A Small Open Colony (290)

Episode 290 –  Small Open Colony

 

Jim Tew

Hi beekeepers, it's Jim, and I'm off on a beekeeping lark I don't do these kind of things much anymore for all kinds of reasons, not the least of which is this probably is not going to be worth it, but I got some good friends who keep telling me they've got a small open Bee colony, it's exposed, it's outside. They keep asking me to come have a look at it So I was thinking that I'll ride over there if you want to go along and we'll have a look and see what this little hive looks like.

I've already got two tiny hives in the buck in the yard that I'm going to have to watch die as the season progresses. I thought that if I don't need the queens for anything But maybe I'll combine them and try to make one hive out of them. If this thing appeals to me, who knows? Maybe I'll go back over and try to transfer it. to established equipment, even though the chances of it are not good. Not a long ride, and there's no reason for me to keep you on the line while I make a little drive over there. So I'll talk to you in a few minutes. When I get there.

But before I go, I need to tell you that I'm Jim Tew and I come to you here about once a week at Honey Bee Obscura where I try to talk about something you do with plant.

Introduction

Welcome to Honey Bee Obscura, brought to you by Growing Planet Media, the producers of the Beekeeping Today podcast. Join Jew Tew, your guide through the Complexities, the beauty, the fun, and the challenges of managing honey bees. Jim hosts fun and interesting guests who take a deep dive into the intricate world of honey bees. Whether you're a seasoned beekeeper or just getting started. Get ready for some plain talk that'll delve into all things honey bees.

Jim Tew

Hey listeners, it was a short trip. I told you that, but I didn't want to bore you with just regular driving and being passed by high-speed motorcycles. So here I am. So I'm here with Sherry. Sherry worked in the bee lab. She was the bee Lab coordinator. She kept up with everything. She made everything happen for years and years and years. And now we've all retired and long gone. So it's Good to be back. Say hi, Sherry.

Sherry F.

Hi, Jim.

Jim Tew

I'm really glad that you're able to do this for me and let me look at the beehive Tell m tell me right now what I'm looking at here. What is this odd planting with the fence around it?

Sherry F.

Well, I decided uh bee uh uh Plant some blueberry bushes and some elderberry bushes so that I could make jam eventually or eat fresh blueberries. That's one of my favorite fruits.

Jim Tew

Well that would work very nicely and I guess the fence is to try to at least discourage the deer. Correct. I wonder if Elderberry res I bet it does looking at those plants. But listeners I don't know that for sure. It's got some blooms coming up on it. Or it's already bloomed.

Sherry F.

immature berries at this point. Okay.

Jim Tew

It has bloomed and the blueberries will take some bees, but they like bumblebees better. Well Sherry, I'm here to look at you know what.

Sherry F.

Yes, my swarm that showed up in the backyard on a tree that fell on my fence for my bo my blueberries and elderberries. So It's pretty cool.

Jim Tew

Well it really is cool. I've never seen anything like this and it's been here for quite a while. Let me describe it to you listeners. It's about Hardly 20 inches off the ground of where the comb is attached to the tree that's laying on the fence. There's only two combs And oh three. Sherry's saying three combs. I thought I'd looked but counted two. And the combs are about the size of a common baseball cap So I'm estimating that there's maybe three-fourths to a pound of bees there. They're out in the open, they're completely exposed. Do you know how long they've been here? I asked you something about that. It's it's kind of obscure back there.

Sherry F.

here but I I noticed them about a week ago maybe.

Jim Tew

How do you mow under them? They're so close to the ground. Is that Greg's problem?

Sherry F.

Well This part really doesn't get mowed. There's a lot of shade, so the grass doesn't grow that um high and plus I've got all this wild vegetation near my berry bushes so the grass doesn't really grow that high.

Jim Tew

It's a perfect bee day. It's a beautiful day. The weather's quiet and still and You know, I'll say that and they'll be able come straight for me, but right now they are 100% placid. They're coming and going. They're very vulnerable listeners. I mean they're completely exposed. I'm really surprised that a raccoon hasn't had its way with this colony. They could do it right from the ground without any issue at all, but yet it's still here.

Sherry F.

I'm surprised myself. I have bird feeders up front by my house and I see the raccoons every evening in early morning and so far the hive has been missed.

