Do You Want Ants? Because That's How You Get Ants

   To preface this post... it's going to be long. Real long! Mainly due to how many pictures there are, and the fact that it took two days to complete (several reasons behind that). I'll save the honey extraction for the next post. Also, this is the first time I've done a REAL cut-out alone. Not a tree pot cut-out, this was a "manually cut through plywood, hammer/claw out nails, and be exhausted at the end" cut-out. Oh, this was also all done in a 15' x 15' shed with no ventilation or airflow, all after rain, and in the 90+ degree Florida heat. Fun stuff!

   This one was actually on the property of one of the guys painting my parent's house. The bees had been in the shed for almost two years, and were very docile, except when the lawn was being mowed. That's pretty normal and they sounded like the average, pleasant feral bees. He asked how much I would charge him, and I threw out a lowball of $50. It sounded like a pretty straight forward job, and the bees definitely sounded like they were strong, durable bees (like most feral bees). So I figured I'd sweat it out, get a nice big, strong hive, and a good amount of honey to make up for the low amount charged for the job. Unfortunately I was wrong, as you'll see later in the post. However, they did have some excellent honey, and a good amount of it. So in the end I still came out with a respectable trade of time/experience/pain for honey/tools/experience.

   Now, normally just to have an exterminator come out would be $300-400 dollars. When an exterminator is called all they do is gas the hive with insecticide, killing off the entire colony, which sucks! Not only is it leaving a vacuum for more aggressive insects (wasps, bees with a higher ratio of africanized genes), but it leaves the home owner with a giant mess of decaying bees, larvae, wax, and honey. Exterminators don't go in, cut out and clean the hive, and relocate the bees so they can help the 5 miles around the hive thrive with plant life. So in the end it's a loss for everyone except the exterminator.

   Oh, the best part of hiring an exterminator to remove the bees is that if YOU don't remove the decaying hive, then ants will do it for you. I don't really think you want ants, do you? A dead hive is a meat and honey buffet for ants, beetles, moths, wasps, raccoons, and a variety of other vermin. So in the end, unless it's an easy to access area, the homeowner will have to cut in and get it all removed anyways. So there'll be repair costs to the property anyways. Better off hiring a beekeeper to remove the bees, cut it all out, and then all the home owner has to do is patch it up. Just make sure they're not wasps before calling a beekeeper to come out... wasps don't make honey.

Day 1

   Anyhoo, on to the cut-out! The homeowner told me that potentially the entire floor was a beehive, considering how long they were there and how many bees they were seeing. It was definitely a possibility, but that'd be a pretty big hive for the pretty average amount of bee traffic I was seeing. 

   

   I did my first cuts using my ryoba saw. It's a Japanese pull saw where the sawing action is done on the "pull" motion. Mainly it uses your back/shoulder/lats. I could saw all day with this thing! Best $25 I ever spent.

   After a few exploratory cuts I dipped my phone in and took a few pics. Yup, definitely bees down there! This cut was 4 feet from the entrance, so far the hive was 4 feet wide. Pretty legit hive! One thing though, there was a pretty high ratio of drones... that could mean a laying worker instead of a queen.

   "Cut through plywood and just lift the whole piece of wood over" was the plan, but I did run into a few road bumps. Namely the NINE BILLION ancient nails buried in the wood. I cut around the perimeter as much as I could, but eventually those nails just had to go. Not only did they line the sides of the plywood sheet where the bees were under, but there was another support plank going through the center of the sheet. The first day I ended up using a flathead screwdriver and hammer to chip away the wood for each nail, then once enough was chipped away it was dug out with the hammer. Eventually I had to go to class though, so I called it after 4 hours. There was no way to do any more than 4 hours in that heat though. It had rained just prior to starting, the early afternoon sun was beating down, and I was wearing a full thickness bee jacket and hood. 

