Another Swarm

A bee mitten

I am bee-sitting for another beek who recently divided a hive. The half I'm caring for had a few queen cells in it. Today the first virgin queen took off with an entourage to find a new home. While the swarm swirled around deciding on a good spot to temporarily cluster, I gathered my supplies. As my bees did last year, they clustered on the nearby old apple tree, fortunately within my reach from a ladder.

I tickled the first mass onto my gloved hand, and was quite tickled to have a bee mitten. I deposited them into a waiting hive box, and climbed up to gather more. Some bees were still sitting in the dust pan, which I had brought up with me the first time. There in the pan, I saw the queen, and hurried down the ladder before she could decide to fly off again. I had success, and the bees settled quite easily into the box. I retrieved some more bees from the cluster, but others seemed determined to stick around. So I went inside to make lunch, which I brought out for a swarm picnic. By this time, the bees that had remained on the limb were now reassembling at the hive.

Karin showed up about this time, and I coaxed her over to see the happenings. She's still rather bee-shy, but enjoyed watching the bees fan and gather.


View the full-sized images here.
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My own bees are doing fairly well, though there have been case each of regicide and accidental death.

The wee swarm queen turned out to be a dud. What few capped brood that developed were mostly drones. Last Monday, I found the queen and squished her. It is a bit challenging to willfully kill a queen, but I knew it was the best for the hive.

Then I found and caged Freyja. She was much easier to catch than her pretender daughter was, and pretty much marched into her cage. After about an hour, to let the old queen pheromones fade a bit, I placed her into the wee swarm hive. On Saturday, I went out to release her, and found her dead in the stem of the cage. Apparently she had crawled in and couldn't back out.


The queen cage, opened.

Next time, I shall not wait to put in the marshmallow plug. I will place it at the base of the stem, to keep a queen from crawling into the corked Tunnel of Death. Then, after the cork is removed, and the workers eat through the marshmallow plug, the queen can safely exit her confinement. It was a hard lesson, but it would have been harder if one of my better-performing queens had died instead.

So now this wee swarm hive has joined Ivanova's rather small queendom. Now I'm down to only five hives.

June Bloom Day

"Kathleen"

Now the rhodies and columbines are fading, and the roses, lavenders and fuchsias are coming on. The beds look a little sad without the riot of columbines. I need to do more for mid summer and autumn.

I've begun to want more roses after seeing Fickle Hill Old Rose Nursery and many gorgeous rose gardens in town. It's sometimes a bit of a surprise to see how well roses can do in our cool, foggy seacoast climate. I like old roses the best, because they are more likely to have a scent, and most (if not all) can be grown on their own rootstock. English cottage gardens are inspirational, because I grew up thinking that roses had to be grown in a barren little bed with nothing else touching them. Seeing a rose bush burst out from a mob of annuals, or climbing a trellis with clematis gives my stomach butterflies. Holly recently gave me a "Mutabilis" rose that her mother started from a cutting. I am looking forward to seeing it big and blooming.


A wild bee visiting the French lavender

The lavenders aren't yet going full-tilt, but they are starting. The bees - honey and native - really like them, and so do we. If ever I get the lawns pulled out, I want masses of lavender, roses and blueberries. More rhodies would be nice, but I do have quite a few big, old ones already. Maybe if I pull out the driveway...

The fuchsias are also starting to bloom, but haven't hit their stride. The buddleia didn't get pruned this spring, so it's trying to take over the world. It's honeylike scent makes world domination seem not so bad.

The monkshood is nearly ready to go, but didn't make it for this month's bloom day. Sadly, the Bletilla orchid has a very short bloom time, and I missed photographing it for an early June update. Many flowers keep going and going. I never before realized that the camellias might still be blooming in June. Not strongly, but with us yet.

