Observing Small Details with Anne Frey (197)

Episode 197 – Observing Small Details with Anne Frey

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Jim Tew: Hi, listeners. Jim Tew here. Maybe you don't recognize my voice. I'm sick. I've actually got COVID, but the show's got to go on. Thursday comes around no matter what. I've got my good friend and beekeeping authority here, Anne Frey, from Betterbee, who's agreed to talk to you today about some of her best experiences she's had this summer working bees. I'm going to let her fly the ship today. I'll say hi throughout the thing. If you hear sniffing and coughing in the background, that's me. I'm fine. Don't worry about it. Anne, introduce yourself and tell us what you're going to do today.

Anne Frey: Okay, Jim. Anne Frey, I am the head beekeeper, teacher, and videographer at Betterbee in Greenwich, New York. I'm confused because, first, you say you're sick and then you say you're fine. I'll do the show today, and hope that you get better, Jim.

Jim: I'm confused too if I said I was fine. We'll ask our executive editor to take that out because I am not fine. I feel terrible for a whole list of reasons. Anne, have a good time.

Anne: Thanks, Jim. Take it easy.

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

Anne: Hi, folks. Today, as a concept for Honey Bee Obscura, I undefined wanted to talk about the fun little things that you can just see by looking really closely at your bees. You have your normal inspections. You have chores to do, but sometimes while you're doing it, you just get lost in staring at the little things. If you don't let yourself get distracted from the task, you can do both at once.

I wanted to share with you some interesting things that I saw this year. A few of them were for the very first time ever, and I've been keeping bees for a long time. It's cool to see brand-new things. The earliest thing I saw was back in the spring when the rounds of brood were maturing in such huge numbers that a whole swath of bees had emerged in one area on a frame I was examining. They had probably just emerged within the past few minutes before I picked it up because the edges of the cells were still ragged looking.

Down inside the cells, there was something that I didn't understand. It was little, whitish remnants. At first, I thought this must be mite droppings. The guanine from mites, but it didn't quite look that. I asked David Peck and he took a close look and he explained it was the remnants of cocoons that large number of bees had left behind as they ate their way out and started walking around looking like bees. Cocoon remnants, they just looked like little wrinkled bits of Saran wrap or cellophane. Little tiny bits inside in a wrinkly look.

That was a new one on me. Then I also learned that these cocoons that they make, down inside their cells when they're metamorphosing, and I always explain that to new people or non-beekeepers as similar to a butterfly being in their chrysalis or a moth being in their cocoon, and they're just not eating anymore. They're just transforming and growing their legs and wings, et cetera. They're antennae. They really have a wrapping around them.

The bee, it's a solidification of this liquid protein stuff that they exude after their cell is capped over. It just gets smeared all over them because they turn around and around inside there. It's not like a cocoon with silk threads or anything like that, but we call it a cocoon. That was all very interesting and deep-down knowledge that I had no concept of before this year, and I've been doing this stuff since 1989. I just love learning the new stuff.

Another thing I saw recently, which nearly blew my mind, was I was sitting into a queen-rearing class and they had the larvae that people had grafted into their little cell-based cups. You could view it on a camera that they had set up, and then on the screen on the wall, you could see your own graft and see how you did. Did you injure the larva, or did you get a larva that was too big?

People would look at them. I looked up at the screen while I was waiting in line to get my graft to the camera and the larva was breathing. I don't know why that amazed me so much, but these holes or stomata down the side of length of its body, they were opening and closing. It glistening. I went, “What?” I was just so jazzed when I saw that. I know they must breathe. They're living. Then I learned that they keep them closed on their downside because that side is laying in the pool of royal jelly. They keep them opening and closing on the upside, the side we are staring at so rudely with our cameras.

What else have I seen recently? I swear, at the end of the year here, it's early fall, those bees are sticking the entrances shut. They're gluing everything together. When you see propolis on the hive and you see how stretchy it is when it's warm or how crackly strong it is when you open a hive when it's cold, you see how much of it there is. It seems odd that when you see the bees, the workers with it coming in the door on their legs, the resin that they've collected from shrubs or trees, I'm thinking, why don't we see this more often? These little glisteny, amber balls on the places where they usually carry the pollen balls. Why don't we see that more often? There's so much propolis coming in.