Day 2

   Yup, that's the dimensions of the hive. 4' x 4' doesn't sound like all that much, but just wait until you get to the next picture. Thankfully one of the homeowner's neighbors loaned me his saw. I'd also bought a cat's claw (mini handheld crowbar with pointy V's at each end, designed for digging out nails) for $17, so there went almost half of what I was charging. I'll definitely be charging an appropriate amount for the next job ha.

   It took about an hour and a half of nonstop hammering to get all of the nails out of this board. Meanwhile there were some agitated bees in the air and it wasn't worth missing work again due to another case of "MMA Face". So it was definitely break time, again, before tackling the hive itself. Once the comb is exposed, it's best to just go through it to the end. Stopping only gives time for the queen to get into some impossible corner, brood to overheat/underheat, and the bees to get even more stressed out. So that also means no feasible way of drinking water while in the midst of the bees, plus my gloves were going to be honey soaked. I have a "thing" about sticky hands and grabbing sticky things... I probly shouldn't have picked beekeeping haha.

   I'd brought a gallon of water with me, and 1/2 of it was gone by the time I'd taken this picture. My shirt is all sweat, no water involved there. It's right about here where I reminded myself for the twelfth time to charge a reasonable price.

   Not a bee, but this guy was pretty neat. He just chilled on my elbow for a good five minutes while on my break. I always liked the bugs with metallic sheens. They're like little transformers, and there are a ton of metallic bees too!

   I'm really happy with the picture above and below. Before flipping the plywood sheet I decided to snap a few closeup shots since the bees were so friendly. Throughout the entire cutting and hammering process they'd gone about their business, without so much as a few passes to see what was going on. Somehow these two photos came out perfectly in focus, perfectly lit with natural light, and are great closeups of the bees. 

   Honey bees really are neat little creatures. It's incredible how perfect their form is for what they do.

BEHOLD! See all those leaves? They're from how monstrously fast this board was squatted upwards. Eat your oats.

Just kidding, they're actually stuck to the comb, and I'm way out of shape. This panel weighed about 100lbs before a quarter of the panels fell off due to weight + heat. 

   This picture was taken a bit after the first one. At this point I'd established that there was no queen here. There were thousands of drones, no eggs, no larvae, and the only brood was capped brood and capped drones. The capped brood was very spotty in it's pattern and all of the open cells between capped brood were all filled with honey. This was pretty much the same exact thing I'd seen a few weeks earlier, when helping Mike out with the bees that were under the eaves of the foreclosed home. 

  What this means is that the hive had swarmed, with the old queen leaving with half of the hive. For whatever reason the new queen hadn't survived, and there wasn't any young larvae at that point who could be raised as queens. At that point they were hopelessly queenless.

   Since I don't own a bee vacuum, there would be no taking home of these bees. They were doomed to die out simply from age, and the bees knew it. There was no closed loop of baby bees taking over the duties of the older bees since there was no queen. So their resources were being entirely invested in honey and pollen to raise massive numbers of male drones before all of the female workers died. 

However, their genes would live on through the drones, who would go out and mate with virgin queens. Bittersweet, but that's still chalked up as a success in nature's own brutal way.

   Here's one of the drones from the hive that had decided that he was driving. Pretty cool looking! Very wild feel to his deep orange abdomen with black stripes, and his really neat orange feet! The "aviator" eyes are really clear in this picture as well, and by that I mean eyes that wrap around fully to the back of the head (just like dragonflies).

   I did learn some solid lessons that day as a budding beekeeper. Mainly: charge an honest amount for the effort and knowledge involved, every beekeeper should own a CamelBak, and every beekeeper should own a bee vacuum if they intend on doing cut-outs.

   After getting it all wrapped up I was ready to just fall down face first on my bed. The equipment got cleaned off, put away, and the honey was left for tomorrow. It was such all-in work in such muggy, awful conditions that I had only noticed one sting. The next day, after waking up, I counted out the stings and it was a solid eleven stings. Six in my left hand (one with a stinger still embedded under my skin), one under my left armpit, one on my left ear, and three on my right hand. 

Oh well, the stings are good for the body, and it just makes the honey taste that much sweeter.

