She's Alive!

With fingers crossed, I opened the hive today - 3 hours before I had to leave for the airport.  Roxi's hive was crazy, busy and the bees were very focused.  It's strange that you can tell the temperament of a hive the minute you walk up to it - you don't even need to open it.  Just watching the activity at the door gives you a good indication of how well the hive is working as a whole.  The girls just glide in and out with no wasted motion, crawling over one another but in a very familiar and gentle way.  Better than watching the door traffic is listening to the hive.  You just press your ear against the hive boxes and listen - don't even know how to describe this, but you can tell by the frequency of the buzzing whether they are agitated or happy.

It was a happy contented buzzing today.  Great!  As I opened the hive and inspected each box, the girls were so preoccupied I didn't have to use my smoker.  The top most super (box) was fully drawn out with wax and full of honey.  That was a good sign.  But the litmus test was whether I would see any brood in the lower boxes.  Well GLORY BEE I saw eggs, larvae, and capped brood cells.  The queen, she is alive!

Bottom line, the hive is thriving - and best of all, I was able to put a fourth super on the top.  It's not going to be as bad a honey harvest as I originally thought - because of the drought.  But it is still extremely dry.  So dry that I get nervous lighting my smoker.  I've taken to carrying a large fire extinguisher and 4 or 5 bottles of water with me when I do an inspection.

As I left my hives, I snapped a picture of them.  Here you can see the sign that Barton Creek made in order to keep people away from the girls.  You can see how brown and shriveled the brush and grass is - WHEN, OH WHEN, WILL IT RAIN?

Where is Waldo?

I went out to visit Roxi's old hive yesterday - 6 days after installing the new queen.  I just couldn't wait an entire week to see if she was still there and, most importantly, laying eggs.  When I opened the lower brood box the cage the new queen was shipped in was empty ... that was good news, but I was a bit worried that not only was the hole with the candy fully open, but the cork plug on the opposite side was missing too.  Why would that come out?  What if the cork plug fell out and the queen was released before the hive was used to her pheromones?

The only way to know was to inspect the hive.  I was very careful to check for the queen on every frame I pulled.  I ordered a marked queen in order to make it easier to find her, but I reached the last frame and didn't see her.  Equally distressing was that I couldn't see any brood or larvae developing.  I tried to rationalize that nasty fact by arguing that the bees had probably only eaten through the candy plug a day or two before - hardly enough time for the new queen to start laying eggs.  But, it was equally likely that the new queen was not in residence.

Needless to say, I was devastated as I left the hive.  What was I going to do if the new queen didn't take?  I didn't have time to order a new queen before leaving on vacation, and I didn't want the hive to raise their own queen since I wouldn't have control over the line of progeny.  My only choice was to leave the hive for another 5 days and check it right going on vacation.  If the queen wasn't laying by then, I was just going to have to let Mother Nature take it's course.

The Queen is Dead! Long Live the Queen!

At the end of my last blog, I reported that my queen Roxi was no longer in her hive - a queenless hive - yikes.  So I hurried home to tap into my beek (what beekeepers call themselves) secret weapon - the Austin Urban Beekeeper Group - to find out where I could order a new one.

As expected, I received a very prompt response - no more than 3 minutes after I posted my question.  Jim Hogg - who goes by the moniker "Daddy's Bees" - is the biggest bee evangelist you will ever meet.  He is also the nicest guy you will ever meet.  His calling in life - and he will tell this to you every time you speak with him - is to save the bees - and he's one of Austin's most active bee salvagers.  He must do 3 or 4 "cutouts" a week.  Cutouts are what occur when you discover that a colony of bees has been living and growing in your roof, in your shed, in your composter, ... and you want them removed.  People that do cutouts, not only remove the bees and relocate them to a better spot, they usually cutout a lot of the infrastructure housing the bees - hence the term "cutout".  This has to be done because you have to remove all the comb as well as plug their method of entry in order to keep the bees (or other bees) from returning to the same site.  Jim also collects swarms and finds new homes for them.