Jim Tew

The bees are dancing on the cone and there's some cat brood there already, so they've been there that long. It's a it's a succinct, functional little colony. It would be a really happy, healthy mating nuke for even a baby nuke or for a small four-frame nuke. I was talking to Sherry earlier. We haven't rehearsed this. But when I told her that the future of this is not bright, she got kind of testy with me and says she wants to try to save them. True Now that was politely put compared to what you said before. I won't say what I said, no.

Well here's the irony, Sherry also has a negative reaction to bee stings and so when she was at the bee lab you couldn't really get her all that close to bees because She had a topical reaction that she didn't enjoy, but this is a change. She's we've been both been gone from the bee lab for about Twelve years, isn't it?

Sherry F.

Uh you're right, about that long.

Jim Tew

So I guess that's long enough. And plus the bees are in a perfect place back here. They're away from everything and Right across the way, maybe as the bee flies, probably a half mile is one of Ohio State's bee yards that that I established. I don't know how many hundreds of years ago, and then Ohio State has kept it. It's a very prominent scenic yard, and I'll just bet you that this was either a mating swarm or a small after swarm. I don't never have known the exact difference between an after swarm, a secondary swarm, and a mating swarm.

I don't know why a m a new mated queen would leave with a handful of bees, but maybe they do. Bees have their own little brain and they make up their own little minds. Well here they are that they are it's just like looking at a puppy, listeners. It's cute, it's quiet, it's very photogenic. The combs are brilliant white And the chances are just excellent that they're going to die this winter, but don't let Sherry he hear that.

It would take somebody taking these, transferring them over if the transferring process is going to be highly traumatic for them But you know, before we go into all that, why don't we stop and take a break and hear from our sponsor?

Betterbee

Looking to re-queen a hive, make a split, or build your own nucs this season? Betterbee has Mated queens available for shipment or pickup in Greenwich, New York. Choose from Kutik K9 Queens, bred for hygienic mite resistance and strong honey production, gentle carniolan queens, known for managing hide populations with the flow, or Betterbee's locally raised northern queens, selected for winter hardiness, disease resistance, temperament, and honey production. Order your queens today at betterbee. com.

Jim Tew

Let's just ask Sherry point blank. By the way, I haven't mentioned this, but Sherry is Jason's mother. For those of you who've been listening to the series, Jason's the young beekeeper man. young by my standards who came over and got down the swarm that was dying and he actually did a good job saving it. So there is a There is a good bee theme throughout this family here, but they don't have any hives of their own. Let's just ask her point blank, listeners. Jerry, what do you want to do with this thing?

Sherry F.

I want to try to save it, g put it in a nuke, and see what it does. So it's it's June. We have until September, October before it gets too chilly. and I just kind of like to see what happens to it.

Jim Tew

Well, it looks like it's got a queen. That's good. It's eas it it would be the eas a drop of honey just fell up, or a drop of nectar Something spilled up. It would be so easy to get to it that that's not a problem. I I don't want to try it today. But it's going to take a lot of feeding. It's going to take constant feeding. But you fill bird feeders every day. Sherry's also a avid bird watcher.

Sherry F.

True.

Jim Tew

So she could probably come down and Ironically, I gave all my extra beekeeping equipment to my grandson, my protective gear, so I don't have that much to give you or loan you. Maybe there's something over at the bee loud that the people there now would loan you if you went over and looked sad enough.

Sherry F.

I could try that.

Jim Tew

Listeners, I wonder if any of you have ever tried this. What what we would ultimately do? It's come over with empty equipment and empty frames, no foundation. And then we would cut out the comb with a sharp knife. As an aside, I could almost say that I had Jason make an antique hive knife, it was called, more than a hive tool. that was actually used to cut combs like this. They were inside a box or inside a scalp or inside a log hive. But anyway you use a knife some kind to cut the combs off Kind of shake the bees off into the box. There's gonna be a lot of bees flying.

If at all possible you find the queen. I would bet you that she's on the inside combs And then we would tie those combs into the frames, depending on the size of the combs. It might be better to put them back together, Sherry, just like it is there, to have three empty frames.

Sherry F.

Oh, okay.