I hope that you can catch that sometime when you're watching your bees to see these just shiny, pretty, little balls on their back legs. It's just a rare thing in my experience, though we do have a lot of propolis. They must be really secretive about it or come in close to evening or something when I'm not looking at them. Mostly all of our bee work before early evening.

Speaking of pollen on legs, everybody's seen them flying in with their double balls of pollen. Right now, they're mostly bringing in goldenrod pollen here in New York. Some other pollen is whitish, which is from a plant we call jewelweed. I think maybe everybody calls it jewelweed. That's about it right now. There's a little asterisks blooming, but you've seen these pollen balls. What they do is they put their back legs down into a cell in a bizarre way. It looks like a worker acting like a queen. She's squatting near a cell and she's really still for a bit.

What she's doing is rubbing her back legs together and knocking those two balls off into the cell. Then she just walks away and she goes back to foraging and the balls are left there until some other worker that's on indoor duty comes along and headbutts them, rams them right down into a flat compact storage. Then more comes in and more comes in. Sometimes you'll see layers of it.

If you're lucky enough to have an observation high with some comb built sideways on the glass, these layers are really cool. If you pick up a frame and all these little tiny balls fall out, sometimes it's because they haven't packed it in yet. I'm going to take a little break here, talk to our sponsors, and I'll be back.

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Anne: Welcome back. We've just been talking about interesting small things that you accumulate as you stare at your bees for more and more days or months or years. We're touching upon the pollen, how the bees bring it in, how they pack it into cells after they kick it off their legs. Just keep watching. One time we found bees bringing in bright blue pollen. We actually put that on our Facebook page, a picture of a bee with blue pollen. Somebody in town alerted us that that was their ornamentals that they were growing.

It's very unusual. When you see those odd colors, it's usually somebody's ornamentals or domestic plants, not out in the wild in Mother Nature. Mother Nature's plants, that's the masses, the same colors coming in all the time, mass quantities of pollen. Unfortunately, you can't see the nectar they're carrying in because they carry it internally. I want to talk about a few other kinds of pollen. Milkweed, which bloomed for us back around Fourth of July for a few weeks. There's a lot of kinds of milkweeds, folks, but what I'm talking about is the common one. It's got a big ball-shaped purplish-white group of flowers made up of probably hundreds of little flowers.

Sometimes at that time, we have customers or worried students tell us that their bees have come home and they have this strange thing on them, this little yellow sticky thing is stuck on them. They're very observant people to see that because it doesn't happen all the time, but it's something that happens when bees visit milkweed. The pollen structure is shaped like a wishbone or a V.

Sometimes the bees that are getting nectar, or I think it's when they're getting nectar, they're accidentally hit by this pollen structure, or it breaks off of the milkweed and it's stuck on them. They fly home with it and it's just this golden yellow V thing stuck to them. Then other bees help them get it off. For a little while, you might see that either at the door or on a frame that was close to the entrance that you had pulled up to look at and they were crawling on it.

That's the pollen structure of milkweed. You'll see that sometimes. The thing that we're seeing much more right now is something that also worries people. They're worried about it because it looks like mold or maybe some disease. It's a whitish stripe down the back of the worker bees. Sometimes it gets an hourglass shape, but that's because of the dome or the ball shape of the bee's thorax. As the pollen is getting wiped off, it starts to look like an hourglass. It might be right across their head and right down their thorax and abdomen, a white stripe.

That's from jewelweed, which is a plant blooming up here in mid-September. Jewelweed is about three, maybe five feet tall, has very pretty flowers, about an inch long, yellow or orange, and they're really deep, like a deep vase. The bee crawls right in, and she ends up getting dabbed on her back with pollen. They collect the pollen on their legs, too, but they go home with it on their back in a big stripe. You'll see it at the entrance or right inside until other bees clean it off.

