The White House gets Beehives

You can even see the White House in the background! I think this is truly a breakthrough for the agricultural world! Honey bee's are responsible for every third bite of food that we consume, yet not even every third person knows this fact. I think it says tremendous things about what this President wants to convey during his term with his actions and I couldn't be more pleased! Regardless of the social and political views, it is the actions they take that will truly be there Presidential legacy. I cannot say I have agreed with everything President Obama has done thus far in office, or will do throughout his term, but I will tell you this: It gives me pride in our president to know that they are a family, with a backyard garden, a swing set, and most importantly, a beehive! The White Hose kitchen isn't the only thing to benefit. The Obama's will enjoy bountiful harvests from their vegetable garden with increased pollination, as well as an eight mile radius around the White House! Not only will you get a direct benefit of having bee's but the indirect benefits to you and to your neighbours should be more than enough to convince you! Michelle Obama is the first First Lady to plant a vegetable garden since Eleanore Roosevelt did after World War II, which she called her "Victory Garden." I certainly don't think we need to be involved in a war for our President and his family to see that we've lost value in the fact that we used to be an agriculture and farming land. Mass agriculture poses threats to humans as well as to our honeybee's, so why not consider alternatives? The alternative is something as simple as picking up a shovel and sowing some seeds!!

Mission: Capture established colony in cement building

I do think the pictures really speak for themselves. Keith received a call Tuesday that we may have another established colony to capture. The owner of the building says they have been there for probably three years and have never been a bother to him, but the neighbours have begun to complain. This looks like a very healthy colony. If they've been there for three years, I wonder what kind of comb construction they have established within cinder-blocks. We will have to just wait and see, Saturday morning we are heading to Holt to meet with the property manager and see what we can do about capturing these little ladies! We also met with some, potential clients perhaps? A couple that are friends with Keith's Uncle that are interested in beekeeping. They had been wrongfully misinformed that to become a novice beekeeper you must invest a exorbitant amount of money. This is very untrue.In our first year of beekeeping we succeeded with just a single standard hive tool (A small crow-bar looking tool) and a smoker (Billows to feed smoke to the bee's which calms them and urges them to gorge themselves on honey should a fire come and they have to leave the hive). We bought a standard box hive, called a Langstroth hive, and extra supers and 10 frames for each of those supers, and foundation to put into each of those 10 frames. With all of that included with the actual bee's, we only spent maybe $200. Looking at how we have changed our practices of beekeeping in just a year, we have seen that our expenses can be trimmed even more when we construct the hives ourselves, and better yet, construct our own hive designs. But with this couples interest in us constructing one of our top-bar hives for them to use, which is the type of hive we have located at Keith's Uncle's Bed & Breakfast in Ann Arbor, we may have just branched into a new area of business!! It's fascinating to see where the bee's take you! You may just find they can change your life!

Swarm season is over!

So bee's have a typical swarm season, which typically lasts from about May 15 to June 15, typically. So we are thinking that our first year of capturing feral swarms during their prime season has come to an end. All in all it was great! It was fascinating to see a feral swarm up close and to explore another chapter of beekeeping. We captured three feral swarms and one established colony in the past month, and two of the feral swarms and the established colony are still thriving. One captured swarm did vacate the hive and we did not relocate them. Often when bee's evacuate a hive to swarm, they do not stray very far from the parent hive. The queen is larger, and also full for laying brood, so it is more difficult for her to gain speed and altitude, as well as travel for long periods of time. But with no luck, we had to let that hive go and consider it a loss. There will always be more bee's, we will make sure of that!! So to date we have on record four Top Bar Hives, and eight Langstroth hives, for a glorious total of twelve colonies! I am eager to see the progress the hives make throughout the summer. We are daring to be a bit experimental with out bee's and are using a combination of Langstroth hives (Standard box hives) and Kenyan Top Bar Hives that Keith and I built ourselves. We built the top bar hives and constructed an observation window in one of them. We have bought as well as built our own Langstroth hives, and we choose to use a combination of standard hive frames and top bar frames. For more information on top bar hives, which I highly recommend should any of you choose to explore beekeeping, I prefer this site: http://bushfarms.com/beestopbarhives.htm. It gave us a lot of information about how to work with our traditional beekeeping knowledge and incorporate more natural ways to tend the bee's and give them a more suitable, less confining, habitat. It also gives you information on how you'll have to work differently handling the frames and extracting, information is not something you can ever have too much of. Learning of new ways to house the bee's and then to see their progress is amazing! Just look at what they create and you'll want them to be happy and productive! Because that's what it's really all about; making happy bee's!