Jim Tew

and then t try to reproduce their their comb design. Got a mosquito after me here instead of bees. And we would keep their nest design just like it is here And then we got to feed them a fairly heavy sugar syrup. You just make it from granulated sugar and the hottest water you've got coming out of your tap and then keep it flowing.

Don't give them too much, maybe a pint or two pints a day, not more than they can take because the syrup tends to ferment And then when you tie those combs in, some people have used cotton string and then the bees fret themselves over and over again for hours and hours trying to get that cotton string out Other beekeepers have used rubber bands, sometimes wooden slats have been used, but something to hold that comb in the correct orientation. So we wouldn't turn the comb sideways or anything just for a matter of convenience or cut comb placement. We want to put it back the same way so the comb inclination is in the same direction.

Then you can release the queen directly into this contraption once it's done. And then we'd need to get it off the ground more than this. Sherry, it needs it. We wouldn't want to just set it directly on the ground because it will ultimately get the raccoons sniffing around here. So we'd pull it out the least bit and give it a Mm, give it a a some kind of mount underneath to get the box off the ground. And then you feed it. And then you feed it. And then you feed it. About how high up would you 18 inches. Okay.

So it can sit on a five gallon bucket, it can sit on anything simple because it's just going to be such a tiny hive you can you can move it. But basically this is a start. I can't tell you why this little colony is here You've already been over the possible reasons with the small swarms, but it seems to have given up on finding a nest cavity. They sent out scouts when they were swarming, Sherry, and those scouts searched far and wide for a nest site. And number one, possibly, they didn't find a potential nest cavity.

And number two, possibly, while they were hanging here It turned cold or it rained and they were stuck here. And then they undergo a process, a term I don't use very often called stigmergy. It's a word that needs more vowels And basically it's an indication that something that happens was predetermined by something that just happened before that fact. So for instance, you walk into a dark room You don't go directly to the projector or something, you turn the light on first. So you follow a logical sequence going into that dark room and then once the lights turned on then you go find the switches for the projector Start that up.

So once those bees hung here for a while, they probably begin to involuntarily secrete wax What do you think, listeners, at some point with their collective mind, they made the decision that this was it? That they were just staying here. No turning back. They'd used up most of their stores. They had some comb going underway. I'm I'm there's no need to say it again, but most of you know what the fate of this colony would be if Sherry didn't take it on with the humanitarian effort. But the bees don't see it that way. If they can produce drones, they would still be contributing genetic stock to the pool.

But I don't think that was their number one game plan. I'm guessing that their number one game plan was to find a cavity, fill it And then move on. I'm not going to touch them or bother them. I see a bee with pollen in her pollen baskets in her corbicular. It's just a nice, stable, remarkably small colony. Listeners, I don't know what else to say that would be descriptive. Have I left anything out that you can think of?

Sherry F.

I think you've done a great job describing it.

Jim Tew

A man with good knees to get down on the ground, but at least it's 18 inches and that really, really beats putting a ladder in the back of a pickup truck and climbing up 18 feet. trying to do some of the things we did with that freezing swarm back at my house. Alright. Sherry wants to save it. She wants to commit to it. So either I or we'll get a helper and we'll come over and we will give these bees the shock of their little lives and see if we can successfully transfer them into establish tithe. If we do that, you better know that you're going to be here for it.

And then as the winter, spring, summer, whatever we're doing progresses I'll make an occasional comment as to whether or not it's still here or if something went wrong with the transfer process. I will close on this note. We did this a lot In years past, we transferred bees all the time, from box hives, from gums, to get them out of the pool equipment, to get them out of equipment that didn't work, to transfer them over. to Langstreth style equipment. S this cutting comb procedure, taping Using hemp cord or whatever is an old, old process.

Until we have a chance to decide what we're going to do with this, I'm going to tell you bye for now. Sherry, tell them bye.

Sherry F.

Bye.

Jim Tew

And we'll get back to you when we're going to go. We know what our plans are. I feel like a physician here making the life and death decision for this little colony.

Sherry F.

Well I'm excited to be able to save it.

Jim Tew

Alright, well you'd like you're just excited to be able to try to save it.

Sherry F.

Right. This will be

Jim Tew

All right. Goodbye, listeners. Enjoy talking to you.