Hive Inspections Pt.3: Trailer-Home Cut-Out & Winterfell Is Stacked

   This cut-out was actually done the day before the hive checks, and I wanted to cover it before going into the bee yard bees. Mainly because it involves hive beetles, a pest that's very relevant to my bee yard bees.

   Mike contacted me in the morning to see if I could help him out with a cut out involving a trailer home. He had a job to do in the morning, and would be starting the trailer home around the time that Algebra was finishing up. It was also right down the street from my house, so it was a perfect opportunity for more experience. My face was still swollen pretty hardcore, but everything I've read says that heat is a great treatment. So if anything, sweating it out in a bee jacket under the Florida sun would be healthy. 

   Upon arriving at the trailer, Mike joked about how I'd gotten lucky, and that it was only a small hive. Brendhan (owner of Bee Barf Apiaries, the primary removal contracting company) had mentioned to Mike that it'd probly be a good "learning experience" due to just how massive trailer home jobs usually are. Apparently the last one they'd done had been half the length of the ENTIRE TRAILER HOME. What a jokester haha. 

   The bees were quite nice, even with how rough I had to be in order to cut away the insulation they were behind. Now, normally removal is done with a full suit. That way there's a minimum of seams for the bees to crawl into. I don't have a full suit, just a jacket with attached veil, and when things are in turmoil bees naturally want to crawl into small, dark spaces. That includes jean legs. 

   As a matter of fact, one got up my jean legs and climbed as if she was going up Everest. There was no backwards motion at all, even when I blocked her off by closing off her vertical progress by gripping my leg. She was on a treasure hunt for some valuable jewels and there was no way to get her out without the jean material pressing down on her, which would make her sting me anyways. So, unfortunately, I ended up having to slap her, hoping that she'd only get a light sting in. Nope, that stinger got buried to the hilt in my knee. Granted, my face was already swollen up from the previous days sting, but this one ended up not being too bad. I also got stung through one of the seams in my glove's finger joints. However, Neither of them swelled at all, and, again, the stung hand was very free of stiffness. It was nice!

   Here you can see the length of the stinger, it's the red line pointing downwards. Those little swords are retty impressive huh? It must run lengthwise inside for about half the length of their abdomen. I'll have to look up the layout of their internal abdomen anatomy. Stingers are actually two separate serrated-edged "blades" that are positioned side by side with a channel between them. The venom is pumped down that channel and into the wound. Contrary to old wisdom, recent research has shown that it's prudent to just pull out the stinger immediately. Use your fingers or nail to scrape/pinch it out, it makes no difference whether the poison sac gets compressed. It's going to keep pumping, like a little heart, the entire time you scramble around for a credit card to scrape with. The amount is so minuscule that it's going to empty out in the time spent searching.

   Anyhow, back to the cut-out. Overall they were healthy! The laying pattern was nice, and there was a minimum of hive beetles. However, take a look at that picture. I didn't notice it at first, but do you see all those larvae with dark heads? Those are Small Hive Beetle larvae, disgusting little bastards. Due to the insulation being just inches from the hive, and being a nice loosely packed, moisture-holding medium it was perfect for the beetles. These little buggers would pupate into a ton of hive beetles, and those might be enough to start sliming up honeycomb with more larvae. Once the comb is slimed, the bees want nothing to do with it. They'd eventually either move to a larger compartment underneath the trailer, or evacuate completely. So it was a good thing for these bees that we got called in!

   This is another reason to make sure there are oil-filled trays under each hives screened bottom board. That way the bees can toss the beetles to their oily death, and the beetles can't lay their larvae in the ground directly underneath the hive. Beetles can fit through the grating, so without an oil tray it's just one massive entrance.

