Genebee(ve), Shrek, and Foundationless Comb

Ever since I lost Myrtle, I've been thinking that the next queen I get will be named Jenny. It's a short, sweet, simple name, and it's also my late grandmother's name. Actually, her name was Genevieve, but folks just called her Jenny. One of my cousins said that Auntie Anna used to call her Genevee, so Genebee wasn't too much of a stretch.

Anyway, here she is!

I spent a good four hours in my bee yard last Sunday, making the split off of Maud, installing Jenny, and waiting for enough nurse bees to defect to the new queen. 

I had the full suit with me because I'm tired of getting stung. The skin on my leg from that big one is still discolored, and I'm not in the mood for another. As soon as I arrived, I went to rescue a struggling Ophelia from the water pan.  As I reached in to fish her out, I felt a little pinch right around the knuckle of my middle finger. At first I didn't notice, then it kept getting 'pinchier'. I turned my hand over and there was a stinger in my hand, with a bee still partially attached. Sonofab---! The poor little gal was apparently under my hand while I was fishing for Ophelia and I squished her. Well, that's out of the way.

After I suited up, and with Jenny's cage in my pocket, I started taking frames out of Maud to make the split. She and her girls were NOT happy to see me, and were pinging my suit left and right. I don't blame them though. If someone busted my house open and started stealing my food and my kids, I'd be pretty pissed too. Thank goodness for bee suits.

Let me tell you about a little feature of the bee suit. The suit itself zips up all the way to your neck, and then the veil zips around your neck and the zipper ends meet just below the end of the suit zipper. There is velcro there to seal up any gaps. I've read somewhere that bees will find any little gap and try to get up close and personal on your side of the veil. Doesn't sound like fun, but I was confident I'd gotten myself properly bundled. 

So I was elbows deep into Maud, making her girls mad, and shuffling things around. Bees were pinging the veil, but I wasn't too concerned. Frankly, the mosquitoes were louder than the bees, so I kept working. Then I felt something crawling on my cheek. Uhhh....!!!

Bee in the veil! Bee in the veil! Bee in the veil!

Ok, keep calm. Stop breathing. Don't open your mouth. Please, little bee, don't sting my lips.  

I slowly walked away from the hive, holding my breath, and pulling my lips into my mouth. I slowly unzipped the veil and slowly lifted it over my head.  As soon as there was clearance, I flicked the girl off my face and she flew away.

WHEW!!

I guess she didn't like being cooped up with a sweaty face any more than I wanted to 'bee' cooped up with a sting-y bee. I was lucky this time. I was extra careful re-fastening the velcro. 

I put the new box with the new queen on top of Maud's boxes (with a queen excluder in between to keep Maud in her own house) and had to wait at least an hour for the nurse bees to climb up to the "borrowed" brood. I de-suited, put the back seat down in my car and laid down to watch my girls fly around. When they take off, they do a spiraled climb, and then zip off in search of nectar. After my nap, I put Jenny's box on her stand and left both hives with some sugar water to help them get back to normal. 

Maud and Jenny!

Later that night, my hand started to swell...by Monday morning, I was sporting a paw that looked like Shrek's hand. I no longer had knuckles, but my skin had never been smoother! And yes, I do have an epi-pen now, just in case. Technically, this is just a localized reaction, but I've heard that you can develop a systemic reaction at any time. I'm prepared. 

I don't need no stinkin' knuckles!

I went back a few days later to let Jenny out of her cage. Before I suited up, I decided to take a quick peek under the lid, just to make sure there were still bees in the new hive. The first thing I noticed was that everybody was so calm. I was able to pull out a couple of frames without so much as a curious girl checking me out. I found the queen cage in the bottom of the hive, and Jenny was already out. Alrighty then. I checked on one of the brood frames and there she was, and, she was laying eggs! Wow, what a great queen already! Plus, it's really easy to find her with that blue dot on her back. One of these days I need to catch Maud and mark her, too.

While I was standing there, I popped the lid off of Maud. If she was pissy, I'd suit up. She too, was amazingly calm. Like, "we don't really care if you're here, primate" calm. Wow, this was new. I noticed they'd sucked down a whole quart of sugar syrup since Sunday. My poor girls were probably hungry. But now they had full bellies, and were working on building new wax to make up for the frames I took from them. I put in a couple frames of foundationless, just to experiment, and I was amazed at how much they had done in such a short time. Plus, I even found new eggs! Maud is hitting her stride, and things were running like a well-oiled machine. I'm feeling much better about their chances. I'm sure they won't have enough honey by winter, but at least they'll have comb built, and will be able to store the sugar syrup I give them.

There were eggs on this frame! Notice the girls 'daisy chaining' on the right.

I'm always amazed at the beauty of new comb.

This is only  three days' worth! 

