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Ed Lafferty (Fruit Hill Apiary) and I installed two packages of bees at Rhode Island College on April 13. If your hives do not survive the New England winter, this is how the majority of beekeepers reboot their colonies: commercially bred packages of bees shipped up from Georgia or other southern states.

Under the thin wooden cover a can of sugar syrup is suspended; this is their food for the interstate journey. To one side of the can is a queen cage. The queen and three or four attendants are sequestered in this small screened box for the trip. It protects the queen while at the same time allowing the rest of the bees to pick up on her pheromones. Three pounds of bees are clustered around the queen cages in each of these packages.

These are essentially artificial swarms, and as such, the bees are quite gentle. They do not have a hive to protect and will put up with some pretty rough handling. Instead of using smoke to ensure calmness, Ed sprays them with some sugar syrup. They then lick the syrup off of each other instead of taking to the air.

Step one in the installation is to pry off the wooden cover and remove the syrup can. This allows access to the queen cage which is typically stapled to the box with a piece of plastic strapping.

One end of the cage has a hole drilled into it which at this point is plugged with candy (seen on the right hand side of the photo below). The bees will eat through the candy to release the queen once they are installed in the hive body. First a nail is used to pierce through the candy to give them a head start. These packages included “marked queens” which have a dot of paint on their thoraxes. There is a two-fold purpose to this; first, it makes it easier to spot the queen amongst all the other tens of thousands of bees in a colony. Second, a color code system is used to let the beekeeper know what year the queen was installed.

Ed attaches the queen cage between two frames using a small nail.

At this point all pretense of finesse goes out the window. The most expedient way to get several thousand bees from one box to another is to simply dump them en masse. As noted earlier, they are not aggressive even in the midst of such upheaval. I was not stung during this operation despite my relative lack of protective gear.

Three or four frames are removed to make it easier to get all the bees into the hive body.

After all the bees are unceremoniously tumbled into their new home, the center frames are replaced and the hives are closed up like normally. Feed is placed above them. In two or three day’s time the beekeeper will check to ensure that the queen was released from the cage. At that point he or she can remove the empty queen cage and respace the frames, or release her manually.

Brutally windy today, but still warm enough for the bees to fly on a late January afternoon.

Anonymous asked: Groundwork Providence operates a tree nursery on a remediated brownfield. We are looking for integrated pest management solutions for our tree health. I have a bee keeper who would like to install hives at our tree nursery. Do you know if there are tree health benefits , through the lens of IPM, to hosting hives at the nursery. George @ Groundwork

The only real benefit for the trees that I could see would be a higher pollination rate. Whether this would play a role in your IPM strategy is not something I am qualified to comment on unfortunately. I’ve never heard anything about honeybees playing a part in disease prevention and they do not attack other insects except in defense of their own hives. Hope this helps. Good luck!

~scott

our hand-drawn labels…

A preemptive response to the number one question I get asked when people find out I am a beekeeper. Why this one topic is something the public is so interested in, I have no idea—comparatively speaking, winter is really the least interesting time in the lifecycle of the hive (and by extension, the beekeeper). Once the temperatures dip below 50-55F it is too cold for the bees to fly. Summertime activities like foraging, water collection, scouting etc are necessarily curtailed. There’s not much left at this point except to eat, and try to keep warm.

If we did our job properly as beekeepers, the bees should have plenty of stored honey to make it through the winter. Here in the northeast that translates into one full deep (+/- 60lbs of honey). If they didn’t store enough on their own they will need to be fed or risk starvation over the winter. There are many ways to accomplish this. In the fall when temperatures are still warm enough, simple sugar syrup may be fed. When it dips below freezing, fondant, hard candy, or even raw granulated sugar can be used. This year after feeding syrup in the fall we made a simple mixture of 5lbs granulated sugar with 1 cup of water and let it set up in molds.

Lining the pan with plastic wrap made it easy to get the candy out after it had set up. This was purely supplemental feed, so instead of placing directly on the top bars of the frames (ie in closest proximity to the bees), the candy patties were positioned on top of the inner cover. On a slightly warmer day when the bees have the opportunity to be more physically active, they’ll be able to get to the candy and then repack it somewhere more convenient.

Why the location of the food inside the hive is so important is directly related to their other prime winter activity: staying warm. Bees have an amazing ability to regulate temperatures inside of the hive, both in summer and winter. In the colder months they accomplish this by clustering. With the queen in the center, the remaining bees bunch up together into one large mass. Vibrating their wing muscles generates heat and keeps the bees on the inside of the cluster warm. Over time the bees on the outside of the cluster will rotate in toward the center, and vice versa. Because of this clustering behavior it is imperative to not only have ENOUGH food in the hive, but also to hive it located where it is easy for the bees to reach. Going into the winter, the brood chamber of a 2-storey Langstroth hive should be in the bottom deep, with most of the entire top consisting of stored honey and pollen. There should be a bit of empty space on the center frames to allow the queen a place to lay eggs. As the food supply dwindles, the entire cluster will keep moving upward to get to the food stored above it.

This actually blooms in the spring. The bees don’t pay too much attention to it, but as you can see, it apparently does provide nectar and at least an incidental amount of whitish pollen.

Bonus:this trap will attract and kill yellowjackets as well.

click photo to enlarge