulation with no room left for new brood. So worker bees start to build swarm cells, stop feeding the queen, and seal off the brood cells. These trigger a large explosion of bees zooming out of the hive, along with the old queen. There you have it, the catastrophe of a swarm, which is good for the propagation of the hive but is a catastrophe from the beekeeper s point of view. As a fairly new beekeeper, I m attempting to Catastrophe: The bifurcated cusp grasp the laws of physics as they pertain to bees, avoiding catastrophe and chaos as much as possible. In the spring Putt and I inspect the hives for cells that signal the coming catastrophe of swarms and make splits as quickly as possible from overpopulated hives. And despite suspecting that our efforts to restore the balance of Nature may be futile, we continue to treat our hives against varroa, introducing variables. We change the conditions by switching up the types of treatments to avoid resistance. We introduce new queens. We hope for the best. Last year Putt and I used HopGuard in the spring, and oxalic acid vaporization in the fall. What did you use? How did it work for you? Did your hives overwinter well? Was balance restored, or did chaos and catastrophe strike? Send me an telling me what treatments you used and how your bees overwintered (kgeorgi@optonline.net). I ll print your results in the next issue. A new kind of Chinese take-out? Nope, it's pesticide free mite control! These 3" high slabs were on medium frames we put in along with deep frames in some of the brood chambers. Both sides of each slab were equally built out with worker brood. The bees also filled the open space on the bottom of the medium frames with drone brood comb. An effective, no cost, labor intensive option, you can control mites by cutting off the drone brood cells or using an uncapping comb to open capped drone brood. Although varroa reproduce by laying eggs in both worker and drone brood cells, mites are more attracted to the larger cells of drone brood. If left inside the hive, these slabs would be potential mite bombs. Drawing: Photo: Putt Georgi 5

6 Bee Season Revisting Our Warre Experiment By Putt Georgi SPRING 2017 We started 2 Warre hives last year, one a Russian pine hive and one cedar hive, that we populated with new packages of Carniolans from Mann Lake. Our interest in them was not generated by profit, but rather was about built-up toxins, diseases, and how to go about maintaining hives hygienically. We were also interested in hives that more closely reflected the tighter spaces bees prefer in the wild, and in the reduced weight of the smaller hive bodies to save our own backs. Our Carniolans came out of the gate extremely productive and prolific. Given 12 x 12 interior space, both hives had built out 2 supers very fast and we added a third. All of the well-documented drawbacks to the traditional frameless Warre style became clear. The lack of actual frames allows the bees to build comb all the way down from the top of the box and join to the top bars in the box below. The only way to open them for examination is by using a thin wire, much lie a cheese wire, in a sawing motion to cut between the 2 supers and thru the joined comb. We had success with the separation, but dripping honey from the comb caused the disturbed bees to go into attack mode and attracted other bees, creating a nice frenzy. For mite control in our apiary we wanted to change up and try nonchemical treatments on our Langstroth hives after having used MAQ strips (Apivar ) in the past. Hop Guard II seemed to be worth a try for all our hives, including the Warres. Disaster struck. While our normal 8-frame deeps took the prescribed treatment dosage well, I used the same dosage in the Warres and inadvertently overdosed both Warre hives. Within 3 hours of treatment, dying Carniolans were frantically evacuating dead and dying bees. As soon as I saw this I ripped open the boxes and removed the HopGuard. Although there was no adverse effect evident in the other normal-sized hives, not knowing what the cause of the disaster was I ripped the Hop Guard out of those as well, interrupting mite treatment in all. No fault of Hop Guard II at 12 x12, the Warre supers are only 2/3 the size of standard 8- frame deeps. I hadn t considered the dimensions until it was too late. The Warres survived but their season was cut short. The manufacturer of HopGuard II had no printed information or warnings regarding treatment of NUCS or Warre hives. Now they recommend using only 1 strip for new package installation, but that wasn t in in their printed information last year. The once robust Russian hive died out, and as anticipated, the weakened cedar Warre died out too, but not until February. We ordered more Carniolans. We will re-establish 2 Warre hives this season but with foundationless frames this time, enabling us to easily separate the supers for examination and harvesting. Save the Date Annual Bee Congress, July 8, :30-5:30 pm (rain date July 9) Phelps Woodside Farm 1241 State Rte. 52, Walden, NY, RSVP to BOSBEES1@GMAIL.COM