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Mountain Sweet Honey Bees New Hive Install
Thanks to Aubrey and colleagues at https://mountainsweethoney.com/ in Georgia for shipping us a new package of bees. In this time of COVID19 coronavirus, the thought of having another hive is comforting, knowing if all else fails with obtaining food, we can try to live off our garden and honeybees.
In the photo above, I had just installed the queen in her cage between the two frames that are slightly spaced apart. I then shook out as many of the bees from the shipping container as I could and they are on top of the frames.
This shows the hive from the front. The shipping container is on top to let the bees gravitate to the hive frames where the queen now resides.
In the front of the hive, you can see the feeder, already full of 1/1 sugar/water syrup which I’ll continue to support them with until they’ve filled out most of the frames in the brood box.
I don’t have a proper entrance reducer and because of the coronavirus can’t get one, so I’ve improvised with heavy wood blocks. After this phot0 was taken, I added some greenery in the front to further reduce the entrance because front feeders like this can attract robbing bees, and I don’t want this new, young, small hive to have more than a very small opening to defend.
Happy new home, bees! I hope you thrive and are very happy here.
Planting a Bee Friendly Garden
Spring is fast approaching and if you are a gardener like me you are thinking about how quickly you can get your hands in the soil and some plants in the ground.
In Southern California where Golden Glow Gardens beehives are located, we are lucky to have a climate where our bees can forage for pollen and nectar almost year-round. Even in the coldest month of January, our native rosemary’s purple blossoms are filled with our bees.
Being a beekeeper, I always think about how I can include more bee friendly plants and flowers in my garden to make a sanctuary for honeybees and other beneficial pollinators. This is as easy as planting a small cluster of native wildflowers, herbs or a flowering vegetable garden. Keep it natural, organic, chemical free, let it continue to flower and you will be providing a vital food source for your local bee population. As an added bonus your vegetables will thrive from being well-pollinated and you’ll have a bumper crop of veggies at harvest time. Here are some simple guidelines I follow.
Choose plants that attract bees – Bees love native wildflowers, flowering herbs, berries and many flowering fruits and vegetables. While bee balm is the flower that may spring to mind first, depending on which growing zone you live in, there are many other plants that guaranteed to attract honeybees, and keep them happy at your property.
Some honeybee favorites plants (listed alphabetically by kind)
Annuals
Asters
Calliopsis
Clover
Cosmos
Dandelions
Marigolds
Poppies
Sunflowers
Zinnias
Perennials
Buckwheat
Buttercups
Clematis
Cosmos
Crocuses
Dahlias
Echinacea
English Ivy
Foxglove
Geraniums
Germander
Globe Thistle
Hollyhocks
Hosta
Hyacinth
Rock Cress
Roses
Sedum
Snapdragons
Snowdrops
Squills
Tansy
Tulips and all bulbs
Yellow Hyssop
Garden Plants
Blackberries
Broccoli
Cantaloupe
Cucumbers
Gourds
Melon
Peppers
Pumpkins
Raspberries
Squash
Strawberries
Tomatoes
Watermelons
Wild Garlic
Witch Hazel
Herbs
Bee Balm
Borage
Calendula
Catnip
Chives
Coriander/Cilantro
Fennel
Lavender
Mints
Oregano
Rosemary
Sage
Thyme
Shrubs
Blueberry and all berries
Butterfly Bush
Button Bush
Honeysuckle
Indigo
Privet
Trees
Alder
American Holly
Basswood
Black Gum
Black Locust
Buckeyes
Catalpa
Eastern Redbud
Fruit Trees (especially
Crabapples)
Golden Rain Tree
Hawthorns
Hazels
Linden
Magnolia
Maples
Mountain Ash
Sycamore
Tulip
Poplar
Willows
Avoid using herbicides or pesticides in the bee garden. They not only can be toxic to bees but also are best not introduced to children or adults that visit your garden. Ladybugs, beneficial nematodes, spiders, and praying mantises will naturally keep pest populations in check
Skip the Highly Hybridized Varieties. These plants have been bred not to produce seeds, so they also produce very little pollen for bees.
Group the same plants together – Try to plant at least one square yard of the same plant together to make a perfect bee attractor. But if you are short on space planting just a few wildflowers or herbs in a planter or window box is all that’s needed to provide more foraging habitat for the honeybee.
Pick plants with long blooming cycles – Or choose plants with successive blooms. This way the bees will keep coming back again and again. A seed kit like this makes attracting bees to your garden easy.