   The cutting out of the comb only took about 30mins, after that it was a matter of finding the queen. In such a tight space it was pretty impossible to move around enough to check all the bees. Mike made the call to vacuum them up. His vacuum has been modified so that the inside of the vacuum tube is smooth, minimizing injuries from bumping around, and the vacuum itself has a suction control. That way he can set it to the minimum level of suction needed to suck up the bees, also minimizing the friction. Instead of an open chamber and filter, they're suctioned into the above box. We knew we had the queen when the remaining bees started to cluster around the screening. That meant they smelled the queen's pheromones and were trying to stay with her. 

   After that we packed up and Mike took the bees of to their new home in his bee yard. Couldn't have gone any smoother without having secured the queen in a clip!

Winterfell

   Now we move forward again to Thursday, which has been the most exciting "bee day" yet. Winterfell is finally ready for a second hive body! 

   I arrived at the bee yard, cleared out more brush on the way to the hives, and this is the first image I saw. At first it was a bit concerning, since it was actually the day after they were meant to receive their new hive body. They'd been looking a bit crowded the week prior, but I just hadn't been able to take a long enough break from school and work to properly paint a new Deep box with multiple layers of primer.

   Thankfully though, upon giving them a look, it was just normal bearding. As you can see, they have an entrance reducer (wood bar with different opening sizes cut into it) and they simply didn't have enough entrance real estate to spread out along the entire thing. This is just typical "bearding" behavior, where a portion of the bees hang out on the exterior of the box in order to cool off and help maintain internal hive temperature.

   

   I should have taken a picture prior to putting the queen excluder mat on (gridded grey square) the top of the hive. The whole top surface of the bars was covered in bees! It was awesome! These girls are busy, and definitely need this new hive body! Now, they'll start storing honey above, and gradually transitioning out the honey frames below. This way way the queen will fill out more and more of the bottom box's frames with brood, while the bees move their honey storage to the above box. The excluder will keep, or exclude, the queen from the top box. That way she'll fill out the bottom box and I can pull a couple frames of honey from the top box once it's finished. I can't wait to taste it!

   I didn't check the hive over in depth. I saw a few eggs and lots of healthy comb from just pulling the frames up by only a few inches. The queen is still doing her thing and the colony is very happy. No stress buzzing from these bees. They were also so busy that only two guard bees came by to inspect me.

   All in all, I couldn't be happier with these Italian-Carniolans and would definitely recommend any beginner to purchase their nucs from Steve over at Bee Healthy Honey Farms. He's a great guy, cares about his bees, and these girls are definitely proof of his hard work!

The Wildlings

   There really isn't anything to cover about the Wildlings this week. I'm leaving them alone until Thursday. They had queen cells last week and they should have hatched out by now. I don't want to risk accidental damage to the new queen, and I don't want her to get spooked. Everyone I've spoken to has recommended leaving the hive untouched for at least two weeks as well.

   There was some crazy vine growth leading up to their entrance, so I cleared that and took their empty feeder jar to refill at home. Sugar syrup is being chugged like mad, so they're definitely keeping busy! I'm not all that concerned about them to be honest. They're a good starting size and, if need be, I can pull a frame from Winterfell for them to build new queen cells. 

   Most would just say "Hey Charles, why don't you just buy replacement queens?". That would be the easy thing to do, but my main goal is to breed hardy, hygienic bees. Feral bees are healthy, proven bees that are able to thrive so well that they reproduce. Remember that honey bees reproduce on a hive level. Any wild swarm is, usually, led by a successful queen that has survived varroa mites and other pests without any "help" from humans. Those are the bees we want as beekeepers. On a large commercial scale, honey is a secondary product of successful bees, while pollination is the primary "product". If the Wildlings and Dothraki can be guided to full health that will be two more hives that can each be split twice in the next twelve months, creating a total of eight hives from just those two!

   That sums it up for this week's hive inspections. Pretty busy, huh? All of this with full time summer classes and working part time, as well as making sure my Kai Ken puppy (Ren) gets all of the attention she deserves. It's a lot of work, but very rewarding. Especially beekeeping, it's part therapy, part physical workout, and part meditation. It's very mind-cleansing to work in agriculture. It gets you back in touch with a part of life that a lot of people are missing out on, and that's the connection with our roots as Earth dwelling mammals. The woods and nature are part of us, and many studies are showing that without we get very stressed out. 

