Babysitting the Bedlamites

     A week ago Saturday (May 11th) we celebrated my son James' birthday. The party was held one day early as his actual birthday fell on Mother's Day this year. We had a little cookout at our house. I flipped burgers in the back yard. Linda made her wonderful potato salad and strawberry lemonade. We had two cakes. James' favorite cake is a dirt cake and he has had one on his birthday for years. Beth also made a coconut cake for the benefit of those looking for a more traditional cake. Dirt cake is a lot closer to pudding than cake. Following the customary cake and ice cream I was presented with an opportunity to babysit their children while James and Beth went to attend a Mystery Dinner Theater. I am always happy for the opportunity to spend quality time with grandkids so it was a pretty easy sell for them.

      While at the Tunnell home in Monroe I got to see first hand how the kids have been developing their climbing skills. I wonder if Grandma Cozy has told them the story of how she used to climb trees when she was a little girl.  When she lived in Detroit, Michigan there was a man who lived near them who would pay Grandma Cozy a nickle to climb down from the tree.  That was probably pretty easy money to a six year old. 

John Wesley Tunnell

Lucy Tunnell

    After the tree climbing demo we took a walk around the neighborhood so the kids could introduce me to the local characters and show me all of the finest tourist attractions in their part of Monroe.  The local characters consisted of Bruce and Captain.  Bruce being the rather outgoing owner of Captain, a large and very friendly golden retriever. Captain gave John such a face washing that would do any mother proud. Oddly enough, John didn't seem to mind having the mother of all lick washings.  The ultimate destination of our little walk was the bowling ball house. I have to admit I had a difficult time imagining just what I would see.  As it turned out, the bowling ball house is simply bowling balls run amok as lawn and garden art. There were probably close to 100 bowling balls stacked and placed throughout the lawn and garden area of the house. While on one hand it was kind of cute. On the other hand I don't think I want to try this at home.

Bowling Balls and Wheelbarrows

Bowling Balls and Tree

Bowling Balls and Bushes

     While I was driving to church early in the morning of May 12th, Mothers Day, I noticed this hot air balloon.  As it happened it passed very close to my route to church so I couldn't resist pausing for a few photos. I have no desire to go up in a hot air balloon but they rate pretty high on the picturesque scale. I'm glad that someone is nuts enough to want to ride in them.

Autumn's Bees and Chloe's Bees

   I was able to examine some of my bee hives this past week. It was nice to have so much warm weather. I don't recall ever having a full 10 or 12 days in a row in which the highs were in the 70s in May. Usually we don't even get that kind of weather until late June. The warm weather is nice for working the bees. I can't do hive exams at temperatures below 60 without risking the brood being chilled. The warm weather has been good for the fruit trees too.  At this point I have good fruit set on all five of my sweet cherry trees and the Asian pear. I'm assuming the apples will all be well pollinated as they bloomed when the weather was so lovely.  The only negative so far on the fruit front is my very earliest plum. I have three varieties grafted onto my plum tree. The earliest, Shiro, bloomed before the weather warmed up and I have only a few plums developing on those two limbs. I'm hoping that I've done better on the two later plum varieties.

    On Friday (May 10)I looked at the package I had installed for my grand daughter, Autumn, on Friday, May 4th. I was very pleased with their progress considering I had just installed them in the hive six days earlier.  The bees had made very good progress on drawing out the comb on the middle five frames.  In beekeeping lingo "drawing out comb" means the bees are making wax and building the honeycomb in which the queen lays the eggs, the brood (baby bees) develop and the pollen and nectar are stored. I took photos with my iPhone and was amazed at the results.

Good progress for just one week

Note the different colors of pollen

The cells at the top are filled with pollen. Eggs can be seen at the bottom of the middle cells..

Queen Autumn the First

     I looked at Chloe's hive on Saturday.  This hive is from a swarm I had hived on Tuesday morning (May 7).  The bees were making very good progress drawing out comb and had stored a lot more nectar than they could have gotten from the small amount of syrup they had taken from the feeder. The bad news was that there was no evidence of a queen.  Considering how well they had drawn out the comb I should have been able to find some eggs. Usually when I hive a swarm they turn out to have a laying queen.  On rare occasions, the swarm ends up queenless.  Possibly she was damaged when the bees were sucked into the bee vac. It is also possible that this was not a prime swarm.  A prime swarm is the first and often only swarm to leave the colony. The reigning queen leaves with the swarm so that swarm starts out with a mated queen.  Sometimes after swarms or secondary swarms will issue from a hive. Usually those swarms are much smaller than a prime swarm and are accompanied by virgin queens.  In this particular case the swarm had about 4 pounds of bees and seemed much too large to be a secondary swarm. It is more likely they left with a mated queen and something bad happened to her in the process of the swarm being collected. My current plan is to check the hive again in a few days. If there is still no evidence of a queen I will try installing a new queen. I currently don't have any queens in stock at the bee store, but I have a shipment of queens that will arrive Tuesday morning. My plan is to install a marked queen from that shipment and give this hive another week to get things sorted out before I move them to Oregon.