Luckily Jim is plugged into just about every bee-related website in the universe, so he was able to tell me exactly who to contact (Koehnen's out of California) and what type of bee to order.

$48 and two days later a new Cordovan Italian queen bee arrived with 7 attendants.  Jim assured me that these Italian queens are the mellowest bees around.  If Jim says it's so, I'm sure it is so.

As luck would have it, when I was doing the queen installation my husband, Tom, and a couple of his friends drove by my hives in their golf cart.  My hives are located between the 15th & 16th holes on the Barton Creek Canyon's golf course over looking a beautiful pond - you can see the two white hives above the far side of the pond that look like two little towers:

Here's a closer look:

Stuart Sargent (one of said golfers) pulled out his iPhone and managed to take a picture of my new queen right before I installed her - what luck - here it is!  It's a bit blurry (wonder why?  he wasn't wearing a bee suit), but you can see the little wooden box that she arrives in with mesh on the side.  It should take 3 or 4 days for the bees to eat away at the candy plug in the end to free her - that should give all the bees enough time to get used to the new queen and accept her.  I'll be doing another inspection in a few days to make sure she's alive and laying.  Hope so!

Bees Gone Wild.

DEATH IN THE HIVE!

I went out the other day to do a weekly feed and inspection of the hives, and in the course of opening Roxi's hive I found lots of honey, but no brood (babies).  Usually when looking in the brood boxes (the lower two supers), I can see bee larvae in various stages of development.  The eggs look like tiny grains of rice.  As they get larger they resemble wet, gushy, white grubs, and as they get even older, the brood cells that they're growing in are capped for final development - at which point they chew themselves out of the cell and become adult bees.

Well, there were no developing bees in Roxi's hive AT ALL!  Nada, zero, zilch.  That could only mean one thing - Roxi was no longer there.  And to further corroborate that fact, I noticed that the girls were building queen cells on a couple of the frames.

A colony can not function without a queen.  So if the queen dies, goes missing, or slacks off in her egg production, the hive will begin developing a new queen.  They first begin by building queen cells - which resemble unopened peanut shells like this:

Then they feed the developing larvae royal jelly that transforms a regular worker bee into a queen.  Once she hatches, she will leave the hive (the only time she will ever leave willingly) and take off on a wild bender for 3 or 4 days where she will mate with multiple male bees.  During this flight she will obtain all the sperm she will need to reproduce for the rest of her life.  It's sort of like "Spring Break: Girls Gone Wild," but with bees.

It's not a good idea to let the hive develop their own queen, because you don't have any control over the bees that she will mate with.  We have Africanized honey bees here in Central Texas, and if the queen mates with one of these smarmy dudes, the brood she produces will carry those genetics - and it's likely that the hive will become more aggressive.  Not what I want.

Better to order a new queen from a reputable bee breeder.  The problem is that not many breeders have queens available this late in the summer - they tend to produce their stock for spring when everyone starts new hive installations.

I must go log onto my Austin Urban Beekeepers site to put out an APB for new queen sources.  They are an extraordinarily knowledgeable and helpful group of beeks.   I'm so lucky to be part of it.

Stingville .....

It was like something out of a Freddy Kruger movie ...

I went out yesterday to feed my bees and do a normal hive inspection.  Normally, I open each super (or box) of the hive, pull out each frame, and check them for things like mites, beetles, chalk brood and other nasty things.  So far (knock on wood) the only problem that I've had to deal with is a few hive beetles here and there - and never more that 4 or 5 in each hive - which a really good, low number.

I opened Maybelle's hive first.  Things were looking great there.  Her girls had done an impressive job drawing out all the comb in the third super - lots of capped honey - and even more nectar being dried before capping.  I was feeling pretty darned good about things because everything in that top box is mine, mine, I tell you!

Then I went into the lower two boxes - I knew I should have closed up shop once the wind picked up, because we all know that bees don't like the wind blowing into their open hive.  But I had to disassemble the hive right down to the bottom board to see if my organic, olive oil beetle traps were doing their work.  So, technically, yes it was my fault, but I just overstayed my welcome and Maybelle's girls are not always known for their manners.  Before I knew it, 20 of Maybelle's minions were attacking my glove like ham on rye ... or bees on honey.  I was lucky to walk away with only three stings.