   If anyone reading this thinks that they might like beekeeping, then you should definitely give it a try. It's as involved as you want it to be. Set up a self-made "top bar hive", get some bees, and let them do their thing. Check on them every two or three weeks to make sure there aren't pest problems, and let the bees do their bee thing. They'll make you happy, make your garden a lot more productive, and you'll be doing a good thing for wild bees as well.

   See you next post!

Hive Inspections P.1: Bee Punched

  Things have been so busy with three summer classes + managing four hives. I've been preoccupied getting the "needs" taken care of, and haven't been updating as much as I like. Mostly that was from having to write my first essay of the semester (who knew that a comma before "and" isn't necessary anymore) and studying for a four chapter Intermediate Algebra test in the same week. Going back to school after several years away is challenging! As a result, this and the next post will cover about a week and a half (instead of the standard week).

   It's also been quite a challenging week with the honeybees. The biggest hurdle this week didn't even have anything to do with them directly!

WeatherTF

   Florida is known for it's mercurial weather, and this week really lived up to that reputation. Storming one day, crystal clear the next; torrential rainstorms for 2 hours and then perfectly clear only fifteen minutes after the rain stops. It was like that from Sunday through Wednesday. The bees couldn't get much foraging done, so they were supplied with as much sugar syrup as they could drink. And boy were they thirsty! The new feral hive chugged a full mason jar (about 3 cups of 2-1 sugar syrup) in only a day and a half, while the Dothraki nano-hive killed a jar in 3 days. Pretty impressive for the Dothraki only having four Super frames of incomplete cut-out comb.

  The Dothraki had hatched out all of their queen cells last week, so I didn't want to bother them at all. They did their thing and I didn't inspect until this past Thursday night. I'm not completely convinced of having seen the virgin queen last week, and if I did she may have been unhealthy. The one thing I noticed about her, if I did indeed see her, was the classic queen thorax. However, her abdomen seemed abnormally small, so I wasn't quite sure what to make of the strange looking bee. In the end, the hive was closed back up and undisturbed, outside of changing the syrup.

   The new feral hive, which has yet to be named, are just absolute badasses. They are SO busy it's crazy, and there are just so many bees! At night the entire entrance is covered in bees. The queen is also the most primal, fierce looking queen I've yet to see. She's got the largest abdomen of all of my queens, almost completely jet black with gold crescents/stripes on her abdomen, and gold fur that points away from her body as if she had a gold aura. Awesome. I'm going to have to get a picture of her some time.

   Both of the above hives are temporarily housed on my patio, and, honestly, I'm not too worried about them. There are only a very few hive beetles that hitch hiked in with the comb from the cut-out, and the bees are doing a very good job of keeping them close to the top of the hive. Mainly, I was concerned about the Wildling and Winterfell hives. The weather had been very rough and I can't walk outside to the check on them every morning in the same way that I can with the new ferals and Dothraki.

The Bee Yard

  It had been a good week and a half since checking on the bee yard hives and... it was completely overgrown. The yard is on the outskirt of a farm, on the other side of a berm, and untouched by farm workers. So the only people who have any reason to visit this area are beekeepers and Department of Agriculture inspectors. Upon pulling in and parking, it was very clear that I'm still the only keeper that visits their bees.

   WEEDS, EVERYWHERE. You may be thinking to yourself, "What's the big deal? I have weeds in my yard, just walk over them.". But you'd be wrong. So very, very wrong. "Why would that be?", you ask.

   Oh no, these are not fields of dandelions. These aren't fields of clover. This is a giant field of shoulder height, overgrown, dense weeds. The stalks are the a solid inch thick on each plant, and each plant branches out into dozens of shoots.

   The torrential downpours of the last week were like Red Bull for these plants. They shot up from waist level to head and shoulder level, and they didn't just grow upwards. They grew to the sides.

