New Beek on the Block

[new-beek-on-the-block]

8/9/2017 mite treat, super install, and top-feeder install

Mom and I went out today and applied the first round of API LIFE VAR thymol-based miticide. Bees very chill, smoker worked like a dream; we popped the super off, put the miticide wafers on the brood box as instructed, put a new super with empty wax foundation on, replaced the original super, and put on the top feeder. We’re doing standard sugar syrup + the label-directed amount of Honey B Healthy, a supplement with a bunch of essential oils that they really like. 

We’ve been noticing wasp predation, but I’ve been told that short of putting up wasp traps, there’s not a lot we can do. It’s also robbing season, since we’re in the nectar dearth; several people cautioned me against using an entry feeder, since that attracts wasps and promotes robbing, so we’re using the top feeder our mentor gave us. 

The miticide smells strongly of eucalyptus and menthol, and it really lingers; I didn’t handle it in any way, and mom handled it with plastic gloves, but my clothes reek of it. The label said that it shouldn’t be used with honey supers on the hive, because it can cause off flavors, but we’re not planning to extract, so we’re just doing it anyway. 

[new-beek-on-the-block]

Fall mite assessment 7/29/2017

Went out and did a sugar shake; our technique was a little inexpert, since we’d only done it once at the association president’s apiary, but we counted 7 mites. Accounting for a few factors (the imprecise measure of bees, using too much powdered sugar, the clogged mesh), that seems like the 10 mites per 200 bees they tell you is the threshhold for treatment. 

In the process of opening them up, we discovered that we need another super. There’s a lot of reddish-amber and lighter clover-looking honey (the partridge peas in the bee buffet field, maybe?) and the brood patterns looked good on the one frame we pulled from the top super. Still have yet to get a single glimpse of the queen! 

The place down in Remmington was closed by the time we finished up, so mom’s going on Monday for the medium box and mite treatment. It looks like oxalic is ok for summer application, but must effective in winter; we’re not using the strips, because our nuc supplier said that they killed several of his colonies last year. I’m still shopping around for an effective summer treatment. 

Pics later! 

(PS: mom got stung once because she accidentally grabbed a bee, but I wasn’t wearing gloves and still have not been stung, ever. I’m starting to wonder if maybe I’m just extremely tolerant of bee venom, and don’t notice stings while I work.) 

[new-beek-on-the-block]

I guess the girls are feeling the heat- a whole bunch of them are sleeping on the “front porch” of the hive tonight. 

[earthstory]

View this post on Instagram

womenwhofarm This is amazing. From @shutterjet - There was a large BC slug consuming a dandelion in my backyard and I decided to do a time lapse video of it eating. This is potentially the best thing I’ve ever filmed. ©2017 shutterjet/R Jeanette Martin

[jumpingjacktrash]

MONCH

[new-beek-on-the-block]

this explains a lot of what's been going on in my garden. little gelatinous rabbits have been at everything

[doyoubeelieveinmagic-deactivate]

@humanmawile said “#why do we gender bees tho?”

I realize this wasn’t an invitation for an infodump but HERE WE GO KIDS BUCKLE IN.

The gendering of bees is a source of endless interest and frustration for me, both because I love bees, and because I am intersex, and bees are (and aren’t) intersex as well.

If bees were people, I should say, then most bees (that is, all the workers) would be intersex. Bees aren’t people, though, and the only intersex identities in nonhuman animals are hermaphrodites and gyandromorphs, which most worker bees are not (although! It is worth noting that some bees are intersexed even in these limited terms).

Functionally, bees have three sexes: queens are female, drones are male, and workers are “sexless.” That is to say, the reproductive organs of 99% (that’s an actual number not a rhetorical one) of worker bees never properly develop to sexual maturity.

Kind of.

The reason we gender bees is because all honeybees who are not drones (male) all have ovaries, but in varying stages of development and fertility. Thus, they are all “female.” However, only a queen is capable of reproducing in a way that sustains a population.

Only the queen is truly female, because only the queen has a large reproductive cell (egg) that can combine with a small reproductive cell (sperm).

The “eggs” laid by workers cannot be combined with sperm, and will always produce drones*.

The reason both workers and queens have ovaries, but only the queen has developed and sexually mature ovaries, is because of the diet fed to a bee grub while it is still in the comb cell. All bees are fed small amounts of royal jelly, because it’s nutritionally dense and stuff, but to produce a queen bee, workers will carve out a special type of comb cell that is significantly larger than a usual egg cell, and stuff the larva inside chock full of as much royal jelly as its little buggy body can possibly hold. 