    Autumn's queen is marked white because I always ask our package bee supplier to use white. Most of my customers want the queens marked white as it easier to spot a queen with a white mark than any of the other four colors used to mark queens. They actually have an official five year rotation with a different color used each year in the cycle. This year the official color is red, not a particularly helpful color to the new beekeeper.  The marked queens  I will receive on Tuesday will therefore be marked red.  The girls' beehives will be like "Through the Looking Glass". There will be a white queen in one hive and a red queen in the other.  Although in this case, both queens will probably have somewhat of an attitude.

Baby Chicks

    Over the past three weeks one of my Domenique hens has been setting on a clutch of ten duck eggs and two of her own eggs.   Yesterday morning I was greeted with some very loud "peeps" as I went out to feed the chickens.  It was obvious something had hatched.  Sure enough, there were two little chicks inside the chicken coop. Sadly, all of the duck eggs were still in the nest, which the hen had appeared to have abandoned. Duck eggs take about four weeks while chicken eggs will incubate in just three weeks. When I checked the duck eggs they were stone cold so there was no option to transfer them to my incubator.

Our new chicks.

     The chicks look really cute in my chicken pen, but its not a very good environment for them.  First of all, they can easily pass through the fencing and wander back and forth in and out of the pen throughout the day.  This means they have the option of becoming cat food whenever they choose to leave the safety of the chicken pen.  The second problem became apparent as evening fell. The hen wanted the chicks to return to the safety of the chicken coop. That seemed to be beyond their present skill set. They managed to descend the ramp, but seemed unable to climb back up.  The two little chicks were under the chicken coop peeping their loudest while the mother hen was set up to brood them inside the coop several feet above them.  In order to give them a safer environment I transferred both hen and chicks to the Parrot house where Cassie is supervising their welfare in the chicken tractor I made several years back.

     I later broke open the unhatched duck eggs in an effort to figure out what went wrong. The hen had abandoned them for good reason. It appears that none of them had developed and most were infertile. That means I probably don't have a slacker hen, but I probably do have a slacker drake. That is very unfortunate as I was planning to hatch out more ducklings. For the information of those who are curious about such things, if you break an incubated egg that didn't hatch and it looks like a normal egg, the egg was infertile.  If the insides of the incubated egg look really nasty, then it was fertile but didn't develop properly for some reason. This is according to a book on incubation I have borrowed from a  friend.

Antique Montgomery Ward incubator

Battery Brooder

     A friend had just loaned me his old Montgomery Ward wooden chicken incubator along with a battery brooder.  The large forced air cabinet incubator has the capacity to do about 300 chicken eggs at a time.  The battery brooder will brood 32 chicks at a time and is stacked on top of two cages that will accommodate 16 pullets each after they reach four weeks and no longer need brooding.  I wasn't planning on hatching 300 chicks, but I was hoping to hatch out several dozen ducks and chickens.  I figured I could sell the extra ducklings on Craig's List while I was hoping to supply family members with pullets and raise the roosters to eat.  The chicken portion of the plan is still on, but I may have to look elsewhere for fertile duck eggs.  

Chloe's Bees

    I'm in the process of setting up two of my grand daughters with beehives.  The last time I visited Autumn and Chloe I got them started with the apprentice level book of the Master Beekeeper program of the Washington State Beekeepers Association.  Hopefully they are making progress on their homework and will have at least finished reading the booklet by the time I deliver their bees to them. We also spent some time repainting some used bee boxes, lids, and bottom boards. I have some 3/4 deep boxes which are somewhat of an odd size. I carry them in the store, but very few people use them anymore. I inherited them from my daughter, Rachel, when she stopped doing bees. I had two cans of exterior latex house paint I had left over from a painting project.  The girls opted to paint their hives a light yellow color, a good choice for Western Oregon, where the weather averages about five degrees warmer than what we get in Snohomish.

