The Beltsville Bee Laboratory publishes a number of helpful pamphlets on bee diseases, but the most comprehensive source I know is Leslie Bailey’s Honey Bee Pathology, published by Academic Press. It is worth reading for a general understanding of the subject, because a beekeeper should be able to recognize a diseased colony and treat it in an informed way, but it should also be read with a sense of balance. Young medical students often decide they have each fatal condition they learn to diagnose, and new beekeepers sometimes fall into a similar habit, believing their bees have every disease they read about. Most strong colonies of bees never sicken. Most well-kept bees are healthy.
Before heading out to my beeyards I mix up Terramycin with powdered sugar. The ratio of mix depends upon the strength of the Terramycin, and manufacturer’s suggestions should be followed. It should be fed in dry form, not mixed with sugar syrup, because it rapidly degrades in the presence of moisture. I put my powdered sugar-Terramycin mix in a big metal saltshaker and shake about a tablespoon of it across the top edges of the frames in each hive, being careful to avoid the center of the frame tops, where it could get directly onto the brood and kill it. The bees take it up rapidly. In ten days to two weeks, I repeat the procedure, so that a trace of Terramycin is widely spread throughout the bodies of the bees in the colony. It is important to medicate bees very early in the season, weeks before the first honey supers are put on the hives, because no trace of Terramycin should remain inside the hive, where it might contaminate honey to be harvested for human consumption. Some beekeepers recommend a twice-yearly dosing with Terramycin and so also feed it out during the fall. In general and on principle I do not like the routine and zealous use of antibiotics for humans or for other animals. In particular, I do not like creating the conditions in which resistant forms of bacteria are encouraged to grow, so I keep my use of Terramycin down to this one spring dosage. If, however, I hear of a beekeeper who has American Foulbrood in his hives within a few miles of mine, I will give my hives an additional treatment.
Feeder
The sugar syrup I take with me on these spring bee rounds is a thin mixture made of five pounds of granulated white sugar for each gallon of water. I mix the sugar into hot water in a pail, stir until it dissolves and then pour it into five-gallon jugs that I load onto the pickup. In each bottom hive body I have a plastic trough feeder, which is just the width of regular honeycomb. If any of my hives need feeding, I can pour the syrup directly into it. It holds nearly a gallon of syrup, and that amount will keep a colony from starving to death for several days. These feeders are available from beekeeping-supply companies, which also sell several other kinds—ones that fit into the front entrances or on the tops of hives. I find the trough feeders work the best for my purposes, but using them requires taking an extra precaution for the bees’ safety: until they have built a crisscross of honeycomb in the feeders, which they will do in a few years of use, I always place bits of twig inside them. The twigs float to the surface of the syrup when the trough is filled and give the bees something to stand on while they are taking it up. If they do not have a dry footing, they can drown in great numbers in the syrup—particularly on a chilly day, when they are less active. It is sad to open a beehive and find masses of bloated dead bees floating in the syrup that was supposed to sustain them.
I feed sugar syrup only to hives that are completely out of honey from the previous season and have no fresh nectar. If I don’t feed the bees, they will begin to starve, burying their heads in the cells as they search futilely for food. I feed the bees to keep them from dying. Some beekeepers recommend continuous feeding of all hives in the springtime, arguing that a steady supply of sugar syrup tricks the colony into believing there is a nectar flow in progress, which stimulates the queen to lay a greater number of eggs than she normally would. I have tried it but find it unsatisfactory, and have concluded that it is impossible to trick bees. They know their world better than I do. The cost of sugar and labor involved over several months does not make good business sense in these days of low honey prices, but, more important, I have learned from the records I keep on each hive that those hives regularly fed sugar syrup end up producing less honey by summer’s end than those which were not. There are a number of perfectly sound biological reasons for this curious outcome, but I like best the way Adrian Bell, the designer of the first London Times crossword puzzle, expresses it. He writes in his 1932 book, The Cherry Tree:
Our postman said … “Isle of Wight disease? Never heard of it. My bees? No I never lost none. John Preach’s? Why, of course they died; he used to feed ’em on syrup and faked up stuff all winter.… You can’t do just as you like with bees. They be wonderfully chancy things; you can’t ever get to the bottom of they.”