I've finally begun chipping up the Pittospora branches from my early spring destruction. I had help from Ananda. She was a champ, chunking up big branches so they would fit into the chipper. I'd given up finding a good helper, after hiring young men a couple of times. Slackers. Soon there will be room to pile up more trimmings. Watch out, Cotoneasters!

The June Bloom Day album on Picassa

Birding and Flower-peeping, Titlow Hill Road

Elegant cat's ear

Today Holly, Pia, Kristin and I went up past Horse Mountain on Titlow Hill Road. We hoped to see a white-headed woodpecker. I had seen one up there a few years ago, and hoped they'd be nesting in the same spot.

Kristin brought along three feathered charges: one grosbeak and two American robin chicks. Kristin volunteers for the Humboldt Wildlife Care Center, and often cares for an injured or abandoned chick during breeding season. They got periodic meals of canned cat food and ground up bugs. Just like Mom used to regurgitate! The wee grosbeak would quiver when he saw Kristin, and peep sweetly when he heard her voice. The rest of us were as nothing to him. The robins are older, and watched us all with both a hungry and a wary eye.

We stopped at a few places along the way, such as when we saw a Townsend's solitaire fly across the road. It's a drab, but sweet thrush. We lingered at that area for a while, also seeing a red-breasted nuthatch preparing a nesting hole in an old snag. We saw a lovely yellow-rumped warbler in full breeding plumage and a ruby-crowned kinglet. At home, I've seen the "butter butts", but only in their winter drab.

When we got to the spot where I'd seen white-headed woodpeckers, we found western bluebirds nesting there. Mom & Dad bluebird were busily bringing insects to their little ones. They were shy of us, so we slowly backed up while watching them. We did see a handsome red-breasted sapsucker, hard to miss with his crimson head and breast. Steller's jays seemed to dominate the area, though this could have been purely by force of character. We were disappointed to see so few raptors: just one red-tailed hawk and some turkey vultures.


Holly

We took a leisurely stroll through the forest, spotting vociferous lazuli buntings, bright western tanagers, chipping sparrows, juncos and a golden-crowned kinglet. There are some nice places to camp, and we daydreamed about coming out of our tent in the morning and birding from a camp chair. Toward the end of our walk, we heard what we think is a mountain quail in a thick bit of trees. We also saw a mountain chickadee, and later heard the classic "cheeseburger" call.

The flowers on Titlow Hill Road, near Horse Mountain are mostly different from those I saw on Childs Hill Prairie along Bald Hills Road. There's a lot of serpentine soil, which can be toxic to some plants. Even so, there was a wide variety of flowers blooming. Many were tiny, and I couldn't photograph them with my humble point-and-shoot. There were at least three species of Viola, a fawn lily, mission bells fritillaria, bear grass, etc. I am impatiently awaiting the arrival of a Pacific Northwest flowers field guide, so I can better identify all there pretties.

We never did see the white-headed woodpecker, but still had a good day.

Vogel da!

Pretty flower photos on Picasa

Beeking is Never Boring Part II

The burr comb, last shown April 30

Recall my June 5th post about Svetlana and the double-decker hive? Well, I think the plot has thickened. The lower level does indeed have a queen; I saw her yesterday, and she's laying quite nicely. Unfortunately, the Minnesota Hygenic queen I gave to Claire isn't doing so well. ...I forgot to mention before that when I was catching that queen, she slipped away at one point and flew a few victory laps around the hive before settling on a leaf. I was confused at the time, having heard that laying queens don't fly. But I thought no more about it, except as an amusing anecdote.

But yesterday, as I was responding to another beek's post about a double-decker hive, something clicked. I must have caught a virgin daughter, and left Freyja (the MH queen) in my hive. Oops. Fortunately mother and daughter were getting along, and one hadn't killed the other. But this could also mean that Freyja isn't doing so well, as I've heard tell about mother-daughter hives. This theory is supported by the presence of fresh supercedure cells (see photo above and detail below). Good grief - Freyja isn't even a year old! So much for better mating quality of bought queens.