Select Single Flower Top Plants such as daisies and marigolds, rather than double flower tops such as double impatiens. Double-headed flowers look luxurious, but produce much less nectar and are so dense with petals, they make it more difficult for bees to access the pollen stamens deep inside the flower.
Provide a fresh water source – Bees need a place to get fresh, clean water. A pond, a fountain, even a swimming pool (especially if it is low or no chlorine fresh water), a waterfall or water feature. Fill a shallow container of water with pebbles or twigs for the bees to land on while drinking. Make sure to maintain the container full of fresh water to ensure that they know they can return to the same spot every day in your bee garden. A bird bath with plants or stones for the bees to rest on, a slowly dripping hose, or almost any shallow water source will work.
Mind standing fresh water for mosquito breeding though!
(as an aside on this topic, I highly recommend a fascinating book, “The Path Between Two Seas,” about the building of the Panama Canal. Talk about the dangers of mosquitoes in standing water!)
Probiotics Strengthen Bees Immune Systems
We believe that feeding our bees certain supplements helps them be as healthy as they can be, and supports their natural immune strength to repel things like foulbrood. Why should gut health not apply to honeybees?
Mann Lake sells a bee pattie that provides bees with probiotics to keep them strong and we use it at Golden Glow Gardens. Our bees love the patties and devour them within weeks.
Golden Glow Honey Bees Enjoying Mann Lake Probiotic Bee Patties
Nature Magazine published an article recently confirming our theory. The link to the full article is https://www.nature.com/articles/s41396-019-0541-6. In part, what Nature said is that “American foulbrood (AFB) is a highly virulent disease afflicting honey bees (Apis mellifera). The causative organism, Paenibacillus larvae, attacks honey bee brood and renders entire hives dysfunctional during active disease states, but more commonly resides in hives asymptomatically as inactive spores that elude even vigilant beekeepers. The mechanism of this pathogenic transition is not fully understood, and no cure exists for AFB. …. These findings suggest the usage of a lactobacilli-containing hive supplement, which is practical and affordable for beekeepers, may be effective for reducing enzootic pathogen-related hive losses.” Read on if you’re interested in this topic!
Six Weeks After Swarm Rescue
Six weeks after finding a swarm of honeybees up in the branches of an orange tree, capturing the swarm and making them at home in one of our empty hives, this newly established swarm is thriving. Aren’t they happy looking bees! It’s great to see them returning to the hive, legs plump with pollen.
Since we rescued this live late in the season (end of August), we were concerned they wouldn’t have enough nectar or pollen to build up a well-stocked hive before winter set in. So we regularly feed the bees a 1/1 sugar syrup, sometimes adding Honey B Healthy for extra fortification. The bees have built up lots of fresh comb and filled it with honey, which we’ll let them keep to live on over the winter. They do still seem to be pulling in a lot of flower supplies, but whether it’s that or the syrup supplementation, this hive is thriving. Last time we inspected the hive, we found the frames building out nicely with comb and filled with uncapped honey and brood too.
Here is the entrance to the hive, showing the bees going in and out at a great pace, laden with pollen on their legs when they return. We gave them some beeswax scraped from the queen divider on the absconded hive to use to renew and build out more of their own comb.
Groundbreaking Mushroom Research Gives Hope to Bees
Bees are dying. In massive numbers. Termed colony collapse disorder, the die-off counts among its causes a parasite chillingly named Varroa destructor. A flat, button-shaped, eight-legged critter no more than 2 millimeters long, varroa mites invade the hives, latch onto their prey – the innocent honeybees, and literally suck out the bees insides like body-snatchers, transmitting devastating viruses into the hive in the process.
The worst of these diseases is deformed wing virus, believed to be one of the largest contributors to colony collapse worldwide. Named for the shrunken and misshapen wings that develop in affected bees, DWV robs bees of their ability to fly, undermines their immune systems, and shortens their lifespan to just a few days. The sicker a bee is, and the more useless its wings, the fewer plants it pollinates. Even worse, the flowers an infected bee does manage to visit become contaminated by the virus, which then results in the infection being passed on to the next bees that visit that plant. As if that wasn’t terrifying enough, beekeepers currently know no effective way to combat the virus.
But in a study in Nature Magazine, researchers including Paul Stamets of Fungi Perfecti https://fungi.com/pages/bees present evidence of a surprising solution to DWV: mushrooms, specifically easy to obtain and inexpensive amadou and reishi varieties of mushrooms. The discovery has implications not just for honeybee populations, but also the food systems, economies, and ecosystems that rely on bees being healthy, such as the huge almond growing industry of central California.