Early the next morning, after I have made up the fire in the woodstove, I step outside my cabin while the coffee is percolating to get a feel for the day in the darkness before dawn. There are no clouds in the sky, and the last stars are shining brightly. The day promises fair. It is too cool to have my coffee outside and watch the sunrise, so I sit near the woodstove, where I can see the eastern sky.
The glow on the horizon reminds me that the sun will soon be up, and I have chores to attend to. The dogs, cat and chickens must be fed and watered. I have two cases of honey to pack for shipment to Dallas. I decide I’ll head down to my southern beeyards first, for although they are only thirty miles away, spring will have come earlier to them. They are in a different climate zone, and flowers there bloom two weeks before they do here. I linger over my second cup of coffee, itemize in my head what equipment I need to take, plan my route. The sun rises, glowing in the morning mist. It lights up the water droplets clinging to the remains of an old spider web outside the window. The drops turn gently in the air currents, flashing blood red, green, violet, shocking pink, each droplet a spectrum of light in the low rays of the sun.
After the chores are done, I load into the pickup what I’ll need: the record book, smoker, hive tool, frame grips, fuel for the smoker. I toss in some extra boards to put under hives that may need them. My record book has reminded me about several covers that need replacing, and I have put them in the truck, too. The jugs of sugar syrup are already in place. The medicine is in a coffee tin in the freezer. I take it out, make up lunch, fill a thermos with water. I am ready to go.
I light my smoker when I arrive at the first beeyard, don my gloves and bee veil and check the entrances of the row of hives. This yard is set up, as are my others, with the entrances of the hives facing southeast, so that morning sunshine hits the front of each hive and encourages the bees to fly out early and go to work. The yard is at the edge of a grove of post oak trees, which protect them from the north wind in the winter and give shade from summer’s sun. Bees appreciate a bit of open shade. Those in hives set in direct sun must spend more time fanning and cooling in the summer; they have less time for flying about and making honey.
The sun is now shining brightly on the front of the hives. I can tell immediately which ones are prospering. Bees are flying out industriously from nearly all the hives but two. One of these appears to have died out over the winter. A few bees from other hives are idly investigating its entrance, and in one corner of the entrance there is a pile of wax, telling me that the colony has been plundered of its stores. There are a few bees flying in and out of the other hive, but the entrance is scattered with small dirty-white and blue flakes, which indicate that the colony within has had Chalk Brood. Chalk Brood is a disease caused by the fungus Ascosphaera apis. Bee larvae infected by it die, shrink and become hard. As they do so, they darken and become bluish or even black. The bees remove the dead brood and carry it away. What I see at the hive entrance are bits of brood they have not yet carried off. Perhaps there are not enough bees to clean the hive. Chalk Brood is not a serious bee disease and does not need to be treated. I seldom see it except in the spring after a period of damp weather, but the colony in an affected hive is sometimes weakened by the loss of yo
ung bees and may need some extra help.
After I have finished looking at the fronts of the hives and learned what I can, I return to the rear of the row and begin working. I smoke the entrance of the first hive, and remove its telescoping cover and inner cover. It is full of bees. There are probably more than a thousand boiling up out between the frames. They are not cross, but have simply left whatever work they were doing to investigate this intrusion into their home. Perhaps they were doing no work at all. Bees look terribly busy. An opened hive is the stuff of platitude, but the truth is that bees, like other animals (including humans), spend a lot of time doing nothing at all.
