All fifty queens are now in nucleus hives. Some of these hives, such as the ones I’m preparing for customers, have even graduated into their second stories, or have been used to set up permanent hives in the outyards. But there will be no letup in my work until I get all of the bees established permanently. And my job is further complicated because there has been a pause in the bloom of wildflowers of interest to bees. The understory of my woodlot is filled with dogwood in thick white bloom, but, although they please me, dogwoods are ignored by the bees, having no nectar to give them. The roadsides are covered with violets in all shades of blue and purple. My beeyard down on the river branch is carpeted with one of the violets’ cousins, johnny-jump-ups, but bees work none of the flowers in the violet family, which is self-fertilizing. I have been keeping my eye on some of the hives that built up quickly in the early part of the spring, because now they are crowded with bees and have an enormous need for food. In a week or so, the blackberries will be in bloom, and there will be plenty of nectar for all, and enough left over to make the honey I’ll be able to take at summer’s end, but unless I feed some of those hives, the bees will die before the blackberries are in flower. When I stopped at the feed store yesterday, the man who works on the loading dock told me his single hive of bees had just died from starvation. He had not realized there was so little in bloom that bees could use.
So I have been carrying jugs of sugar syrup with me as I move the new hives into the beeyards. I feed the nucs when I set them out permanently, to give them a start while the bees are taking their bearings, but I also have been checking the hives already in the beeyards and feeding those that need it.
Last evening I taped shut the ventilation holes of a truck load of nucs to move today. This morning, just as the sky was turning light, I loaded them into my pickup—these small, one-story nucleus hives are easy enough for one person to lift. I stacked additional empty hive bodies on top of them to make second stories for the hives that would need them, and back at the cabin mixed up a batch of sugar syrup. I loaded the jugs on the truck, too.
Just after the sun came up, a white-eyed vireo began to sing—the first I’ve heard this season. Their song, which my bird book lamely describes as chick-a-per-weeoo-chick, once learned is impossible to mistake for any other, and I love hearing it, because it means that springtime is really here. We still have “blackberry winter” ahead of us. This is a few days or even a week of unsettled, sometimes cold weather that usually comes about the time the blackberries bloom, a last reminder that steadiness is not a feature of the Ozark climate; but the days are growing longer, the sun heats even these hills for a greater period each day, and the white-eyed vireos are guarantees of warm weather on its way.
I took my truckload of nucs to two beeyards. In the first of them, I needed one as a replacement for a hive that had died out during the winter and one more for requeening. After I drove in, I put the replacement hive down: I set out the boards for it, and put the nuc on them. I then untaped the ventilation hole, unscreened it and opened it up. After filling the feeder with sugar syrup and giving it one of the hive bodies I had brought along as a second story, I closed it up and wished the bees happiness in their new home. From a human standpoint, this is a pretty beeyard. It is on a knoll shaded by big oak trees, with a thicket of wild honeysuckle behind them. The bees don’t make use of the honeysuckle, which has corolla tubes too deep for a honeybee’s tongue, but they will find useful the Ladino clover the farmer has planted in the pasture in front of their hives. This is one of my best beeyards because of that clover; the new bees should prosper here.
By this time of year I have a good idea which hives should be requeened. I have kept a list of those that need new queens—either because they were unproductive last season or developed queen problems during the early spring. The hive in this yard that needs requeening has a poor queen. Last year, her hive produced only part of one super of honey. The colony did manage to make it through the winter, but she had not laid many eggs so far this year, and although all the other hives in this yard are full of bees, the population in her hive was a small one.
I set the hive to one side and put a new nuc in its place. I untape the ventilation hole in the nuc and take away the screen from its entrance, so that the field workers from the old hive can begin to mingle with this strong, feisty new group of bees. Then I take apart the old hive to find the queen. I have to find and kill her, because if I were to unite the two hives without doing so she might kill the new queen. There is little brood in this hive and the morale of the bees tending them is not strong. They are mild-mannered to the point of spiritlessness and make no objection to my taking apart their hive. In such a small colony the queen is not hard to find and when I do, I kill her. Then I put together in one of the hive bodies all the frames that have brood or nectar and pollen in them and give it to the nuc as a second story, after I have filled the feeder with sugar syrup. The morale of the original hive is so poor that they will not kill the new queen. This is as near to a foolproof system of requeening as I know. I have been using it for a number of years and have, so far, never lost a colony of bees when I did so.
I became convinced some years back, when I helped a beekeeper who insisted on using another method, that it was a chancy business to introduce queens directly into hives without first building up a nucleus population loyal to them. This is tornado country, and during springtime that year a twister ripped through the farm of a man who had just bought a hundred hives of bees as a sideline to his hog operation. When I asked him if I could help him and his family in any way, he said he would be grateful if I would help him requeen his hives the next day. He had been convinced by an article he had read that his hives should be requeened each year with hybrid queens. The day before the tornado struck, all one hundred queens had arrived in the mail, and while he and his family attended to the most immediate tornado damage, the queens had been left sitting in their mailing cages on top of his refrigerator where he hoped they would keep warm. They had been up there for a week before he could get to them.