This hyper-nutritional regimen is continued throughout the larva’s entire developmental stage, instead of only during the early developmental days of most larva, and it causes the bee within to grow into a fully sexually mature female.

The binary gendering of bees has been a subject of much debate in non-scientific circles, because in higher order animals (including humans) we don’t call an animal with undifferentiated and undeveloped sexual characteristics female, we say they are intersexed due to gonadal dysgenesis. 

So my point is, worker bees are called female because it’s easier and in a certain technical perspective it’s true. But actually worker bees are all nonbeenary and intersex, and I will fight to the death over this.

*Well, in very very rare cases an egg might be parthenogenic and produce a clone of the worker, which would also technically be non-drone, thus female, but this is still not a functional form of reproduction that can sustain a hive, and is infinitessimally rare.

[keptbees]

Info dumps are always good!!

[new-beek-on-the-block]

*nonbeenary*!!!!!!!!

[thewannabeee]

Fun Facts About Honey

- Honey is mostly sugar (WoW!) it is 80% sugar and 20% water (double WoW!)

- There are over 20,000 species of bees, but only 4 make HONEY

-Honey is the ONLY food that contains all the substances you need to survive (Including WATER)

-Children under the age of 1 should not eat honey… why? because sometimes it contains bad stuff called botulism and can cause them to get botulism poisoning (that sucks, even infants should taste the deliciousness that is honey)

-Honey will crystallize under optimum temperatures (this has a lot to do with how you store it)

-Bees produce honey to eat during the winter when there are no flowers and no nectar for them.

-A honeybee would only need an ounce of honey to be able to fuel a flight around the world (this makes for a very cultural bee!)

-A typical beehive can make up to 400 pounds of honey a year! (Wowza!)

[raygender]

This reads like it was written by a bee and I’m 100% here for it

[thewannabeee]

This is singlehandedly THE BEST compliment I have ever received :)

[thepinkjinx]

Over 20k species of bee and only 4 make honey, what do the rest do…?

[thewannabeee]

They pollinate flowers but don’t produce honey out of it :)

[new-beek-on-the-block]

Not... really. Some of this is correct, but some of it is definitely wrong. 

While humans only use bees in the Apis genus for their honey, this genus contains more than four species (here is a discussion of honeybee species and subspecies, from an English beekeeper’s association). All social species of bee/wasp which have hives that overwinter produce honey.

Honey is mostly sugar; it doesn’t contain fats, salts, dietary fiber, or protein (except as trace amounts of pollen). It absolutely does not contain all of the substances you need to survive, even if you are a bee; honey is a carbohydrate source for bees, they have to get their protein and fats from pollen. Here’s the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s food composition report about honey. 

A typical beehive doesn’t even weigh 400 pounds in total; this is just a really absurd number. Depending upon region, a hive needs between 20 and 80 pounds of honey to survive the winter (you can read more about this in this blog post from David Burns, a master beekeeper certified through the Eastern Apiculture Society). A typical hive will make a surplus of around 25 pounds, although a very high producer might make 60 pounds of excess (according to the British Beekeeeper’s Association). That adds up to an upper limit of 140 pounds of honey per year, but I have never, ever heard of a hive producing this much; as far as I’m concerned, this is just a theoretical number. It would take a lot of bees to make that much honey.

[respectfulmemes]

[new-beek-on-the-block]

Look at this big beetle!

a Horned Passalus (Odontotaenius disjunctus) that was in my driveway. check out the fuzzy red pair of middle legs. 

It was like an inch and a half long. 

[new-beek-on-the-block]

iNaturalist is so good and I’m learning so much more about bugs

I have been discovering so many interesting bugs (IE, regular, common bugs that I just never really looked at or thought much about besides “that is a bug, hope it doesn’t get in my hair somehow”) by taking pictures of them and posting them on iNaturalist. I try to ID them myself using the internet, but usually even if I can’t, somebody on iNaturalist tells me what it is. 