In an 1899 study, one Professor C. F. Hodge marked bees and watched them from daylight to dark. He reported, “No single bee that I watched ever worked more than three and one-half hours a day.” In one case he saw a worker bee crawl into a cell and he watched her remain lying there quietly for nearly five hours. In the 1950s, Martin Lindauer, an entomologist, followed up on these observations. In a rigorous study, he tagged great numbers of bees and found that they spent a lot of time doing nothing at all, or very little. One typical bee, during a hundred and seventy-seven observation hours, did absolutely nothing for seventy of them and “patrolled” the nest, as though looking for something to do, for fifty-six. During roughly two-thirds of her time she was performing no productive work.
I puff some smoke across the top bars of the frames to make the bees go back down, because I want to remove a few frames and check the pattern of brood. I take out the two outside frames first, prying them loose with the hive tool and then pulling them out with the frame grips. Both still contain capped honey from last autumn. I check to make sure the queen is not on them, and lean them against the side of the hive on the ground. Then I gently pry apart the remaining seven frames to loosen and space them, so that I won’t squash any bees as I pull them out. There is a scattering of honey, nectar and pollen on the outer frames. One has eggs in it. The three innermost frames are filled with brood, most of it sealed. On the very center frame, the queen walks sedately, unperturbed at being removed from the hive. I hold the frame in the grips and watch her. She is looking for an empty cell, and when she finds one she backs her abdomen into it and lays a pearly-white egg. I replace her frame carefully and return the two other brood frames around her, so that she won’t be pinched and killed when I put the other frames back in place. Peering down inside the hive, I can see that the bottom hive body has only empty comb, but the bees down there are cleaning out the cells to ready it for use.
Generally speaking, the queen bee goes upward to lay her eggs, and will not fill the bottom hive body unless she is forced to. And, generally speaking, the queen is found on frames of brood. These generalities, like all others in beekeeping, are not always true. I carefully checked the inside of the top and inner cover, for instance, when I took them off, because sometimes the queen is parading across one of them; if it is placed beside the hive, she may wander off in the grass, be lost to home forever and die. This hive does have enough food to see it through, so I reassemble it, powder it with medicine and close it up.
If I had fewer hives to tend, I would do something more to it to prevent swarming some months from now. Swarming, from a beekeeper’s standpoint, is not a happy event. A hive that has swarmed—or raised itself a second queen and split in two, with one group flying away—is weaker and will produce less honey. It is a perfectly ordinary procedure for bees; indeed, swarming is their way of increasing in numbers and spreading, but it is not good for their human keeper, who wishes as many bees as possible to stay in place and produce lots of honey.
Nearly every beekeeper has his own pet way to prevent swarming. The method I prefer takes into account the bees’ own tendency not to develop the swarming impulse as long as they have space available inside their hive. Since the queen likes to move upward to lay her eggs, one of the best ways to give her more space is to rotate the hive bodies throughout the springtime, placing the full upper hive body on the bottom and the empty bottom hive body on the top. In a month’s time, the empty hive body that had been on the bottom will be filled with brood, pollen and nectar. The brood in the other hive body will have emerged, the comb they were in will be empty and the hive bodies can be rotated again. When the hive is full of young bees, their wax glands dripping with fresh creamy wax which they urgently want to spend to build new comb, even more space can be made by pulling out several old combs that probably needed to be retired anyway and putting in their place frames that contain foundation sheets only. This gives the bees more space and it also employs the young bees in building up new comb rather than allowing them to start up that mysterious urge to swarm off to other quarters. This is not a guaranteed method of keeping bees from swarming—there are no guarantees to anything, with bees—but it does serve to keep the swarming impulse in check, in large part. It is simple, and it takes into account the bees’ own biology, so it is the kind of method I prefer to the more hostile ways of preventing swarming, such as killing new queens as they pupate.
However, to be honest, I don’t even follow this simple method anymore. When I had sixty, eighty, even a hundred hives, I could afford the time and labor involved in rotating hive bodies and replacing comb. But with three hundred, it became impossible. I now accept the fact that a certain number of my hives will swarm. The only thing I can still do is divide the strongest hives and provide plenty of supers at a very early date, in hopes that the additional space will keep the bees from feeling crowded.
