What a differance a day makes: the Snow Hive Melt Down one day later.

This picture was taken 24 hours after the image in the previous post.

The snow on the side has melted and fallen down and away from the lower hive body.

The hive is in a shaded alcove caused by extensions on the buildings on each side of my fully attached house. Daytime temperatures only got up to 37 degrees for a short time the day after the storm.

The Little Honeys must have partied hardy all night in their Mead Hall, burning the beeswax candles at both ends to have generated that much heat.

The Snow Hive

This picture was taken shortly after dawn on Thursday morning, January 27, 2011 at about 7 AM.

The lower deep brood chamber is completely buried in snow and the upper deep and medium brood chambers are coated with about an inch of blown snow on the side facing the camera.

The radio said that Central Park recorded 15 inches of snowfall before the storm ended earlier this morning.

NYC Beekeepers Calendar

During last nights beekeeping class given by James Fischer of NYC BEEKEEPING one of the topics covered was Beekeepers Calendars that one can find on the net.  James pointed out that the problem with such calendars is that a beekeeper has to remain flexible in his or her timing depending on the particular seasonal temperature differences that vary from year to year.  He pointed out the importance of keeping track of "degree days" in order to have an idea when flowers will bloom.

I believe James is making an important point and hope that NYC beekeepers can come up with some way to build an adjustable sequenced timetable to remind ourselves of things that should be done each year.

As a member of a Community Emergency Response Team (CERT), I have helped design numerous Search & Rescue Radio Drills and developed protocols for conducting foot patrols in a save and orderly way. One of the concepts that we found helpful during our exercises at Brooklyn South CERT was to require S&R teams to have pre-designated "checkpoints" along their patrol routes. Every time a S&R team came to an intersection where they were going to change the direction they were going, they would call in on their radios to let the Planning Section (aka "Maps") know where they were and which way they were headed.

This enabled the Incident Commander and others at our Operations Center keep track of each S&R team in case they lost radio contact.

I think that instead of using particular months to divide up our beekeeping calendar, we should adopt the "checkpoint" concept to plan our beekeeping year.

I'll give an example of what I mean as a starting point for discussion. The following was adapted from pages 23 and 24 of the Purdue Extension 4-H Beekeeping Division II - Working With Bees PDF and of course would have to be fine tuned to some extent for NYC conditions. The main concept I would like to put forward is that the "checkpoints" could be moved forward or back each year in response to seasonal variations.

So: here's a First Draft suggestion of how such a "calendar" might look:

NYC Beekeeper’s Calendar

Prepare Equipment Checkpoint

• Prepare equipment for coming season.

• Perform emergency feeding with sugar candy or dry sugar

on top of the inner cover, if necessary.

Begin Feeding Checkpoint

• Begin spring feeding toward the end of the month or early in

March.

• Perform emergency feeding with sugar candy or dry sugar, if

necessary.

• Develop an advertising program.

• Order package bees or nucleus hives.

• Prepare equipment for the active season.

• Clean up dead colonies.

Clean Entrances Checkpoint

• Clean out entrances and bottom boards.

• Order package bees and queens needed to replace those that

are failing, or to make splits.

• Continue feeding sugar or syrup if colonies are empty.

Introduce Packages Checkpoint

• Introduce package bees.

• Feed package bees syrup.

• Requeen colonies having failing queens.

• Split strong hives and requeen one half to prevent

swarming.

• Reverse hive bodies on two-story colonies where the queen

is only laying above.

• Check colonies for American foulbrood and Varroa mites.

Begin Supering Checkpoint

• Add a super to each strong colony.

• Remove queen cells to prevent swarming (but make sure

they haven’t swarmed first!).

• Add another super if necessary.

• Provide a ventilation hole.

• Place queen excluder below shallow super on colonies for comb

honey.

• Start to rear queens if you want to raise your own.

Hive Splitting Checkpoint

• Split hives to increase the number of colonies, if desired.

• Remove queen cells to prevent swarming.

• Replace defective combs with full sheets of foundation.

• Provide plenty of super space.

• Requeen toward end of month.

• Check colonies for American foul brood and Varroa mites.

• Remove comb honey supers when properly sealed.

Add Supers Checkpoint

• Add sufficient super space.

Harvest Honey Checkpoint

• Harvest honey supers when they stop filling up.

• With honey supers off, treat for Varroa mites.

• Extract clover honey.

• Remove section supers.

• Do not work bees too much, to avoid robbing.

• Perform fall requeening.

Remove Supers Checkpoint

• Either put empty supers above the inner cover to let bees

clean them, or let bees rob from the supers in the bee yard.

Then store with PDB moth crystals.

• Provide supers for fall flow, or let bees store it in brood

nest.

• Check colonies for American foul brood and Varroa mites.

Mouse Guard Checkpoint

• Put on entrance reducers or mouse guards.

• Extract honey from fall flow.

Stop Feeding Checkpoint

• Complete late fall feeding if hives are light.

• Provide top entrance.

• Provide windbreaks.

• Develop a marketing program.

Book Reading Checkpoint

• Read bee books.

•Continue to develop your marketing program.

• Make equipment for extracting, bottling, etc.

Hive with Snow Cap

This photo was taken from my kitchen window in Brooklyn at noon on Monday, December 27, 2010.

The hive base can barely be seen at the snow line. Hidden by the snow is a hive stand that is held up by a piece of plywood on top of a shipping pallet raised above the ground by plastic coke crates. I estimate the snow is over three feet deep below the hive.