He insisted we find the old queens, kill them and then directly give the hives the new queen; still in their cages and with the sugar plugs pierced. I told him I thought it wouldn’t work well. I had tried doing it in the past, and found that well-established, fully populated hives often killed queens that were introduced so quickly. In addition, these queens had been in their mailing cages too long and might have been harmed by their confinement. I argued as persuasively as I knew how that we take the time to establish nucleus hives first to see which queens would survive, and only then use the nucs for requeening. But he was in a hurry. He could spare just one day for the bees, he said. And he was sure his method was the best one. The poor man had had so many other worries and was so insistent we proceed that, against my better judgment, I agreed, and we began opening hives. By noon both of us were exhausted. We still had more than half the queens unhoused, so we called another beekeeper to come help us. We finished late in the afternoon. The fanner was effusive in his thanks, but although I was glad I had been able to lighten his cares, I did not think I had done a good day’s work by the bees.
I met him some months later and asked how the requeening had worked out. He shook his head sadly. Not even a quarter of the hives had accepted the queens. A few of the remaining ones had raised new queens of their own, but most had simply died out. He had lost not only most of the expensive hybrid queens he had bought but a great many of his hives of bees as well. A year later, discouraged with beekeeping, he sold the remaining hives.
After requeening the hive that needed it in my beeyard, I check the other hives to see if any need feeding. Several do; they are the most populated of the hives, and the bees have no stores at all left in their combs. One of them has even begun sacrificing the male bees, for I can see dead drones strewn on the alighting board. I feed the hives and fill out my record book, noting the additions and changes I made in this yard and the hives I fed. I will have
to keep a close watch on what is in bloom, and if the blackberries do not come along in a week some of these hives may need to be fed again.
In the second yard I repeated the process, requeening four and putting out four nucs as additional hives.
This second beeyard is a wilder place than the farm to which I went first. It is on a piece of land a farmer owns but does not use—a weedy abandoned spot, and the wild things are reclaiming it. The bees and I like it here, and I was pleased to see fat white flower buds on the dewberries—prostrate blackberries, which are among the first of the genus Rubus to bloom. The ground is too damp to sit on and have lunch, so I sit cross-legged on top of one of the hives to eat and watch bees fly out searching for flowers. Although there are not as many of them as busy and intent in their flights as there will be in a week or so, I can see that some of them are returning heavy with nectar; they are finding flowers in bloom somewhere, and so after I have drunk my coffee, I climb off the beehive and walk in the direction from which the bees returned. Back in the scrubby undergrowth I find a patch of wild black-raspberry canes. Those black raspberries are another early-blooming member of the Rubus genus. In two months, their fruit will be delicious to pick and eat, and will be all the more enjoyed because it will be a rare treat. There will be only a handful here and there. Not enough of them grow in this part of the Ozarks to provide a good supply of wild fruit for human beings or a major nectar source for bees, but today every greenish-white flower on them has a bee in it taking nectar. It is a welcome sight. I stand and watch and, once again, I hear a white-eyed vireo sing.
All the resident summer warblers have come back. They are setting up shop and tending to nest building. Today I lingered over my morning coffee and listened to them, especially the yellow-breasted chats, the antics among warblers. They are big as warblers go, with solid yellow breasts and olive-green backs. Their vocabulary is a series of squawks, rasps, trills and verbal punctuation marks, which they sputter out as they caper from tree branch to bush to branch again. There were two of them over near the chicken coop; I was watching them through my binoculars and listening so intently to their calls that I nearly failed to notice that I, in turn, was being watched. A great crested flycatcher, normally a shy bird, was perched on the back of the wicker chair next to the bench on which I was sitting. They are dull-colored birds with a wash of yellow on their bellies, and they usually perch so high in the trees that the modest crest which gives them their name is barely noticeable. But this bold individual was watching me calmly and seemed to find me as interesting as I found him.
We stared at each other for the longest time. Eventually he had enough of me and flew away and I, too, left to super the bees.
I have been supering now for over a week, to catch as much good blackberry honey as I can from the bees. I have been carrying truckloads of empty supers around to my beeyards all week and today was the last of that work. By day’s end, every one of my hives had a super on it, and the bees were hard at work in them.
The supers each contain nine frames of drawn comb that the bees had filled with honey last year. After I had extracted the honey from them, I had left them outside to let the bees clean up the residue in the combs. Then I had fumigated the stacks of supers to keep wax moths from destroying the combs within and stored them for the winter. They are now ready to be filled again.
Some queens will go up into the supers after they are put on the hives and begin laying eggs in the combs there, but beekeepers prefer the bees to fill the supers with honey in a place that is convenient to harvest from the hive. They want the queens to lay their eggs down below, in the hive bodies. To prevent queens from getting into the supers, beekeeping supply companies sell “queen excluders.”