Best of all, there were no stings! No suit, no gloves, no veil! So this is what gentle bees are like. My new Jenny must be a good influence. Either that, or the bees outsourced "irritating the primate" to the mosquitoes, who were simply horrific and left me with no fewer than 17 bites in a matter of minutes.

The More I Learn, the Less I Know

Wow, how time files! It's mid-July already and my girls are chugging right along.

The week before last was the annual conference of the Heartland Apicultural Society, which is the end-all, bee-all for Midwestern beekeepers. All of the bee gods were there. In fact, I've never seen more Ph. D.s in a square mile before. Turns out my bee teacher is among the revered. Her talks were packed to the gills, standing room only. How lucky I am that I get to learn from her!

The sessions ranged from super-basic info for pre-beginners, through the presentation of a multi-year research project to measure the antibiotic effects of propolis inside a hive. There was one Ph. D, Dennis VanEnglesdorp, who presented his findings on varroa mites which was a real eye opener. Varroa are to bee disease as mosquitoes are to malaria and fleas are to the plague, and varroa are EVERYWHERE.  Those who don't treat for them are spreading them to beeks who do treat, and it's becoming a big mess. As much as some folks want to remain chemical-free in their hives, and I can completely understand that, it's just not practical to let a colony become infested with horrible viruses. If your kid or dog had an infection, you'd treat it, right? You wouldn't just let them suffer. Same goes for bees. They're livestock in our care, and we wouldn't just let a cow become infested with parasites, would we?

Ok, enough soap box.  

The "thing we can do", however, is test for mites, and report our findings. Dr. VanEnglesdorp, in conjunction with my bee teacher, Meghan Milbrath, and another person from University of Minnesota whose name escapes me, have put together mite testing kits for backyard beekeepers. Everything you need is in the kit, and you just have to report your mite numbers to their website, where they're gathering tons of data about mites, which will help us in the fight against them. 

For the beeks who are reading, here is where you can order a kit: Citizen Science Project Mite Test Kit 

Meanwhile, I was able to pick up a five frame medium nuc kit from the vendor room. A nuc is short for "Nucleus Colony", which is just a smaller hive kept in order to support the larger hive, or a way to start a larger hive. You take frames of brood, pollen and nectar from a large, strong hive, and put it in the smaller box. You also move a bunch of bees there too, to take care of the brood, and don't forget a queen! If you take the queen out of your main hive, the bees will build themselves a new one. It's actually a good idea to break the brood cycle in your main hive while they're building a new queen, as it helps curtail the spread of varroa.  By the time the new queen is hatched, mated and laying eggs an entire generation of workers will have come and gone and with them went the fodder for mites. 

Anyhoo... I was thinking about making a nuc off of Maud to have another set of bees to go into winter with.  I really want my girls to survive, but they odds aren't in their favor. Meghan, our teacher, says that overwintering nucs is a good way to have bees in the spring. (They're smaller, easier to manage, and don't require as much food.) Once I got my nuc boxes built, I'd either look for a new queen from a reputable breeder, (read: Meghan) or have Maud's girls build a new one.  The best time for this is right about now.

A fancy Nuc. The beer's not too shabby, either.

The rest of the conference was filled with lots of different activities.  There was a night hike through a nature center which was pretty darned cool.  We called owls and they answered! There was a barred owl following us around. We also saw the coolest bio-luminescent fungus.  Did I mention we didn't use flashlights?  Yep, it was super dark, but our eyes adjusted and we were able to see just fine. I highly recommend it, especially for the all the wildlife sounds you'll be able to hear. Also, if you crunch wintergreen lifesavers with your mouth open, in the dark, you can see sparks. Quite cool.

We also had an ice cream social one night, and the next night there was a barbeque, folk band and a delicious mead tasting.  There were about 9 or 10 different mead makers there with several types of mead available to taste.  I had no idea there was so much variety! Most of it was pretty sweet, but I found a couple I really liked, including one that was made with hops. Note: Mead is high in alcohol content.  

The band, "Behind the Times"

Say hello to my little friend.

...and then there was a queen auction!  A smooth move on the part of the Apicultural Society; get us tipsy then auction off some really amazing queens. They even had some of the "ankle biters" from Purdue's breeding program.  For those not in the know, these queens are the superstars of the genetics world. Northern survivors, with some amazing hygienic behavior. They attack any mite they see and bite its legs off. End of mite.  There were also some of Meghan's queens, as well as some other 'famous' stock from Vermont.

Ladies and Drones... I give you Jenny! She's one of the fine gals from Vermont. 

Jenny, short for Genebeeve. She has the blue dot.

Yep. I won a queen in the auction. I guess I'm going to make that split a little earlier than I thought, but at least I have Myrtle's old equipment handy, and I have plenty of time to build her and her girls up before winter. 

The main thing I learned from the 2.5 day conference is that there is so much to learn, and 2.5 days isn't enough to cram terabytes of information into my gigabyte head. 

Here's to a lifetime of discovery!