I’ve been taking pics of other animals and flora, too, but the bugs have really opened up a whole new world of critters to learn about. And they’re just right there! I go outside, and whoops, what the shit is that?! It’s a kind of orbweaver I didn’t even know existed! What is that thing?! Well, it’s a fly, but it’s iridescent green with red eyes, is that rare? No, it’s a common green bottle fly! Check that shit out, it’s a???? a wasp the size of like a peppercorn? Who IS she? (I still don’t know)

This is as cool as when I was learning about what all the different types of common weeds are, which I am still doing. Look at this, it’s spotted spurge:

look at this fancy fucker that was just chilling on our zucchini plant: 

LOOK at that! Pure aesthetic! It’s just the chrysalis of a varigated frittilery, a super-common sort of brown-orange dappled butterfly. 

Shit like this is just everywhere! I don’t even know what that tiny brown leafhopper(?) guy is in the upper left. 

Nature! Why wasn’t I noticing it before?! This is great! 

If you join iNaturalist, let me know and I’ll tell you my username. (I don’t want to just broadcast it because, due to the geotagging, it would become immediately obvious where I live). 

[bogleech]

Reminder that the increasing talk of “saving honeybees” and where we would be without them is missing the real issue entirely.

Bees are ONE pollinator among tens of thousands of insect species, including everyday houseflies, that form a collective pollination service. *Almost all* insects, believe it or not, are in decline right now due to pesticide, and plant life will go down with them.

Honeybees get special attention because we use them to pollinate some of our key crops, but honeybees themselves, like those crops, are an introduced foreign species in much of the modern world.

Saving the environment we live in means preserving and encouraging insects in general, not just our bees for our vegetables.

[new-beek-on-the-block]

canning is easy??? (it sealed... remains to be seen if it did work)

[new-beek-on-the-block]

The first garden harvest: 7 cucumbers, a HUGE zucchini, and a single runner bean. There are also some jalapenos on the plant, but I’m letting them get a little bigger. My regular human-sized foot for scale. 

Thank you bees! 

[tinyangryghost]

this bee ruined my life

[new-beek-on-the-block]

AAAAAAH ILOVE IT HE WAVE AT WARNING-DISPLAY BEEE! this is so cute! artist you are so cute!

[new-beek-on-the-block]

look! my bees made it! They just made it in the wrong place (i.e., one which prevented me from pulling frames) so I took it off and left it on the stand for a bit to let them take all the honey back.

[exeggcute]

when people try to talk about how honey is supposedly unethical because we’re stealing the bees’ food I’m just like, genuinely curious if you’re aware that the honey we eat is the result of beekeepers raising colonies and harvesting the excess honey while making sure the bees are all good and fine, and that the honey you buy at the store is from a farm and not just like going into the woods and sticking your hand in a beehive like a bear in a cartoon and stealing the wild bees’ honey

[madsciences]

the activity page is a hot mess so I can’t find the reply for the life of me, but there was a vegan last time I reblogged this who took issue with how it was patronizing and didn’t address the actual issues a lot of vegans have with beekeeping, (which is entirely fair) so I wanted to make a point of actually talking facts I’m a former radical vegan (5 years), current vegetarian, and i’m aggressively anti-corporation, especially when it comes to farming. I fully recognize and try to educate others about the insustainability of factory farming and how cruel it is. I also love insects, to the point that I reblog photos with embarrassing commentary like ‘a shiny boi’ and raised/released 30 pickerel frogs last year so nobody would use insecticides near my property. 

But I’m also pro responsible hunting, and the reason I’m pro hunting is the same reason I’m pro beekeeping: Human beings may have decimated more than our share of ecosystems, but we aren’t separate from them, and like any other animal we’ve become critical to maintaining the balance that existed before we did.

I don’t know about you guys, but I eat/grow a hell of a lot of vegetables and fruit, soy, wheat products, and (this one i’m particularly not proud of due to its environmental impact) almond milk. None of those things can exist in this country without beekeeping. Not only that; A vegetarian or vegan lifestyle is literally unsustainable without beekeeping. Not just bees, but active apiarists who cultivate these bees on the level that they do. 

The European bee, specifically, pollinates somewhere around 80% of our crops in North America, and the European be is not native to this continent. It was brought here specifically by settlers from Europe, while the Americas had primarily solitary pollinators like the carpenter bee, mason bee, wasps, bats, butterflies, hummingbirds, etc.

This already means that the honey bee isn’t really adapted for or intended to be(e) on this continent, then we have to take into account the drastic habitat loss and catastrophic use of herbicides that have destroyed the ability for wild populations to survive even further. And, even without that, European bees are extremely vulnerable to ectoparasitic mites, specifically the ones that cause colony collapse, because they aren’t solitary pollinators. The only reason most wild colonies can survive without treatment for mites is due to their tendency to swarm fairly regularly, which as any beekeeper can tell you, is extremely risky and can often be catastrophic.