The peanut-looking thing is a queen cell. There are also fat larvae nearly ready to be capped, and the high-domed caps over drone pupae. There's a tiny rice-grain egg above and to the right of the queen cell. The glisteny stuff in the dark cells is nectar.

The wee swarm nuc (briefly mentioned on May 31st) is still wee. There was a small patch of eggs a week ago, and a small patch again this week. But no larvae. Hmmm. I think this girl is a dud. I'm going to give her another week before staging a coup and combining her girls with Ivanova's.

Bald Hills Road, Part II

On Wednesday, I returned to Bald Hills Road, dragging along my friends Holly & D'har. As you might expect, they were kicking and screaming the whole time. The weather this week has been cloudy & sometimes rainy, with occasional thunderstorms. Not like last week's warm & sunny weather. So much for summer!

Anyway, I abandoned the idea of painting , and we three spent an entire day flower peeping, birding, insect chasing and reptile harassing. We had a fine picnic overlooking the lupine-draped slopes. The lupines are now past their prime, but still beautiful. There were lots of unripe seed pods which we coveted. I took photos of most of the flowers we saw, minus the itty-bitties and some others. I also had a few that were out of focus. Rats. Similar to when I start photographing for Bloom Day, I was amazed at how many flower species there were.

The lazuli buntings were elusive - until we finally saw one. We stalked two singing males for about twenty minutes. Then they were everywhere, misters and missuses out in the open on just about every tree and bush. Oh for a good camera with a 500 mm telephoto lens. We had some gorgeous views of the lazuli buntings, western tanagers, Steller's jays, black-headed grosbeaks, and a pair of red-tailed hawks soaring by. There were loads of other birds, such as acorn woodpeckers, Allen's hummingbirds and one olive-sided flycatcher.



While watching the bluebirds and western tanagers in an oak copse, we heard a familiar humming. D'har started to bolt, having encountered far too many ground wasp nests in the woods. But she stopped when Holly and I cried out "A swarm!" A tiny swarm of honeybees flew by, and was gone in seconds.



Butterflies, wild bees, all sorts of beetles and other insects were enjoying the flowers. Early in the day, we saw a fellow weilding a butterfly net. But we had the place to ourselves for most of the day. There were lizards - either western fence or western sagebrush; I didn't compare the scales. D'har found a coral-bellied ringneck snake that was trying to swallow what looked like a slender salamander. We bothered it enough that it disgorged its lunch and made its escape. When she came back to the same spot, D'har found it again, trying to reclaim the meal. I would have gotten pictures, but he was elusively tucked under the oak leaves.

Now and then, thunder rumbled to the north and south of us. We got alternating stifling muggy air and cooling breezes. We enjoyed a nice long walk along one of the timber roads. Toward 5:00, just as we began to think of tick-checks, showers and dinner, the heavy clouds found us and started raining.



It was a grand day.



Or view my Picasa album.

View Holly and D'har's version of this trip:
Hollix: Blue Day
D'har: Bald Hills Rd Day

Beeking is Never Boring

Last week I sold my Minnesota Hygenic queen Freyja to a friend who needed one. On the same afternoon, I combined that hive with a nuc containing one of my new Russian-Carniolan queens (Svetlana). I also sold a nuc with a homemade queen to another friend. Finally I'm getting the hive numbers back to normal.

Yesterday I had a small break in the weather, so checked on my combined hive. In the top I found Svetlana, and she had loads of brood - yay. Then there was a "storage" box below with some nectar, no brood. In the very bottom boxes (Freyja's old palace) I found more brood of all ages AND three open queen cells (on a drone frame, of all places). They must have been hidden by masses of bees last time I checked - a lesson to shake off those girls. So I popped in a queen excluder and a spacer/upper entrance for the boys. In a few days we'll see what kind of brood is in the bottom. I may well have another homemade queen on my hands.