Queen excluders are rigid welded wires placed in wooden frames cut to the outside dimensions of the hive body and supers. The wires are close enough together to keep queen bees from going through, but far enough apart to allow passage to the smaller worker bees. When in place on top of the second hive body and under the supers, they confine the queen to the lower parts of the hive and let the bees still store honey up above in the supers.
Queen excluder
Queen excluders are controversial pieces of equipment among beekeepers. Although they do keep the queens tidily below, the worker bees are also reluctant to go through them. I know a commercial beekeeper with three thousand hives who says they are not only queen excluders but honey excluders, as well, and refuses to use them. I agree with him, but I don’t like having to harvest supers with brood in them—the frames that contain larvae should not be processed along with honey, and yet they present a number of cleanup problems.
I have worked out a compromise with the bees. Over the years, I have discovered that only a quarter of the hives have queens who go up into the supers to lay eggs, but there is no way to tell ahead of time which ones they are. So I put the first supers on all of my hives without a queen excluder, which is what I have been doing this past week. In two weeks’ time I’ll return to each hive with queen excluders and more supers. The bees in most of the hives will have stuffed the super with light-golden blackberry honey, a sight to gladden a beekeeper’s heart. The filled frames of honey present a barrier to the queen, and in all likelihood she will not go up into any other supers I put on the hive, so on those I’ll put two more empty supers, giving the entire hive a total of three, one filled and two still to be filled. But in some hives the center frames will contain eggs and young brood, indicators that the queen will continue to lay eggs in any other supers I put on her hive unless I confine her to the hive bodies below.
When I find such a super, I smoke the bees down as thoroughly as posible. The smoke usually sends the queen scuttling downstairs, too. Then I set the super to one side, carefully check each frame to see if the queen remains on any one them. If I find her, I gently carry her back to the hive and with my finger nudge her down among the frames in the hive body. Then I put a queen excluder in place on the second hive body and put an empty super on top of it. Above this, I put the super with the frames of brood. The worker bees will not abandon their brood. They will come up through the queen excluder to tend the developing bees, and in the process of passing through the excluder they will have become accustomed to it. They will store honey in the empty honeycomb in the first super and in the empty cells from which the brood have emerged just as readily as if there was no queen excluder there at all. But I must leave the queen excluder in place all season. Once a queen has proved herself to be the sort who likes to go up in supers to lay eggs, she seems determined to do so no matter how many supers of capped honey are between her and the empty combs. By the time I harvest the honey, all the brood in the frames above the excluder will have developed into adult bees and flown away.
I finished putting out the supers by midafternoon, and drove home. The day was hot, and I was wearing as little as possible under my bee suit. I indulged myself in a bit of beekeepers’ air conditioning, angling my arm out the truck window so that a cooling current of air could find its way into the loose sleeve of the bee suit and funnel down across my hot, sweating body. I was so simplemindedly enjoying my own evaporative cooling that I did not at first notice the rotating red light of a patrol car behind me. I pulled over, and a young state trooper came running up alongside me.
“Your pickup’s on FIRE, Ma’am!” he shouted.
I got out and walked to the back of the pickup with him to show him the bee smoker in its metal carrying case. The fuel inside was almost gone, but a few plumes of smoke still wisped from it. I explained about the bee smoker, and the trooper recognized my garb as the sort of thing a beekeeper wears. He blushed bright crimson and apologized for stopping me. I reassured him he was doing a proper job, and we parted friends.
When I got near home, my neighbor stepped out in the road and flagged me down. Surely he couldn’t think my truck was on fire. He didn’t, but he was excited, too. A swarm of bees had landed near his mailbox. Could I do something?
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I walked over to the mailbox with him and looked. A group of bees, twenty-five thousand or more, had alighted on the thin branch of a slender bush, and their weight had dragged the branch to the ground. I retrieved his mail for him, told him the bees would probably spend the night there and I’d come up in the morning to remove them for him. I tried to tell him that bees were in a benign mood when they swarm—they have no home to defend so they seldom sting—but he’d rest easier, he said, if I’d come get them this evening.
Swarms are not much use to a beekeeper; they are headed up by an old queen, and to be of any value once they are hived she should be killed and replaced. Even then, because they are starting out on empty comb, the colony seldom produces any honey the first season a beekeeper hives them. Also, they may carry disease. But beekeepers are continually called in the late spring and early summer to pick up swarms, and usually we oblige. Because most people are rather afraid of bees, gathering up a swarm is an easy way to earn the gratitude of the person on whose property they have chosen to alight. But the real reason we pick them up is that it is so much fun to do so.
This year has been a famous one for swarming. All of us who keep bees are getting telephone calls about them.
A friend of mine, a banker who also keeps bees, has had more than his share. People even come into his office in town to report them to him. When I saw him the other day, he told me he had just been out to pick up a swarm that had wrapped itself around the trunk of a young tree. There was no way to shake them into the hive he brought to put them in, nor any easy way to entice them into it. So he put the hive on the ground, got back into his pickup and began to ram the tree with its front bumper until he had jostled them loose.
A Book of Bees Page 11
