Tag Archives: bees

Halloween, 2011. Bring Out Your Dead.

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It started at the Hatteras shore where many Horseshoe crab lay dead last week from some unknown cause. Not just empty shells as is normal from their molting.

We stopped on the way home for BBQ chicken in a little North Carolina restaurant with 3 bullet holes in the windows in what should have been peaceful cotton country where the crop grows in sandy soil right up to the side of the road.

Driving through the night we saw one Orion meteor streak through the darkness ahead in a blaze of dying glory.

Now in Ohio it is cold and the worker bees (females) are starting to pitch out the apparently useless male drones to die. (They would otherwise eat the hive’s winter honey)

The tiny Varroa mite can carry a wing deforming virus which does this to one of my drone’s wings:

Good housekeeping bees will bite the mite and hopefully keep them in check as I don’t want to put any pesticides in the with the honey.

 I didn’t see any bite marks on this upside down one. These mites are only 1 or 2 mm wide.

These bee photos were taken with a $4 macro camera “App” for my Android phone – which already has a camera. I don’t understand it but the resulting close-ups are amazing.  Check your camera-phone. It may have a built-in macro option.

Dead drone.

Happy Halloween

 

 

 

 

 

Fall in the Adirondacks

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When the sun shines in October driving through the Adirondacks can be gorgeous:

 


 Friday evening we arrived in Baltimore to deliver honey and hockey sticks and eat fish and chips with Kepler and friends by a tributary creek of Chesapeake Bay.

Then on Sat. drove North for 5 hours to Rhinebeck for tennis with S&J, Alen & Hazel, Prosciutto+figs drizzled with raw comb honey. Alen’s famous Irish oatmeal and Burket croissants were eaten for breakfast Sunday before more tennis and then the 11 hour drive home while finishing a good 11 CD book of Isabel Allende: “Daughter of Fortune” about Valparaiso and the California gold rush of 1849.

The bees were glad to see me again. I’ve squished 150 hive beetles in 2 days.  Only about 1 in 10 of them fall into these little plastic traps with salad oil in the bottom.

The remaining 9 out of 10 hide in little cracks or in empty comb cells. If I turn one over a bee eagerly grabs it by the legs (as in the picture above) and flies off with it, but if they are right way up the beetles have too hard a shell for the bees to be able to do anything.

Now that the temperature is getting too cool for them to want to fly much I have to lay a stick bridge so they can get back into the hive after I’ve knocked off a big bunch from the lid when I go into the hive to chase the beetles. Once one crosses the bridge she’s quickly followed by the hundred or more stumbling around in the weeds.

I don’t know if they are practicing clustering to keep warm for winter but they are up to something. I put my ear to each level of the hive and hear quite a different buzz from each one but don’t know what they’re trying to tell me yet. The cluster on the left below was hanging from a honey comb frame I’d removed while looking for beetles. It was from the top box so the queen should not have been there.

Bee Tales

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We saw the bee hives on the flat roof of the Royal York hotel, just hidden by the new tall buildings on Queens Quay.  They are set in a great herb garden there. It is  immediately to the left of the golden glowing Royal Bank seen last week at sunrise from Algonquin Island as we prepared for the Round The Island windsurf Marathon. (The brightest copper glow on the right side is from the newer Bank of Nova Scotia further up town)

Back in Perrysburg I reluctantly donated one of my few combs for taste testing against 15 other honey samples by 30 members of the local bee club, meeting at 577 Foundation.

You can’t imagine my surprise when it was awarded the very last prize of the night:

Back at the ‘farm’ I put in a one-way gate under the top honey ‘super’ (box). After 2 days it was almost empty of bees so I could take off 30 pounds of honey.

When I took off the next box to check for beetles, etc., and temporarily put it down on edge (so as not to squish them) the bees wandered out of their unfamiliar home,

but I put the board in front of the hive and they all obediently walked back in.

They really are very well behaved and don’t sting me much at all now.

Right now they are out gathering pollen from Golden Rod and Sedum in the last warmth of summer.