On my way to capture ANOTHER swarm!

So it looks as though we had an issue with the second swarm we captured. The queen has vacated the hive. I checked it this morning and to my dismay, there were less than 100 bee's in the hive. A small or even weakened colony you could expect to see 3,000 - 10,000 bee's, so a triple-digit population is heartbreaking. On the plus side, we did find an ad on Craig's list.
Honey bees for bud light
http://annarbor.craigslist.org/grd/1201259113.html

but they're settling for some of our homebrewed beer and mead in place of the bud light. trust me, any sane person would do the same, I'm sure they won't be disappointed.

I'm off to Ann Arbor to save some more honey bee's then it's off to the hive on the other side of Ann Arbor to set a vacant hive next to one of our top bar hives, we may get a swarm off of one of our established hives this year! How exciting!!

We've captured another swarm!!

So Friday afternoon I received another phone call from Ron, the same guy that had called us about out first swarm in Brighton, he was calling to tell me he found us another swarm! Talk about a lucky charm! He works over near Kensington Metropark in those rock quarry's off of Muir Road, and inside a weight of a front-end loader, was a rather large swarm of bee's!

This is not your usual situation in which one comes across honey bee's, but when you find them, you either take them up or the swarm will disappear within hours. It's in the bee's nature to take habitat in a temporary place with their queen while other worker bee's go out and orient themselves to the landscape and search for food and shelter. How the bee's came to find shelter in a small cavity about the size of a carton of half and half, is beyond me, but I'm glad we met Ron and got that call!

Keith and I took to the bee's with just a spray bottle of sugar syrup and a small paint brush. Sugar syrup is a dream when you're working with bee's that are feral or swarmed, because they don't have anything to protect, so they're very docile but you don't have anything to calm them about because they don't have anything to protect(i.e. brood stored in cells and capped honey stores) Sugar syrup is 1 part cane sugar to 1 part water and helps the bee's to clump together and not fly around so much in a disturbance, and it also helps to calm the bee's because now they're concerned with cleaning each other off and making the most of this free nectar, rather than discovering why you might be invading their territory. The paint brush was not so much a technical tool as we didn't have any other way to get the bee's out of that crevice other than using our hand! There is a such thing as a 'bee brush' and it is a technical tool. It's made of very soft, durable fibers that gently brush bee's off of a frame or, say, away from a steel plate, which would enable us to scoop or brush them into the hive body we brought along. We never thought too much about using a bee brush, and we don't currently have one, but after capturing that hive, we have a new found respect for the bee brush. During the spraying and brushing of the bee's from the small cavity, many of the worker bee's sacrificed themselves and stung at the paint brush, alerting us to their dislike. But for lack of better options, we continued to use the brush.

Capturing a swarm is a rush, but it's not as terrifying or complicated as you might imagine it to be. We just show up with a spray bottle and spray them down heavily, then we brush them with the bee brush, or in our case, the paint brush, then we wait for a few to calm down and not fly so directly in to us to scare us off and then repeat the process.

Something to be aware of when capturing the swarm is that it can take hours for all of the bee's to migrate into a hive after you've located the queen, and it's not always possible to spot the queen when dealing with a swarm. A swarm is a time sensitive matter. There is always the chance that you're capturing a swarm without their queen and all of your work will be for nothing; a swarm without a hive, that is then captured without a queen has no chance of survival. So your choices sometimes fall down to either "stay and spot the queen and get her into the hive" or "get enough bee's into the hive body that will then alert the other bee's of a proper shelter space, and hope that they will lure the queen with their 'waggle dance.'" Luckily Keith did brush the queen from the front end loader, but it did take a good while to spot her. I noticed her walking across the bee's with her long abdomen, and she had a spot on her rather than striping like a standard bee. Most of the queen's we have do not have striping, however we are opening ourselves to the fact that a queen will always be most distinguishable by her size and shape rather than her coloring or striping.