NPR Science Friday: From Hive Politics to Beekeeping

There was an excellent episode of NPR's Science Friday this past Friday about how bees communicate and make decisions when swarming.

The show was broadcast just before Christmas and the 200th birthday of Lorenzo Langstroth, the "Father of American Beekeeping."

I was especially impressed with the recorded sounds that bees make during the various stages of swarming.

You can find a transcript of the NPR show here and/or listen to the show on-line.
Here's the link to the MP3 if you want to download the show and listen off-line.

The Science Friday page has links to videos with segments including the "piping" sounds that the swarm produces when the decision has been made about the location of the new home for the swarm.

Between rain storms: An Iimirie Shim added as a upper vent & entrance

There was a gap in the rainstorms this Sunday that was forecast to last a couple of hours.  I had noticed some condensation on the Seran wrap where the styrofoam hive top feeder rested on the upper hive box.

With the hive feeder on top of the hive there was no way for water vapor to escape from the hive.

I put together an Imirie Shim that I had purchased some time ago. My plan was to put it on top of the hive box and then take the styrofoam feeder off and replace it with the brown plastic multi-feeder.

Outside temperature was 52 degrees. When I tilted up the styrofoam feeder I noticed that there were some bee on the bottom of the feeder.  I slid the Imirie shim in under the feeder but decided not to replace the styrofoam feeder with the multi-feeder until later when the bees were clustered.

Before I packed it in for the day I tacked a wooden hive reducer to the front of the upper hive box, just below the opening of the Imirie Shim.  I wanted to provide the bees with a little landing ledge for when they returned from their cleansing flights on the warmer winter days.

By having the opening toward the front, I figured that air would enter from the lower front entrance and travel up the front wall of the hive and out the opening of the Imirie Shim.

One final act was to put a perforated transportation entrance closer across the lower entrance, with the movable section pushed toward the center so the bees could go in and out at their habitual location, on the left side of the "front porch".

NYC BEEKEEPING 2010 CLASS (1)

FREE WINTER COURSE LECTURE 1

Wednesday 11/10/2010

New York Arsenal

Central Park, 64^th St, and 5^th Ave.

The first lecture of the Fall Series given by New York City Beekeeping took place at the New York Arsenal last Wednesday, November 10^th. The Arsenal is a huge old building located just inside Central Park where East 64^th Street terminates at 5^th Avenue.

Jim Fischer conducted the class and Liane Newton, the current Organizer of NYC Beekeeping, handled the sign-in table and helped keep things moving along.

The room was packed and most of the seats were taken by the time I arrived. Over 140 people had signed up for the series of FREE beekeeping classes and some people had to be put on a waiting list.

As more people arrived and people were left standing without seats, Liane and I went up one floor to the outdoor terrace and brought down 10 extra seats. The seats were a little stiff from not being opened and closed regularly so it took a bit of trial and error, as well as a bit of muscle, to get them set up. Eventually everyone had a place to sit.

In the meantime Jim had started the slide show. I’d seen some of his slides before at various events conducted by the NYC Beekeeping MeetUp this summer, but most covered material that was new to me.

The material covered was both interesting and informative. It included introductory material about the different kinds of bees, the anatomy of the hive, and the kinds of forage available to bees in NYC.

One fact Jim mentioned that may not seem immediately obvious to new and future beekeepers in the City:

Bees make their living mostly off trees.

So trees provide the majority of bee food in the city. Beekeepers need to know more about city trees and be involved in the city treescape. The City has a program called A Million Trees. Beekeepers should make a effort to influence the types of trees planted to insure that they are species that provide forage for our bees.

(This is a good place for me mention that I am putting together a Google Map of bee-related information for New York City. The map will contain the location of forage trees, empty and abandoned lots in need of flower seeds, and the approximate locations of bee hives – located to the nearest block or intersection to protect beekeeper privacy.)

One of Jim’s slides two columns showing the contrasts between what the bees want and what the beekeeper wants. The following is from my notes, and I only jotted down the beekeepers wants, so the bee side of the table below may not be completely accurate.

The Bees Want:	The Beekeeper Wants:
Build-up ON the bloom.	Build-up BEFORE the bloom.
To use any queen they can come up with.	To keep the queen provided.
Produce a normal number of drones.	Produce fewer drones.
To reproduce by swarming.	NO SWARMS !!!
Make honey to survive the winter.	Make as much honey as possible.
Make new comb when needed.	Make new comb often on the beekeepers whim.
To defend their hive.	As few stings as possible.

One item that came up during the discussion was that Tim, who has kept bees for thirteen years and runs the blog Borough Bees, is interested in obtaining one or more swarms of bees to provide hives for the Value Added project in Red Hook. So keep him in mind when swarming season arrives if you wind up with an extra swarm and no place to put it.

General information:

The series of 10 (or possibly more) classes will be the equivalent of a college course in beekeeping.

This set of classes and demonstrations is intended to provide a cost-free comprehensive foundation for new beekeepers and to foster a community of cooperative beekeepers who work together throughout the year to help each other learn more about beekeeping.

The goal of NYC Beekeeping is to operate in a non-profit mode, to help people get own bee equipment at a discount through group purchases. Larger pieces of equipment to harvest wax and honey will be shared as a group co-op purchase.

People will be given an opportunity to extract and bottle their own honey as a group in a proper commercial kitchen. People were told that messing up their own kitchens is something they would not want to do.

(All of the above is a refreshing contrast to other bee “courses” I have seen offered in the city that provide a single one-day class for something like $150. The other organization also asked for part of your honey crop if you used their equipment to extract your honey. )