   This picture was from three and a half'ish weeks ago, from an earlier blog post. Notice how the ground is mostly sandy dirt? Only a few vines/runners are scattered across the ground. There was a nice sandy path from the parking clearing out to the bees.

   This photo and the title photo are what the lightly winding 125-150ft path has become. I ended up having to go home and retrieve my machete. Then it took another half an hour to clear away enough brush to make it over to the hives. All of which was done under the burning, midday Florida sun. Not only did I have blisters across my hands from not wearing gloves with an old, dull machete, but it dehydrated quite harshly. Two massive fire ant nests sprang up in the path too. Thankfully I saw them in time. 

   In the picture above, the "table" with the aluminum topped hive is mine. Not pictured is the Wildling hive. The rest of the hives are association member hives. Right after taking this picture I got targeted by one of the non-Z bees who followed me 100ft back to my car, continued to buzz angrily after I'd "frozen", and then tried to kill the back of my hat.

   I was using my phone to try to locate it, since all I could hear was furious buzzing coming from right side of my head. Unfortunately, I was too worried about just locating it for the image to register. To recognize that the bee was actively attempting to sting my hat. With breath held (to avoid the bee homing in on my carbon dioxide) I wished it away. But unfortunately, that bee was pissed and suddenly swung around to punch straight into my face. Directly above my right eye.

   That red dot over my eye in the left side of the photo is after pulling the stinger out. New research shows that so little poison is actually dispensed, that it's better to just immediately pull out the stinger. It comes down to scraping/pulling it out immediately with fingers and squeezing the venom sac vs taking the time to locate an appropriate scraping utensil and carefully scraping the stinger out. It's pumping venom in while all of this is happening. So I actually just pulled it out with my fingers. There wasn't really much pain involved. The sequence of a bee sting is pretty much "OW you little douchebee!" and initial shock that something stung you, followed by 10-15 seconds of residual "Man, that stung", then about two minutes of mild burning while the venom takes effect. After those two minutes there really isn't any pain, just a mild throbbing at the sting site. 

   After ten minutes of rehydrating and gearing up, I then headed back over to the bees to get some work done. And honestly, it was my fault for not wearing a veil while machete'ing anywhere near unfamiliar bees. 

   As far as I can tell, the only visit from anyone else was to remove a dead-out that I reported. The other dead-out is still there, three weeks later, on the first pallet. Needless to say, those bees are stressed out. I took a peek into them to make sure there wasn't beetles pouring out, but they've all pulled back to the bottom boxes. I'm not going to touch other people's gear, but with how aggressive those bees are I'd say they're pretty stressed out.

   Now, with my bees I can do just about anything and they won't get riled up. Not once have they attempted to sting my jacket. But, upon getting behind my bee "table", yet another few bees came over from the other hives and were angrily buzzing around my veil. They even landed on my veil and were sticking the tips of their abdomens through the netting, trying to sting me! I can't help but feel bad for those bees. They're putting up a fight for survival, and I wouldn't mind helping them out. But unfortunately, I have no idea if there are any sickness and it could spread to my hives if I did manage both the association hives + my own. 

   I did what I could and cut down the tall grass that had completely grown over several hive entrances, but that's all that could safely be done for them. Just one of the down sides to an association bee yard. At least it gives ones self the "opportunity" to really think about if they really want to do this. It was a crappy experience, but I'm more dedicated to my bees after it. As the saying goes, "A calm sea does not a good sailor make".

  Anyhow

   No one wants to read an entire book in one sitting, so that's why this post is being split into two parts. The first part being punched in the face by a bee, and the second part will be the actual inspection of the bee yard hives + the really interesting going ons with the Dothraki nuc. It involves virgin queens, re-re-queening, and an even more swollen picture of my face from the day after. Stay tuned... and wear your veil!

(The right side is my normal face... thanks for asking if the right side was the messed up side Danielle)

P.S. Thoughts on starting a new health craze? Beetox, an organic alternative to Botox?