A Curious Beekeeper ponders pollen sub caused swarming

I promised myself I wouldn’t holler, yell or stand on my head.

It seems like every time I look somewhere on Facebook recently, someone is asking if they should start feeding pollen patties.

Let’s review. Pollen is, in the words of one Master Beekeeper, food for baby bees. And, in a roundabout way it is. First though, it is consumed by nurse bees who then produce Worker or Royal Jelly through food glands in their heads (primarily the Hypopharyngeal and Mandibular.) This is the food that is placed in the cells by the nurse bees.

The queen reacts to an abundance of jelly by stepping up her egg production.

Since I can’t yell, I’ll let Randy Oliver do it for me. This from his excellent website, http://scientificbeekeeping.com: “Practical application: there was no apparent benefit to feeding pollen sub when there was adequate pollen of high nutritive value naturally available. So don’t waste your money.”

In my words, you only need to feed pollen substitute when you want the bees to do something they wouldn’t normally be doing. Like increase brood rearing before going to pollinate Almonds, or more typical for around here, to increase the amount of brood & young bees for making splits. OR when there is a dearth of natural pollen, or the bees can’t get to it.

So what does all this have to do with swarming?

Bees have their own “prime directive” and that is colony reproduction. The most common way that happens is by swarming. When a Prime (or first) swarm emerges, roughly half the bees in the hive along with the current queen, leave. That’s not so good for the beekeeper who wants to make honey, as wise beekeepers before us noted “if you want to make lots of honey, you need lots of bees.” A swarm sets colony population back to where around here, there just isn’t time for them to grow into a booming colony with a population of 90,000 or more.

My fear is that with more beekeepers feeding pollen sub routinely, without some plan for the increased and early brood production, that more bees will end up in the trees, which is a nice way of saying the beekeepers haven’t managed to keep all their bees!

(Maybe we should talk about queen wing clipping now, but I don’t want the distraction.)

I don’t know of a sure fire way to prevent swarming. There are a variety of manipulations that can be done, but the easiest way is to not have to do anything. While no one swarm trigger has been identified, and having adequate room for the queen to lay is huge, I like the theory that it is queen produced pheromones that have the biggest effect, young queens produce more of them (plural) than older queens, and that some breeds and/or races of bees are less inclined to swarm than others.

So queens in their first full year that have been bred to head colonies not to inclined to swarm – like Buckfast – are primo. They are still going to swarm some – I’ve seen a figure of 6%, but that to me is much better than a three year old queen of unknown racial background whose colony swarming inclination might approach 80%.

That’s reason enough for me to not automatically feed pollen sub. I’m not sending bees off to Almonds, nor do I want to be making lots of splits. This is a hobby for me, so this way of chasing dollars isn’t my bee goal. I don’t want to loose my bees to swarms. This year, I want to make honey. Nor do I want to mess with Snelgrove and Horsley Boards in an attempt to control swarming.

I seem to be an old saying type of guy. Here’s another one: “You can either make bees or honey. Not both.”

What are you trying to accomplish?

A Curious Beekeeper makes plans

Winter time planning can be dangerous. There are lots of times when ideas sound good and you’re ready to jump in whole hog. But often too it pays to bounce those ideas off of someone else, if only to make sure that you’re thinking clearly.

Just what was on my to-do list last winter? Something about RH in hives?

Today’s plans regard feeding for next winter. I have long said that local conditions rule in beekeeping, and I think this time I’ve run into that head on. Still, I’ll be cautious and test my theory and revised technique on three hives. (I run about 20)

I’m talking about dysentery and the undigestible components of fall honey (ash, etc.) I need to grab the microscope and make sure I’m not dealing with Nosema apis.

There are times when I wish I wasn’t a generalist. This is one of them. Looking under a scope for Nosema is thankfully straightforward. Though I’m not about to tell apis from ceranae.

My plan is to treat the hive as if they were a single deep, harvesting all honey not in the bottom box, seeing what they can store in the 2nd deep during the fall (post frost), and giving additional feed over the winter if necessary.

Breaking with tradition, I’ll keep a 2nd deep on them above an excluder all the time. I don’t want them feeling crowded and swarming on me. The excluder will come off for winter. Next spring whichever box the queen is in will be the bottom box, and the excluder will go back on.

I’m very much a follower of make sure they have all the food they need for winter and spring buildup in the fall, and then ignore them until February.

I get that many folks routinely do what I consider insurance feeding. My reply is I got into beekeeping thinking I had winters off from the bees, and I was taught to feed them all they’d need in the fall.

