Photo and Video of Bees Drinking from Chicken's Water

( On this still photo, above, you can see the tongue of the second bee from the bottom.)

The chickens enjoy drinking out of the bee's water source. It seems that turn about is fair play.

The New IPM Screened Bottom Board

On March 21st, I took the hive off the solid wood bottom board that had served as the hive bottom for the first year, and replaced it with a fancy "Country Rubes" screened IPM bottom board. IPM stands for Integrated Pest Management, and indicates that this is a natural way of helping control the mite population. The mites fall through the screen and have a hard time getting back into the hive.

Also, there is a plastic sheet that can be used to either close up the hive a bit or to count the mite population. To do a count, you make it a sticky board by putting some sticky substance on it, put it under the hive for a couple days and then count the number of mites per square inch that are adhered to the surface.

I haven't used it as a sticky board, but I did leave the plastic sheet in from March 21 to April 5. When I took it out, it was mostly covered with pollen.

There were also a few Varroa mites strolling around on the board amidst the pollen, my first face to face encounter with them. They are not much bigger than the period at the end of this sentence, little brown spots that can wreak havoc in a hive if their population gets too high.

I'm leaving the plastic sheet out for a while to improve air circulation, which should help with the general health of the hive.

One thing I enjoyed when I opened up the little slot to take the plastic sheet out of the bottom board...the wonderful smell of beeswax and honey that came out of the hive. MMmmm.

Swapping out the Sugar Water

We gave the bees their third quart of medicated sugar water today. They will get up to one more quart to treat their Nosema prior to the beginning of the honey collecting season. The assistant beekeeper is pictured actually making the swap.

**You may have noticed by now that in most of the blog, the so called "assistant" is doing most of the work. This is a little trick I learned from watching Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom as a child. I always remember the older man's voice saying things like, "And here is my assistant wrestling a boa constrictor on the edge of the swamp. A matter of life and death as he tries to avoid being squashed by the mighty constrictor or drowned in the process."

Drinking

The bees have to have a water source. If you don't provide one close to the hive, they'll go right to your neighbor's kiddie pool, which the neighbors tend to find a bother.
My little bee pond is simply a plastic bucket with some rocks in it. The rocks provide a landing strip to prevent drowning. With the recent rains, the water in the bucket had gotten pretty deep, so I did have a few drowning victims this week.

I went out after taking these pictures and cleaned out the water bucket and put in fresh water. The bees are making good use of their little mini-pond today, with sometimes four or five bees at a time collecting water to take back to the hive.

According to the scientists who study these things, water collecting bees just collect water. Some members of the hive will focus on harvesting nectar and pollen, others will just bring back water to share. Today is a big water collecting day, with the temperature outside a little over 70 degrees F.

Switching the Hive Bodies, New Bottom Board

Before: After:

(1) Come spring, if you have two deeps (two hive bodies, or two boxes), the bees will have mostly moved up into the top box. We switched the top and bottom boxes to give them upwards room to grow. The queen's job in spring is to make lots of baby bees to do the work of the active season. (I'm not counting the very top box in this account, since it is a feeder rather than a hive body.)

(2) There were still two frames full of honey on the outside of the inhabited box...one on either side. Since the bees still cluster in the middle when it is cold, they can't get to the honey if it is outside the cluster, so we took those frames and switched them with the two center frames of the emptyish box, which puts them now right above the cluster of bees. Top and center, ready to eat.

(3) We replaced the solid wood bottom board with a fancy screened bottom board. The screen will allow more ventilation, and will also help with reducing pests in the hive and doing studies to see how many mites and beetles and such are in the hive to begin with.

More on that later.

(4) The mason jar sugar feeder is still in that top box. It was a quarter full earlier in the week and was empty today. I'll make some more sugar water in the next hour or so to put in there tonight. We'll medicate the sugar water again to treat their ongoing stomach bug...see the telltale poopage on the front of the hive in this last picture?

Stomach bug or no, there were LOTS of bees in the hive. They're looking healthy and active on the whole.

Bugs and Babies

Good news and bad news in the bee yard. First the bad news. I think my bees have Nosema, a stomach bug common in spring. Bees get it when they've been cooped up in their hive during cold spells. The brown smudges around the entrance indicate they might have upset tummies. The first good news...I have medicine for them. I mixed in 1/4 teaspoon of Fumagilin-B with their next bottle of sugar water, so they'll take it with their food. We put this bottle of medicated food on this afternoon.

Better news...while we were out there, we inspected inside the hive and found many good things. The picture below shows the nursery...with shiny white larvae and tiny white eggs and brown capped brood. Plus nurse bees attending the babies. The eggs and larvae indicate that the queen is alive and well....but there was also a brief queen spotting. She ducked down in the hive before we could take her picture, but she is definitely in there!

More good news...the bees have lots of stored pollen (the bright yellow patches, below) and honey. The honey on this picture is the dark brown to the right.

This is the top of the assistant bee keeper's head, and a whole frame of honey.

Soon we will go back out and switch the hive bodies, putting the now empty lower box on top and the active top box on bottom. Bees like to move UP. We'll also switch out the solid wood bottom board for a fancy screened bottom board. More on that later.

March 1 snow

The bees are snuggled in their hive...hopefully 92 degrees in their cluster. We went out once last night and once today to poke the snow out of their entrance hole. Last night there were two bees frozen in the slush at the entrance.