Bad Bee News

Anson says we had a beemergengy, that we had to act beemediately and that it was unbeelievable but I just said you've got to bee kidding me.  A little less creative.  We indeed had some bad bee news this weekend.  It started out on Friday for our first real beekeeping activities.  Like I said in a previous blog post, the main responsibility a beekeeper seems to have is to ensure the queen is alive and well.  The way to check for this would ideally be to find her but that is challenging among tens of thousands of bees.  The other way is to find eggs, larva or caped larva.  This evidence of brood would lead the beekeeper to the conclusion that there was a healthy queen laying recently.  Well, on Friday when we checked we did not see any evidence at all of brood.  We called Poppop and then a mentor from the Wake County Beekeepers Association and determined that there was no queen and that the only option we had to save the remaining bees would be to combine the hives down to one hive.  Anson and I are both so disappointed.  However, this has been and will continue to be a good learning experience!

Where did our queen go?  Well, it seems we never actually had a queen.  We can conclude this by looking at the development cycle of a worker bee:

Poppop told us that he had replaced both hive's queens before giving them to us.  To do this, you can make a new queen or you can buy one from an apiary.  Poppop buys his from Mr. Tapp of Busy Bee Apiaries in Chapel Hill.  They mail him a queen in a tiny box.  First, he has to locate the old queen and remove her.  Then there is a process to introduce the new queen.  For our hive without a queen he said that he was never able to actually locate the old queen and that obviously the bees must have rejected the new queen.

A hive cannot survive without a queen.  So, what we had to do was combine the hives.  The upside to this is that the one hive will be more populous, stronger, and get an earlier start in the spring.  We can then divide the hives back into two.  My bee mentor said he'd come help me do that.  We'll have to buy or make a queen. I have no idea how to do any of this so it will be fun to learn.

The hives we started with each had 2 boxes.  To combine them we had to break down the weak hive into just one box and introduce it to the strong hive.  Each box has ten frames.   We chose the ten choicest frames that were the heaviest with honey to leave with the bees and were supposed to remove the other ten and store for the winter.  Before storing, however, Poppop recommended we leave the frames in the freezer overnight to sort of sanitize them.  We have a very small fridge and we had plans so we decided, stupidly, to leave the box of frames on the porch to deal with when we got home later.  Well, oh my god, was that a mistake.  We came home to a cloud of bees.  It was insane.  It was actually very alarming.  Our awesome neighbors said they could hear the roar of bees buzzing from their porch.  I took a 15 second video of the feeding frenzy that was ensuing on our porch to share with you:

Luckily the bees all go home at night so we let the chaos continue and went to have dinner and see Batman with friends.  We came home later and the box was free of bees.  We put it in a trash bag, took a couple out for the freezer and put the rest in the shed.  Everything is much calmer now.  And still no stings for either of us.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of dead bees out by the hive.  It makes us sad.  I'm not sure why there are so many dead but there's enough I probably need to sweep them all away.  Hopefully everything is going OK and there will bee no more problems.

Why keep bees?

You may be wondering why someone would want to keep bees.  Anson and I asked ourselves that question during the bee-filled van ride home to Raleigh.  Comedian Eddie Izzard has some funny things to say about keeping bees:

Well, there are many reasons one would want to keep bees.  Here are the top reasons Anson and I are interested, listed in order of importance to us:

1. Honey -- The benefits of honey are plentiful and there's even a website dedicated to the benefits-of-honey.com but to name a few:
• Immune system booster; Antioxidant; Probiotic
• Potential allergy immunity 
• Sore throat relief
• Good for your skin: heals wounds and burns, moisturizes 
• Delicious
2. Connect with nature
• I've read that beekeeping reduces stress (but I have no stress!)
• Anson and I saw a new bee emerging from its cell today.  They have to chew their way through their wax cell to get out as adults.  It was almost emotional to watch.
3. Education
• Bees are fascinating! I'll make a blog post on why later.  I've been making a list of cool facts to share.  I'll also try to take pictures of bees doing bee things.
4. Easy and rewarding hobby
• Bees are low maintenance and require minimal effort and time to keep
• Honey is a great gifts for loved ones
• Beeswax can be used to make candles, lip balm, hand salve, and more.  I think we'll likely make candles and not the latter two but we could if we were so inclined! 
5. Pollination
• I heard in a documentary that 40% of our food is dependent on bees in some capacity.  75% of the US's fruits, nuts and vegetables are pollinated by bees.  Pollination is so critical to our food supply that bees are shipped all over the US to crops as they come into season.  This has become a $15B industry.  If you think about the need for pollination for our food sources, you'll see that bees are critical to our world.  For example, without bees to pollinate alfalfa we would have no hay to feed cattle.  Circle of life stuff.  But Anson and I are just happy that our gardening neighbors will benefit.  We also want to plant blueberries next year.
6. Bees are in trouble and need our help! 
• In 1940 there were more than 5 million managed bee colonies.  Today there are less than 2.5 million. The following things are putting bees at risk 
• Colony Collapse Disorder
• Increased use of pesticides 
• Invasive parasitic mites and beetles
• Other theories abound for the vanishing bees (such as cell phones) but I won't name them all

Citation 

Citation II

And of course lots of wikipedia