Oh well, you can't be a beek without expecting to get stung.  My hand looks horrific today.

I Cut The Cheese ... Literally

I've been a cheesemaker for a few years, but have always had problems aging hard cheeses.  Soft cheeses - those requiring 6 weeks or less to age - are no problemo.  I've always been able to successfully ripen them using a small undercounter refrigerator with an external thermostat to keep the temperature at the right level - usually 50 to 55 degrees.  The problem with the small refrigerator, though, is that it doesn't regulate the humidity.  Cheeses like high humidity and refrigerators don't have a means of stabilizing this.

I've had some success controlling the humidity with jars of water and wicking material - but it's time consuming and very inconsistent.  I can manage to make this approach limp along for a few weeks - which is great for my bries and camemberts.  But I've never had success aging anything longer than 2 months.

And then I discovered the Eurocave - from France - that uses cold wall technology.  This machine has been designed to generate high levels of humidity.  It's really meant to be used to age wine, but coincidentally wine and cheese like the same humidity and temperature ranges - so why not cheese, I ask?

It was a birthday present to myself - and it wasn't cheap - the big question was - would it work?

Well ... today I had the pleasure of cutting open my first ever Monterey Jack cheese including green jalapenos grown in my garden.  Actually Tom did the cutting while I did the photo essay.  It had beautiful color and was very, very delicious.  Next time I think I'll put in more jalapenos.  The only negative was there were cracks in the center.  Don't know what caused that - perhaps not turning it enough early in the aging process?  I'll have to do some research.  It didn't hurt the taste, just the look.

Overall, I'm so over the top with the outcome - especially knowing I can know work on mastering hard cheeses.  Let the curdling begin ...

People are giving me strange looks in the grocery store ...

Normally when establishing a hive the beekeeper feeds the bees in the early spring, until the warm weather ushers in a good nectar flow.  Then, when fall approaches, a careful beekeeper will feed the hive again for a month or so to ensure that the colony has enough food to overwinter.

Well the drought is SOOOO bad here in Central Texas that all area beekeepers are being encouraged to feed their bees throughout the entire summer.  Sugar water is the best food.  It's easy to make:  boil the water, take it off the heat, stir in the sugar, cool to room temperature, put it in the hive feeders.  The ratio of sugar to water is huge, though.  The recipe calls for equal parts water and sugar by weight.

Realize that a gallon of water weighs 8.3 pounds - so for every gallon of bee food, I dissolve one and a half regular 5 pound bags of sugar into it.  Consider that each of my hives is going through two gallons of food a week.  Multiply that by 2 hives, and it turns out that I'm using over 30 pounds of sugar a week!

I really should be feeding them twice a week since the feeders are dry each time I go out, but my work schedule has been crazy - making it hard to get out to the hives more than once a week.  And also, do you have any idea how expensive sugar is???

You can imagine the looks I get when I schlugg my grocery cart to the check out line full of bags of sugar.  Like a drunk covering their tracks, I tend to go to different grocery stores each time so people can't follow my sugar buying habits.

This morning the check out lady looked in my cart - full of 8-10 pound bags of sugar.  She was around 60 if a day, maybe 5'2", toting a BMI in the 30+ range, and sporting 3" of root growth.  In a sarcastic Boston laced accent she asked, "Planning to do a lot of baking are we sweetie?"

Yes, I am DEFINATLY going to have the most expensive honey ever produced.

Payback Time!

I've added a third super (or box) to both hives.  Prior to putting the topmost one on, I put a queen excluder between the lower two boxes and the new, topmost one.  This metal mesh grate allows the smaller worker bees to move into the upper super, but the mesh is too small to allow the larger queen through.  By keeping the queen out, I make sure that the queen doesn't lay any brood (or babies) in that area.  That way, the contents of the upper supers consist of honey only.

So all the honey above the queen excluder is mine ... mine I tell you!  And everything below provides stores for the bees so they have carbs (honey) and protein (pollen) to overwinter.