    I had hived a package of bees for Autumn this past Saturday and had intended to do a package of bees for Chloe at the same time.  Unfortunately, Quentin, my sole employee at the Beez Neez had been  very diligent in selling off the extra bee packages so we only ended up with two "extra" packages.  I had the only two extra packages already loaded in the van to take home as we were getting ready to close up the shop at 4:30 pm on Saturday afternoon. Then up walks a customer who we had already crossed off the list by mistake. My heart sank as she asked to pick up her bees. That left me with only one package to take home for the girls instead of the two I had planned.

     Fast forward to Monday afternoon. The Beez Neez is closed on Monday but Quentin had just happened to stop by the store to place orders with some of our suppliers. While he was at the store a swarm call came in that appeared to be "low hanging fruit". That translates to a good sized swarm in an easy location, in this case on a bush, a few feet off the ground. Quentin suggested we retrieve the swarm for the grand daughters in Oregon.  We arrived at the location in the Silver Lake area at about 2:15 pm. About ten minutes before our arrival the bees had decided to change locations and was in the process of moving to a rhododendron bush across the street.  This was the honeybee equivalent of a "Chinese Fire Drill". The air was filled with bees and there was nothing we could do but wait for them to settle down at their new location.  This took about 45 minutes.  Quentin then vacuumed up the bees while I supervised (watched). There were still  a fair amount of bees in the air when he finished so we placed the vacuum cage full of bees in a shady spot so the remaining bees would eventually coalesce onto the cage's ventilation screens.

    I returned at about 6:00 am the following morning and picked up the vacuum cage, now with about an additional half pound of bees clustered on the vent screens. I put the cage in the back of my beater cargo van where the loose bees calmly stayed put for the ten minute ride back to Snohomish. I took
the video above of the bees filling the air.  The video turned out well but I had some difficulty uploading it to the blog. I finally got it to upload but I wasn't able to make it bigger. I think it still gives a good sample of the air filled with bees.  Next time I won't delete videos that I want to upload to the blog so I can try to upload it directly from the phone.

Chloe's bees in the process of relocating to a different bush.

 

Calm in a Crisis

   I experienced a little bee crisis Thursday as I was removing a few queen bees from our queen bank at work.  The queens are stored in the queen bank, a small 5 frame nucleus colony, in little cages with no worker bees within the cages. If the customers aren't absolutely certain they will be able to install their newly purchased queen into a hive within the next two hours we have to add worker bees to the queen cages. That involves catching three of the worker bees crawling on the outside of the queen cage and putting them into the cage, abdomen first. This is a job that some dexterity so it has to be done bare-handed. I always rub fresh spearmint or peppermint leaves on my hands prior to bare handed bee work as it masks my scent and makes the bees less inclined to sting my hands.

   My crisis consisted of feeling a worker bee crawling up my leg as I was busily engaged in adding worker bees to two queen cages I had just removed from the queen bank.  With the added distraction of  an audience of several customers, I focused on finishing the task of catching two more worker bees by the wings and adding them to the second queen cage. By this time the bee inside my pants had just passed my knee cap and was continuing her journey upwards. I then very gingerly walked to our rest room (thankfully it was unoccupied) and carefully lowered my pants to remove the intruder. The bee was released unharmed and all was well that ended well.

    In the first draft of this post I wrote that I didn't recall that I have been stung yet this year. Part of that I attributed to good luck and part to careful technique on my part in working a hive.  It was obviously not a good idea to make a statement like that as I was stung twice today. The first one occurred as I had to open the queen bank as soon as I got to work in order to pull out a queen for a customer.  I am never anxious to open a bee hive first thing in the morning before it is warm enough for the foragers to leave the hive. The older worker bees are the foragers and they are much more inclined to sting than the younger worker bees who function as "house bees".  One of the older workers decided my intrusion was appropriate justification for the ultimate sacrifice and stung me on the hand as I removed a queen cage from the queen bank. Later I received a second sting as I was removing hitch hikers from a package for a customer. I often ask the customers if they want the free bees on the exterior of the shipping cage.  Most of them decline and request that we remove the "free bees" before they leave with their package.

    One of the first questions usually asked of a beekeeper is how often do you get stung.  I honestly have a hard time giving an exact answer as I really don't keep track of it. I will say that I doubt that I average even one sting a week during the warmer months of the year when it is warm enough to work the hives.  An important factor in the small number of stings I receive is the fact that I am somewhat used to the bees and am usually pretty comfortable and calm when I work the bees.  It is essential to remain calm when working honeybees. They have a very sensitive sense of smell and they can literally smell fear. If you are nervous or scared while working a bee hive, the bees will be able to detect that and will respond in a negative manner.