Wandering around, looking at the flowers and seeing the strange things like that, this orange or yellow jewelweed has got white pollen. Milkweed, which is purple, has yellow pollen. When you're botanizing or walking around watching your bees on things, you learn odd things like that. Spotted knapweed is another good fall flower around here. It's related to starthistle, I think. The pollen for that is white. The plant itself, the flowers are pinkish purple, but that's a great fall plant for us.

What else is a tiny little thing that I've seen recently that has struck my notice? A queen recently that had the smallest abdomen I've ever seen. We barely could find her. We actually thought that this nuke we made didn't have a queen, but clearly, it did because there was eggs. When we found her, she just looked a little bigger than a worker, but she had the most amazing brood pattern. Dense, prolific. Just keep watching. Keep observing, folks. You'll see things that surprise you, and they don't seem to follow the rules.

Another thing around this time of year is a smell that you might observe in your bee yard. You never smell it anytime else or anywhere else, except maybe in the boys' locker room, you might smell it because it smells like dirty socks, basically. Beekeepers love to smell this smell because it's the smell of goldenrod nectar curing into honey. You might not smell it until around supper time each afternoon, but if there's a lot coming in, you may smell it in the middle of the day. It is a weird scent, but don't worry, it's just goldenrod being cured, and the honey is not going to smell like that at all.

Another thing that we've seen recently, not every day, but if you're watching a whole lot of different hives, you'll see that the drones are more and more being kept out. There's a lot more workers than drones. When a drone is tussling with a worker and they fall to the ground and the worker is like, "No, you're not coming in this landing board and entering this hive." The drone might not be dead, but he is tired.

Then he tries again, and some other workers tussle with him and fall to the ground and tell him what's what. Then they go on about their business. Then there's a tag team. Those drones, they're kept out because the workers don't want to have them in there just eating honey all winter, I suppose. I suppose it's an evolutionary thing that the ones that ejected the workers were the ones that live with us today.

One time when I had an entrance reducer on already, a mouse guard entrance reducer, the pile of drones was really obvious because the holes that the bees could go in were just about a third of the entrance. There was a pile of drone on each corner away from the actual entrance. Just mounds of sad drones who couldn't get back in. It was pathetic. If you stare at your entrance for very long, sitting off to the side, or you're even holding a frame while you're doing an inspection, you might see one or two yellow jackets on the frame just because they landed while you were inspecting or trying to go in the entrance or even succeeding going in the entrance.

This is mainly just because that's what catches your eye. You're like, "Hey, that's different, and it's not part of the pattern." You're seeing the yellow jacket. Don't let that make you think that only yellow jackets come along and rob. Honeybees do a lot of robbing. Be aware that during this robbing season, the end of summer, early fall, don't inspect the way you used to inspect in June and July. Be prompt.

Don't put frames down on the ground leaning against the hive. Cover the hive if you have to step away for even a minute or two. I think in a way, we're insect racists, and we focus a lot on the the occasional fly, or praying mantis that we see perched on the entrance, or yellow jacket dashing in. It's those sneaky honeybees from strong colonies that also do a lot of robbing. Be alert.

Jim: Anne, truthfully, I've had a nice time. I could just sit here and keep my nose dry and keep my mouth closed and let you take all the risk and people can write you and say, "Whoa, I don't agree with that," or they can write you and say they do agree with that. Thank you so much for helping out. It was really a change for the listeners. It was a change for me. I always enjoy talking to you.

Anne: Thanks, Jim.

Jim: It was really hard keeping my microphone turned off. I wanted to cut in on several occasions and make comments and offer support, but I stayed quiet.

Anne: Admirable self-control.

Jim: Hey, listeners, thanks for your patience with me. I promise I'll be all better. I hope you thank Anne appropriately. She's really done a nice job filling in for me today and actually carrying your own weight. Nice job, Anne. Nice job.

Anne: Hey, you're welcome, and thanks for having me, Jim.

Jim: I'm sure we'll do it again sometime. I'm not a young man. I'll plan on sickness about once a month. That's okay.

Anne: That's grim. Maybe you should take a nap.

Jim: All right. All the best to you, Anne. All the best to you, listeners. Bye-bye.

Anne: Bye now.

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