The mushrooms in question belong to the genera Fomes and Ganoderma, more commonly known as amadou and reishi. The former grow on trees in the shape of a horse’s hoof. The latter have long been prized in traditional medicine circles and are a frequent sight at Asian markets and health food stores. Both varieties of mushrooms belong to an order of fungi known as polypores, extracts of which have been shown in numerous studies to possess potent antiviral properties against dangerous infections like HIV, pox and swine flu viruses.
“I wanted to see if those extracts had a similar antiviral effect in bees,” says Paul Stamets, the study’s lead author. A prominent mycologist, the author of Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms, and a passionate proselytizer of all things fungal (his TED talk, “6 Ways Mushrooms Can Save the World,” has been viewed millions of times), Stamets has long suspected that bees derive some benefit from mushrooms.
He recalls a scene from his backyard in July of 1984—the first time he noticed bees from his personal hive flying back and forth to a pile of fungus-coated wood chips. The bees, he says, were sipping droplets of liquid that had oozed from the mushroom’s mycelium, the fuzzy white network of cobwebby filaments through which fungi absorb nutrients.
At the time he figured the droplets contained sugar (fungi break down wood into glucose). “But then, a few years ago, I had an epiphany—a waking dream, actually, ” Stamets says. What if the bees were getting more than a shot of sugar? He began to wonder if they were in fact self-medicating.
Join Paul Stamets’ “Save the Bees” mailing list by emailing bee@fungi.com.
Late Season Nectar and Pollen
The end of summer August to October is a challenging time for honey bees. This season is characterized by oppressive heat, drought, and a shortage of pollen and nectar. The bees naturally start making less brood and pushing drones out of the hive reducing the bee populations in size to only the bees that are essential to overwinter the colony.
If we inspect our hives and determine that our bees do not have enough honey to feed themselves through the winter, we will provide them with sugar syrup in a one-to-one ratio of sugar to water. For the hive that we recently rescued, sugar syrup supplementation was essential because we had put the swarm into a hive with bare frames and they had to quickly build out a store of honey to get through the winter.
While sugar syrup has its benefits, it does not supply the pollen necessary for reproduction. So when late-season blooms come along, we are thrilled that our bees can enrich their diet with nectar. One of the best late-season blooms that’s happening right now is a variety of eucalyptus tree that typically blooms during August and September. Here’s a video we took this morning on a hike showing bees delighting in the blossoms from this eucalyptus tree.
Late season Sugar Syrup Supplementation
Fall is the time when honey bees run up against nectar dearth. This is when the ready supply of nectar and pollen from blooming flowers trees and shrubs diminish and the bees are forced to rely on their stored honey.
This year, as we wrote about in a previous post, We rescued a late-season swarm and installed them in an empty hive. We knew that starting this colony on bare frames so late in the season presented a risk that they would not survive the winter because they did not have the stored honey to live off of. For this reason, and to help them boost their storage of honey, we began to feed them one to one sugar to water syrup and discovered that they were going through a full mason jar twice a day. When we inspected the hive just 10 days after rescuing it, we were amazed by how much come and honey the bees had already built up in the hive. Sugar water was proving to be a great support.
We read that sugar supplementation increases the chance of robbing by other colonies, so we decided to supplement our next weakest hive at the same time. So far, so good. All hives are thriving.
Catching Late Season Swarm
Spring is the season for swarming, but here we are just before Labor Day weekend and a swarm showed up in the garden. We happened to have a hive free due to the fact that one of our colonies departed after we split and requeened….could they have returned?… so we quickly boxed up this swarm and deposited it in the open hive.
The bees were very docile (until we knocked them off the fruit tree of course). They seemed to quickly adjust and settle back down to calm dispositions.
Because it’s late in the season with fewer flowers and nectar, we filled up a feeder with 1/1 sugar water and will feed them – probably through the whole winter – to help them establish. I also have ordered bee patties for this colony to further boost their health and chance of thriving through until the next nectar flow.
Honey Helper
We enlist the expert help of Hilary Kearney to watch our hives and harvest our honey as we aren’t in Southern California very often. She is wonderful, super knowledgeable, and can be a great resource for anyone needing help with bees in San Diego area or just with information in general. She runs classes, writes an excellent blog, and has a good instagram account. Check out Girl Next Door Honey!