Soil Test

  I bought a soil test kit a few days ago and finally got to try it out.  I was a little surprised with the results.  Our soil is okay for phosphorus, which I expected to be low and low for nitrogen which I expected to be high.  Potassium was also good in both places I sampled. Of course there is always the possibility of operator error. I should probably read through the instructions more carefully to make sure I correctly followed the test procedures.  I'm thinking the chickens should get the credit for our good phosphorus levels.  Chicken manure has high phosphorus levels compared to horse, cow, or goat manure. I'm not sure where duck poo falls in this spectrum as it appears their poo has not been as carefully scrutinized as chicken poo. This is probably due to the fact that ducks are not raised in the large quantities that chickens are. I suspect duck poo is probably also high in phosphorus.

Phosphorus, Potassium, and Nitrogen Tests

   The little kittens are becoming quite active little explorers.  Mrs Buzz Saw has pretty much lost containment.  Stan Sessions, our home teacher, came by this past Sunday afternoon with his older children. The girls were pretty gaga over the kittens. It s nice that the kittens like the attention. They come out to greet me whenever I come near the closet and they're awake. The friendlier they are, the easier it will be for them to find homes. I'm pretty sure we will get homes for them all in a few Saturdays at the bee store.

Jerusalem Artichoke that will eventually top 6 feet.

    I was looking out in my garden today and noticed that my Jerusalem Artichoke plants are emerging. I also have beets that are up, although I'm planning on putting in more beets. I'd like to plant enough beets to do a lot of pickled beets. I thought my garbanzo's had failed to germinate, but now I realize that the plants just look very different from what I expected.  When they first emerge they look more like vetch than beans or peas.  I almost gave up on them and was considering replanting those beds. The only thing that saved them from being weeded out of the garden was that I finally noticed the even spacing of the plants.

Italian Parsley

Newly emerged beets

Package Bee Day, Round 2

  I made my annual trip to Palo Cedro, California this week to pick up our second load of package bees. Alan Pomeroy, a good bee friend, had volunteered to make the trip with me.  I enjoy the trip but I really do need help with the driving. Besides, I really really need to travel with someone who knows how to back up a trailer. That and not being able to whistle ( I guess my penny whistle is kind of a prosthesis) are two serious deficiencies in my skill set.   Alan was good company, pointing out every different variety of sheep and cattle we passed. He has raised some kind of animal since childhood to include various breeds of milk goats and Jacob's sheep.  He is a serious herdsman at heart. We discussed everything from religion and life's tragedies to cattle, sheep, and of course beekeeping. Alan has been into honeybees since he was a teenager. The trip down was somewhat leisurely and we were able to stop and eat in restaurants. The trip back was quite different as we could only stop for gas and nature calls and were limited to whatever fast food was adjacent to the gas stations.

Alan did me a huge favor helping transport the bees then thanked me profusely for letting him come.

A pallet of packages waiting to be loading into the bee trailer

The loading crew

    Every time I'm picking up the bees it seems I get to see something I haven't seen before. One year I got to watch them make up packages and last year I watched them graft queens.  This year I got to watch several of Steve Park's employees removing queen cells from the incubator. They pulled out quite a number of wooden bars from the incubator. Each bar had about 15 queen cells attached to it. One guy checked the queen cells to make sure they were all good. He held them up against a light to make sure each cell had a queen that was vertical in the cell. If the queen was curled up in the bottom of the cell it meant that she had died.  I watched him do quite a few cells and I only saw him cull two queen cells.  After this quality check he would use a hot knife to detach the entire line of queen cells loose from the wooden bar. Then he would use the same hot knife to separate each individual queen cell. The separated queen cells were then put into an insulated basket for transport to a mating yard. At the mating yard each queen cell will placed into a different mating nut, a minature beehive. The queen will emerge from her cell in the mating nuc and a week or so later will take one or more mating flights.

Wooden chicken incubator used to incubate queens

Candling the queen cells for quality control

Detaching the queen cells

Separating the individual queen cells

A basket full of queen cells ready to be transferred to mating nuts

    We did things a little differently this year, loading up early in the morning in Palo Cedro, California. We left with the bees at about 7:45 am.  I enjoyed the trip much more traveling in the daytime. We arrived back in Snohomish at 8:30 p.m.  Quentin had lined up the usual suspects (the missionaries) to help unload the trailer. It went very quickly. We had the bees unloaded, the trailer deposited at Quentin's house, and the rental truck returned by about 11:00 p.m . It was very nice to get a good night's sleep before package bee day.

A nice looking package with minimal dead bees on the bottom of the cage

A member of the "Bee Team" stacking packages

Alan Pomeroy moves a package while one of the Elders vacuums off the hitchhikers.