The genus we captured this time was the standard Italian bee, which is what almost all of our hives are comprised of. The feral swarm we captured in Brighton however, was the European Dark Bee. The European Dark Bee used to be a Michigan standard bee to keep years ago. But they are prone to swarming, and do not overwinter as well as the Italian, so the Italian has become the standard practice of beekeeping, and the European Dark was left to become a Michigan Feral strain of bee's. The European Dark is also not as strong of a honey and wax producer, therefore, having a apiary full of European rather than Italian bee's will yield you less honey per harvest.

Capturing our first feral swarm!

We've captured our first feral swarm! Have you ever seen on television a huge cluster of bees stuck to a tree branch? That's what we've captured and now have in our front yard! This will make an even ten hives, which is exhilarating considering we only had the one hive last year and we're growing and doing so well with the business start up. We're getting our official DBA license from the State of Michigan, and we've already got our business cards stocked and our information in with animal control, pest exterminators, and wildlife control!

Keith and I received a call last week, that a small mobile home park in Brighton had a swarm stuck in a tree. We were lucky that it was in a 6 foot crab apple tree, otherwise it would have been difficult to capture. We took an old hive body that we had leftover from our last years colony and were on our way. It was such a rush to see all of those little honey bee's there just enjoying their time, not bothering anyone. The residents of the Starlite Mobile Home Park said they have seen swarms around the park before and believe it was from an apiary that is stationed nearby but not well maintained. It is a wonderful feeling to see the bee's and to tell people about them and let them know they are not dangerous to you, they're not even agitated, a honey bee in a swarm of bee's is probably the most docile you will ever see a honey bee.

When a hive senses that it is getting near maximum capacity, meaning they have filled their allotted space, and must either expand or find a new larger place to dwell, they will create a queen cup out of wax and affix it to the bottom of a frame of wax or honey. A queen cup is just a different shaped cell that the current queen will drop an egg into a cell, and worker bees will move that egg into the queen cup and begin feeding it. The main difference between a standard female worker bee and the queen bee is the matter in which they are fed before reaching the pupal stage. The worker bee is fed with the correct combination of nectar, pollen, and honey, but for the queen, her diet will also consist of royal jelly. Once the queen is developed and ready to hatch, she will do so, and flee with a swarm, or a population of the bee's that abandon their current hive for a new queen, food source, and location.

Before that swarm can establish itself as a colony it must find a suitable food and water source and adequate living space. That in between period is when you will find that all of the bee's that left with that new queen will gorge themselves on honey, almost to the point where they could not support themselves by flight because they have added so much weight to their body in honey stores alone, and that distends their abdomens so they cannot sting. If you were a nomadic creature that had to leave your home, you would pack enough food for the trip wouldn't you? That's all the bee's are doing, and in doing so, they've made themselves more docile and less likely to be agitated by outside disturbances. You can stick your bare arm into a swarm of bee's and not be stung, just remember that!

We were getting a crowd around us to, and as soon as we cut the limb off the tree and shook them down, bee's were a-flying! It's a good feeling to see people your own age just standing there watching you save a hive of bee's from termination (The family wanted to burn them, which is not a good idea, they're an agricultural animal and provide you with every third bite of food.) After the swarm was in the hive body, we left it there to collect the last of the remaining bee's. After a bit of time they would all regroup and cluster around the queen, or in this place, prepare their new living space that we put the queen into.

On top of all that, the owner of the tree we cut the swarm from, is a fan of mead! A lot of people have heard of mead in passing, so it was also a prime time for us to network with people that are interested in trying our mead made from our own bee's honey! I can't wait to harvest honey stores off of the swarm we captured! Hooray swarms, from a beekeepers perspective it's just free bee's (Get it? Freebies!)

And if you see a swarm of bee's in a tree, remember pest control can't help you, but we can! Save the honeybee!