Swiss Cheese

I was originally planning to limit my musing on this blog to bees, but changed by blog title a few days ago to broaden the content.

I just had to share my latest giggle.  As many of you know, I am a artisan cheese maker - and have been making cheeses for the last 4 or 5 years.  For the first time, I have attempted to make a swiss cheese - Emmental to be specific.  It starts out like most hard cheeses - heat the milk, add the culture, add the rennet, separate the curds from the whey, press the cheese, brine it, and finally cave it at around 52 degrees and 80% humidity.  And so it goes with swiss, except that after a week of caving, you take it out and sit it on the kitchen counter for 2 or 3 weeks at room temperature.  This allows the gaseous bubbles to grow inside the cheese from the initial culture that was added.  The funny thing, is that as the gas bubbles expand the entire cheese starts to blow up - and the top and sides round out like a huge toasting marshmallow.  This picture doesn't truly capture the expansion, but it's pretty funny to look at.

Put another log on the fire ...

It was wildly gusty yesterday - so gusty that I was a bit afraid to open the hives for inspections since bees are not too keen on wind.  Given my busy weekend ahead, though, I had to do it on Friday, or I wouldn't have time for a least a week.  As expected - as I approached the hives - Roxi's girls were a mile a minute - the line at the front door was at least 40 deep.  Maybelle's hive, on the other hand, was steady and - well - punctual - as though everyone had been given a arrival time and dammit don't be late!

I decided to start with Maybelle's hive - it's a bit like stretching before a big run - really gets the pistons firing.  Maybelle's girls had drawn out 6 of the 8 frames in wax, but had not yet filled the comb with nectar and pollen.  I have to wait until 80% to 85% of the frames are drawn out before adding another box to the hive - so Maybelle's troops - at a respectable 75% fill rate - were not ready for an addition.  After checking that there were no beetles or mites messing with the hive and that the brood pattern was nice and regular, I topped off the sugar water feeder and closed Maybelle's hive.

Roxi's hive, however, did not disappoint.  When I pulled out the first outer frame in the brood box, I saw Roxi right away.   She was laying eggs as quickly as her fuzzy, queenly bee legs would allow.  I saw her again in frames 3, 4 and 7.  It's pretty amazing how quickly she gets around the hive.  Brownie points to Roxi's girls - they had almost completely drawn out all 8 frames - so it was time for another box.  As much as I know they will love the extra real estate tomorrowing morning, Roxi's bees were severely PO's at my disruption of their crib.  I was very glad I had double checked all the closures on my bee suit.  They were pelting me with impunity!  This picture sums up their feeling perfectly.

As I gave the two uneven hives a backward glance as I was leaving, I was reminded of those water gun games that I used to play at carnivals when I was a kid.  You know, the ones where the starter bell chimes and you try to aim the stream of water into the clowns mouth and be the first one to get the ping pong ball to the top of the tube?  Adding each box to a hive is a bit like that, but instead of a stuffed animal, you win a treasure trove of honey if you win.

The Naming of the Hives

After Sunday's installation, I left the hives alone for two days so the bees could settle in.  Curiosity got the better of me Tuesday, so I went for a visit.  I used the excuse that I wanted to add another gallon of sugar water to the feeders, but really, I wanted to assure myself that my bees hadn't decided to abscond.  I'd had a bad dream about that exact scenario the night before.

Worry unfounded ... all the bees were present doing bee things.  What was striking to me was how different the two hives were/are.  I've named the hive to the left Roxi's hive.  Roxi's hive is like Little Italy in NYC at the turn of the century.  They're loud, they gesture a lot, and they like to hang out on the front porch drinking red wine and climbing all over each other.  "Whatsa matta you?  Get dat pollen in the house NOW!"  There were always at least 20 bees trying to get into or out of the hive at any time.  And the guard bees ... sheesh ... the guard bees were like Abe Vigoda in the Godfather - ain't no one getting in or out without knowing the secret handshake.  I saw Abe take down a wasp that was trying to enter the hive - it was a violent brawl.  I'd give it an M for mature audiences.  Here's a picture of Roxi's front porch.

