Yellow Jackets Attack a Hive – and Me!

Nov12

It’s been a tough month at Golden Glow Gardens, but we’ve learned some valuable lessons. We had resolutely resisted taking honey from hives #1 and #3 to give the bees plenty of stores for the winter. Turns out we should have harvested the honey because both hives have absconded, taking their honey with them. Here is what we think happened to hive #1.

I had seen one yellow jacket buzzing around hive #1, which had never recovered to be as strong as before after we split it mid-summer. The yellow jacket eventually made its way in the entrance and I naively thought “well, he’s in trouble” thinking he would swiftly be dealt with by all the bees inside the hive.

  • yellow jacket feasting on the bee hive

I probably made a fatal mistake with that assumption. We were gone for a few weeks and returned to find the dreaded quiet hive. Upon inspection, sure enough, all the bees – and brood – and honey – were gone from the hive.

At the same time, we discovered this ground yellow jacket nest, which we’ve since removed. But it hadn’t been there, at least looking as vibrant as it was when we found it, a few weeks before.

  • Yellow Jacket Ground Nest Near Our Hives

Our conclusion is that the yellow jackets robbed the hive of its honey and drove the bees away (what I prefer to believe over thinking the bees were killed by the yellow jackets).

Here are yellow jackets attacking and robbing a honeybee hive

A nest of Yellow Jackets are not easy to drive away or kill! First I tried tea tree oil and cinnamon. This didn’t seem to diminish the yellow jackets numbers a bit. Next I went to Home Depot and got wasp killer and sprayed it – at night wearing full bee suit – on and into the nest. The nest was completely covered in foam.

The next day, I walked over near the nest to see if there were any yellow jackets. Yes, and they were mad. One must have gotten caught in my hair because after I was in the house I felt a sting on my upper ear.

I can sadly report that yellow jacket stings hurt much worse than honeybee stings and, at least in my case, can cause ferocious allergic reactions. This is my ear three days after the sting, which is visible as the small white bump on the inside of my upper ear. The inflammation and swelling went down to my neck on the side and under my chin. Tonight we are proceeding to use other poisons and I will report later on how they work.

  • hugely swollen ear, neck and face with painful redness and inflammation
    3 full days after yellow jacket sting. Ouch!!

A contributing factor to the bees leaving may have been ants. The ants also could have come in after the hive was abandoned when there were no bees to protect the comb from being polished off by the ants. Ants will eat bee larva. Here’s a video (not from our hive) showing them doing that.

Although we had used Terro baits and tanglefoot on the legs of our hive stand, we think nearby tall plants may have been a way for ants to get onto the hive stand. However they got there, we discovered ants in the vacant hive. There were even a few dead hive beetles when we cleaned out the hive. Lesson to ourselves: don’t leave the hive unattended and uninspected for so many weeks in the vulnerable early fall timeframe.

Tanglefoot has been a life-saver for our hives to keep the ants from climbing up from the ground.

We also find putting dimataceous earth on the ground under the hive (and even brushing it lightly on the sides and top of the hive) works well to repel ants. Just don’t put it in front of the hive or in the bees flight path. For convenience, we sometimes order these products online, but they are usually easy to find at local garden supply stores or even walmart or home depot.

Normally the terro ant baits work really well for us (the ants take the poison back to their nests and it kills the colony and the ant queen).

The good thing is that the hive equipment is still in excellent condition. We are going to bag it up and store it until next spring when we’ll be on the lookout for a swarm of nice, mellow bees to give a home to. 2020 will be a better season!

Probiotics Strengthen Bees Immune Systems

Oct29

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

Oct13

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

Oct6

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

Sep9

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.

Bees Foraging on Late Season Eucalyptus Nectar

Late season Sugar Syrup Supplementation

Sep3

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

Aug29

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.

Hot Sauce in Hot Austin

Aug22

With a bumper crop of tomatoes and chile peppers in the GOLDEN GLOW GARDENS, we decided to make our own hot sauce. Testing recipes lit a few taste buds on fire, but we think the result is flavorFUL with just the right amount of spice and heat for these 100+ temperatures we’re having here in Central Texas.

Lucky for us, we settled on our favorite recipe just in time to bring it to the 29th Annual Hot Sauce Festival in Austin. Come on by on August 26th, give it a try, and let us know what you think!

Angry Bees

Jul21

our mistake with this hive was letting it get too big and having an outside feeder. A larger hive promotes angry bees, at least in our experience. An outside feeder attracted bees that did not belong in the hive, both robber bees and even aggressive, Africanized bees that are more likely to try to enter and take over your gentle hive.

Our solution with this hive was to take it apart and divide it. Then we introduced new gentle-stock queens to turn over the genetics of the hive (in about 30-45 days). Eventually, the hive returned to being a gentle hive.