The reason that so many of our crops are pollinated by the European honey bee is specifically because we keep the species and cultivate healthy hives. Our native pollinators (some of which are tragically extinct or critically endangered at this point) are actually better in many ways at pollinating crops like blueberries or tomatoes, but in order for them to pollinate our crops instead of the European bee, we’d need to domesticate and cultivate them instead. And that’s less practical because, as I said, most of our bees are solitary. So not only would the European bee likely go extinct (or hover near critically endangered) in this country without apiarists, our native pollinators couldn’t pollinate anywhere near enough food for our population without humans raising bees like we do. So I get the criticism of certain practices in the large scale industrial raising of bees, I really do. Things like culling hives in the winter to save money are totally unnecessary and cruel, and I’ve never heard of a noncorporate apiarist who did it. But a focus on passing laws to prevent cruel or irresponsible practices by corporations is where our efforts should be focused, not on boycotting or demonizing the practice of raising bees as a whole. 

There are loads of keepers on social media and Youtube who can give you a real insight into how dedicated small keepers are to their hives and the welfare of bees, and we desperately need to support our local apiarists while we combat poor practices by corporate ones. Because like it or not, without beekeeping, your and my meatless lifestyle is literally impossible.

(I’m not an apiarist I just like bees so if I fucked anything up and you’re an actual beekeeper pls add your two cents.)

*also man how many of our problems would be solved if we farmed locally instead of on an industrial scale? though I guess then we’d be extremely susceptible to crop damage or droughts. this shits always gotta be complicated  im gonna go kISS A BEE)

[new-beek-on-the-block]

Well put. 

[kuttithevangu]

Honestly the mere fact that some people refer to Daddy Long Legs as “harvestmen” is creepier than 90% of all deliberately created horror but like the worst part is that the alternative is calling them Daddy Long Legs

[pipistrellus]

#WHAT ARE THEY HARVESTING #I AM HAUNTED AND VEXED

[apinchofsanity]

They are harvesting our sorrows

[sweaterweathercub]

True harvestmen, and not cellar spiders which are the other Daddy Long Legs, are truly omnivorous- known to eat everything from spiders, to fecal matter, to leaves and fungus… But one of the singularly most interesting habits of a particular European species is their almost symbiotic relationship with beehives– particularly man-made beehives. When a bee dies inside the hives, workers will remove the the corpse to just outside the hive just before dark. And the harvestmen? Well, they live up to their name.

[feynites]

So what you’re saying is that they are the grim reaper for bees.

[morrithal]

The grim beeper

[solitarelee]

I would like to personally thank @waltersandmurdock for making this horrifying nightmare of information better with a pun

[new-beek-on-the-block]

i haven't heard this before but oh my god

[mostusefulthing]

The biological sex of bees doesn’t depend on X and Y chromosomes, but rather on whether the egg was fertilized.  Drone bees come from unfertilized eggs -- they have no fathers, and will create no sons.

[new-beek-on-the-block]

Oh man! The reason for this is really interesting: so, yes, it is correct that all adult female bees came from a fertilized egg, while all adult male bees came from an unfertilized egg. However, while all female larvae develops from a fertilized egg, some drone larvae can, too. This is because bee sex is determined by the presence of 1 or 2 sex alleles, one passed from each parent, and sometimes both parents have the same allele. (Bees and most other insects don’t use the XY sex-determination system like most mammals.) It works like this:  

Bees have 19+ possible sex alelles. Each egg cell has one of the mother’s two, and each sperm cell has the father’s single one. When a bee has only one sex allele, it’s a drone, and when it has two, it’s a worker or queen. So, drones are haploid (16 chromosomes) bees with 1 sex allele, while workers and queens are diploid (32 chromosomes) bees with 2 sex alleles. 

This is important, because if the sex allele in the sperm and the sex allele in the egg happen to be the same, you get a diploid drone; a bee which has 32 chromosomes like a female, but only 1 sex allele like a male. These larvae don’t survive, and will show up as holes in a frame of brood. This is much more common when the queen has mated with a close relative; I’ve seen some sources that say that in brother-sister matches, up to 50% of fertilized eggs laid will be diploid drones. 

Here is a diagram from Glen Apiaries:

This is why genetic diversity is so important!