Maybelle's hive (to the right) is a whole different country.  The residents of hive Maybelle are very, very mellow and methodical - no pushing at the front door - and never more than 7 or 8 at a time - but they are constant.  Now that I think about it, they're like Brits - very good at queuing.  "Mind the gap!" Here's a quick snapshot of the House of Britannia.

The guard bees were equally as rough in hive Maybelle, though.  Keeping with the movie analogies, they were as tough as Dicky Eklund in The Fighter.  Dicky actually pulled a small yellow jacket to the ground and rolled twice.  Can't imagine that that yellow jacket is coming back any time soon.

But, what was most notable about all the foraging bees was the size of the bright yellow pollen balls on their legs - they were huge!

I can't open the hive and do a proper inspection until Sunday, but will probably swing by tomorrow to check out the buzz and hang out on the porch with the girls.

HIVE INSTALLATION!

April 10th finally arrived.  After four months of selecting my bee breeder, assembling and painting the hives, gathering tools, designing my honey label, reading a lot of bee books, and finding a swanky, high tech bee suit to go with my wasabi colored wellies, my bees arrived in Austin for an early Sunday morning pickup.  I ordered the bees from BeeWeavers, a 5th generation family bee business, headquartered out of Navasota, Texas.  They have a great track record of producing mellow bees that are resistant to many apiary diseases and parasites.  They also haven't used any chemicals on their girls for well over 10 years.  Since my hive is going to be completely organic, the BeeWeaver bee breed fit the bill.  (Try saying that 3 times quickly).

My girls had been trucked in the night before, and I was at the designated pick up house promptly at 7:30am.  It was VERY surreal to see 300+ bee boxes scattered throughout the yard all buzzing loudly.  As you can imagine, many bees had escaped from their boxes so the air was teeming with honey bees drunkenly bumping into everyone picking up their new colonies.  It was a good, last minute call on my part to use my son's Mazda SUV for the pickup - instead of my Mini Cooper - because I had a dozen or so escapees zooming around the interior of the car during the drive home.  Fortunately, they really liked the hatchback window and not the front windshield.

I decided to buy nucs for my hives instead of package bees because every experienced beekeeper I spoke with (they call themselves beeks) said I'd have greater success at keeping the hive alive with a nuc than with package bees.

Nuc stands for nucleus hive and it differs from package bees in a significant way.  Nucs are boxes that contain 4 hive frames, about 10,000 bees, and an established queen that have been working together for a few weeks.  There is already brood (babies), pollen, and honey in the frames - so you more or less start with a reduced, yet fully working hive.  This is how a nuc arrives:

Packaged bees, on the other hand, consist of an unestablished queen (ensconced with her attendants in her own screened queen box) nestled within a larger screened box containing 3 pounds of bees.  Believe me - there are a LOT of bees in a 3 pound box.  During shipping, the packaged bees get used to the queen through their respective screened cages - heavy pheromones are at work during these early days.  Only when the package bees are shaken into their new hive are the workers able to release the queen by chewing through a candy door.  Once freed, the new team can begin filling up the frames from scratch.  This is what three pounds of package bees looks like - guess where the queen is?  Where is Waldo comes to mind.

Installation of a nuc is easy.  You just put the four frames in the hive along with empty frames to fill out the rest of the hive box (called a brood box), pop the top feeder on that, fill it with sugar water, install the cover, and WALAH - the installation is done.  All went without a hitch - and I was lucky to actually see the queen bee as I installed both hives.  I opted for marked queens when I placed my order thinking that it would make hive inspections much easier.  Queens are marked with a dab of paint on their backs.  It stays on her for her entire life.  Color coding is used to designate the year she was mated and installed.  For example, queens installed in 2011 (and any other year ending in 1 or 6) are marked in white like this:

I have pictures of me installing the hives (thanks to photographer Tom!), but I haven't been able to find my USB cable to connect my camera to my computer, so can't yet post the pictures.  Have no fear - I've ordered a new one.  Hopefully it shows up in my mailbox today!