I heft the next hive and, although it is lighter than it was in the autumn, it is heavy enough to tell me that the bees inside still have honey. They have been disturbed by the jostling of their hive, and when I open it they are in a defensive posture, their abdomens raised in the air in the sting position. I puff smoke along the tops of the frames to quiet them, and pry some frames apart to see down inside. There are more bees in this hive than in the first one, and they have five sealed frames of brood. I medicate it and mark it down in the book as one that would be possible to divide later on. After I close it up, I disturb it again by lifting the back of the hive and pushing a board under it. The boards already there have settled, and the hive has assumed a backward slope. The new board returns it to a slightly forward tilt, which is the proper position for a beehive: any moisture that collects can now run out the entrance, and the inside of the hive will stay dry and clean. The bees in this hive, already a bit on edge, are made crosser still by the disturbance, and they fly back to defend their home. I direct more smoke at their entrance and they lose interest in me.
After I have checked and medicated the next hives I come to the one I suspected had died out. I open it and find only robber bees, who are searching through the frames in a desultory way. In the center of the top hive body are four frames of starved bees, their heads plunged downward into the cells, where they desperately looked for honey to eat and, finding none, died. Below, on the bottom board, I can see a heap of dead bees who had fallen away from the winter cluster and died of the cold. The significant thing is that there was still honey in this hive when the bees died; the outermost frames in the bottom hive body contained honey very recently. Those frames have been ripped open by robber bees and their contents carried off. I can tell that because the wax cappings of the cells have been roughly torn away, the sign of the work of bees from a different colony. Bees in their own hive open honey cells neatly and carefully. This honey was too far from the winter cluster of bees, and they were never able to get to it. They must have died during a stretch of weather too cold for them to have moved—starved because they had no honey remaining in a convenient place. The bees from neighboring hives have taken the honey they left behind undefended.
I set aside the two hive bodies to take back home. Several of the bottom frames have holes chewed in them where the mouse who scampered out as I opened the hive has made her nest. She had dragged in bits of fluffy thistle head and leaves to cushion the hole she chewed in the wax.
I scrape out the nest and dump the pile of dead bees from the bottom board. Cockroaches scuttle away as I clean up the hive. There are always roaches in beehives, but a strong healthy colony keeps them in check; it is only when the colony becomes weak or dies out that they can take over. The next few colonies are strong and prosperous, and now that I have an idea of how much brood should be in each hive I disturb them as little as possible. I glance down between the frames, dust them with medicine and quickly close up the hives. The bees are barely aware that I have intruded. The neighboring hive has few bees in it when I open it, only a fraction of those that have been in the other hives. I start pulling frames out to see what is the matter. They have a queen, for in the center frame I find a patch of sealed brood, developing larvae and eggs, but the entire brood area covers a circle of a mere four or five inches in diameter, and other frames have no brood at all. A few cells contain nectar, but the bees have no stored honey. I check my record book and find this colony produced only one super of honey last year. The queen is a poor one who needs to be replaced, and after marking this down in the record book—and because I fear the colony will starve before requeening time—I fill its feeder with sugar syrup. I medicate the bees, close up their hive and ask them please to hang on.
It is silly to talk to bees—for one thing, they can’t hear—but I often do anyway. I tell them encouraging things, ask them for help and always thank them for doing good work. It is said that when a beekeeper dies someone must go and tell his bees about his death or they will fly away. Whittier wrote a poem about the practice, which dates back for as long as humans have kept bees. In the West Country of England, the custom also requires tapping on the hive three times and giving the news with each tap. If this ritual is not observed, someone else in the beekeeper’s family may die within a year. It all sounds very superstitious, but I like the courtesy toward bees implied by the custom; I hope someone remembers to tell my bees when I die.
A Book of Bees Page 7