Tell me why then, with winters off, is there is an EPS hive on the porch now to assemble and paint? Could it be that winter is drawing to an end? (On the plus side, my Gator came back from the dealer today, all repaired and ready for another season. It was belching white smoke las fall, and I thought it about to explode. The dealer said I had fuel & condensation in the oil, probably from not running it enough.)

Then again, my plans could change. That’s one reason plans made this time of year are so dangerous.

Distractions abound! I heard something about 6 over 6 nucs yesterday that I might just have to try! Did someone say deeps and follower boards?

A Curious Beekeeper Explores Bee Friendly Farming

Bee Friendly Farming is a self-certification program of the Pollinator Partnership. When BFF (as it is called) began, it was over seen by an organization called Partners for Sustainable Pollination. Partners for Sustainable Pollination merged several years ago into the Pollinator Partnership.

The criteria for becoming a Bee Friendly Farm is pretty simple according to their web site:

1. Offer forage providing good nutrition for bees on 3-6% of land.

2. Plant continuous bloom of different flowering plants throughout the growing season, especially in early spring and late autumn in temperate regions.

3. Offer clean water for bees.

4. Provide a variety of habitat for nesting and mating, through features such as hedgerows, natural brush, or bufferstrips.

5. Practice Integrated Pest Management (IPM); reduce or eliminate the use of chemicals.

6. Pay the annual $35 certification fee.

$35 is relatively cheap money IF you are able to use BFF in your honey marketing program. If you own the land your bees are on, the requirements are much in line with most best practice recommendations. At least there isn’t a hives need to be so high off the ground requirement like there is with Certified Naturally Grown.

When I first wrote this column there were 3 BFF in Maine. Now according to the map, there are 6. The movement is growing!

The ice is deep outside, so walking around and planning this year’s plantings isn’t going to happen anytime soon. I’m still trying to get a Gallbery a/k/a Inkberry hedge going to act as a windbreak and bee food source. About ½ the plants didn’t make it (funny, if you skip watering, plants tend not to grow enthusiastically.) I’ve got an area of predominantly Alder that I hope to clean out this spring – I haven’t decided exactly what will go in there but I think it will be woody plants as opposed to prairie type flowers.

My bees’ big needs are for feed in the early spring and mid July until Goldenrod. That takes common Witch Hazel off the table (fall blooming), maybe a Willow or a Dogwood.

The Heather I’ve planted over the past few years seems to be doing ok though it hasn’t been the bee magnet I hoped. At least it is still alive.

It’s so easy to get sidetracked; maybe I should look at this as another bee inspired adventure.http://pollinator.org/bff Check it out.

A Curious Beekeeper considers Master Beekeepers and More

The designation of Master Beekeeper is almost mystical.

Granted, some organizations have an Apprentice and Journeyman programs, some even have Master Craftsman.

I wanted it as a teaching credential, but it is really a recognition that you know a thing or two about bees and can share your thoughts with others.

Well, some programs don’t emphasize the communications piece. I think it important though.

What I really think important, regardless of the program, is that Masters ought to have perpetual curiosity and enthusiasm for bees.

In this group’s geographic area of focus, there are three popular programs. There is The Eastern Apicultural Society, The University of Montana’s School of Extended & Lifelong Learning, and Cornell University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

That the Cornell program exists confuses me, as the EAS Master Beekeeper program was started at Cornell, and only passed off to EAS when there was no one at Cornell to take it over.

No matter. It exists, and that is what counts. I wish I knew more about it than I do.

Not that I’m inclined to make the trip to Ithaca for testing. If I were to do another Master program it would be Maine’s Master Naturalist. That intrigues me.

But I digress. Many outstanding beekeepers (who are excellent teachers too) haven’t participated in any of the programs.

I don’t think that matters.

Each program has a bit different take, something different is emphasized. The Montana program is quite science oriented. EAS’s emphasizes communications. I don’t know what Cornell’s focus is.

EAS certifies Master Beekeepers. The other two issue certificates.

I love that Cornell’s program is connected to their Cooperative Extension. That to me is how the world should work. The University of Montana is a Land Grant school as well. (I was an undergraduate there a long time ago.) EAS is in today’s language a NGO.

Let’s see: The University of Maine is Land Grant and has an Entomology program. It already shares faculty with Cooperative Extension. uMeCE hosts a number of bee schools too. (“My,” really my club’s school included.) Maybe it is time for something more. Just thinking. MAAREC?

This work is produced & licensed to others by Andrew Dewey under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 4.0 International License.