A Few Words about the Inhumanity of Allowing Weak Colonies to Die

I would like to take a moment to address the idea that letting weak hives die is "inhumane."

Firstly, everything dies. We can all agree on that. But it's an important point that gets lost here. So all bees are going to die, the question is when and how.

Secondly, bees are insects. Insects don't have a long lifespan. Honeybees live about six weeks. Their life is short and full of hard work. Unlike humans which are adapted to live many years and with high intelligence, bees live short lives with a limited number of learned behaviors.

Third, they don't feel the same way we do, they have different nervous systems, different lifecycles, and they're cold blooded to boot.

Fourth, letting a hive die is not at all like letting child or a pet die. A hive is a collective organism. And as I said above, it is cold blooded. A hive that dies in winter simply slowly ceases to function. A hive that dies in summer, the workers will find new hives to join. But eventually they're going to die anyway.

Fifth, in fact, I'd say it's probably more inhumane to requeen a hive, to physically go in and kill a long living insect with your own hand.

Sixth, bees short reproductive cycle allows them to adapt much more rapidly than people. And they have to because they don't have the brain power to learn things and they don't have a long life in which to learn them. They are entirely unlike mammals, most especially humans.

It is not inhumane for a creature to die in a natural way. It is not inhumane for a gazelle to be brutally killed and eaten by a cheetah. It is the way things are. It is how our planet works. Inhumanity comes from how we treat people and other animals, causing them unnecessary pain in the process of controlling or killing them. It is not inhumane to allow a colony of insects to cease to exist under their own power because they don't have the genetic tools to deal with their diseases. It is nature. It is not only the way things are, but the way things ought to be. Treatment-free Beekeeping seeks to return that natural balance to the bees and not interfere in dealing with things that they should deal with on their own. And the feral bees from which we glean our wonderful survivor bees are already doing that.

New Rule

If you wave your hand over an open hive and bees fly up to sting it, requeen.

Grafting Success!

I had a somewhat exciting week, this past week, Spring Break.  I grafted for the first, second, and third times. 

Sunday night, I made up some cell bars using wax cell cups I purchased from Rossman.  Monday morning, I put them in the hive so the bees could get used to them.  I put 12 cups on at first.

On Tuesday, there seemed like there was going to be a break in the rain after it had rained for two days. During an actual break in the rain, I ran out to my chosen hive and did the manipulations for the Ben Harden Method, acquired the frame to be grafted from, grafted, and placed the cell bar frame back in the hive.  I added six more cups just for fun. 

The Ben Harden method is one in which you use a queenright colony to raise new queens.  To do this, you make two dummies, frames that are just solid wood which kind of concentration the action in the hive to just a few frames in the middle.  You put this setup above a queen excluder.  You then place a frame of pollen, a frame of young brood, and the cell bar frame in the box and nurse bees are supposed to come up from below and care for the new queens.  They are not supposed to reject them because the queen has never set foot on that cell bar frame and thus her scent is not there.  It's managed kind of like an engineered supersedure.

Later in the week, I checked.  Every single one had failed.  No takers.  I had a few ideas why, the rain was on the top of the list.  I should have had more patience.  Instead of nurse bees coming up to tend the brood, they stayed in the main brood nest as it was probably too cold to go meandering about the hive.  Fortunately though, I had placed an empty comb in the broodnest to replace the one I put in the upper box.  But I'll get back to that later.

So I left the cell bar frame in the hive and waited until Saturday when the weather should be excellent.  I made up some more cell bars, another frame with 18 and decided that I would retry the Harden Method and also do a batch with a regular queenless hive.  That frame that I had put in on Tuesday was now the perfect frame to graft from and to use to bait nurses up from below.  All the larvae were pretty uniformly on their first day out of the egg (some eggs remaining) and were the perfect age to be grafted.  Add to that the fact that the cups had been in the hive for half a week and were well polished and ready to go.

It's hard to tell in this picture, but the bees have begun to raise 17 out of the 18 grafted larvae.  Quite a good run.  Remember, this is in a queenright hive which can go about its business with no disruption in brood rearing or queenlessness.

I took pictures of the queenless hive cell bar this morning as well, but my phone focused on the grass in the background rather than the bees so the picture is out of focus.  But it looks almost the same except that they only took 12 of the 18 grafted.  I reason this is at least partly because the cells were not allowed to be polished by the bees before grafting.  You can be assured I will not make that mistake again.

Overall, this was a very successful excercise and one from which I learned greatly.  More updates soon.  In a week, it will be time to make up mating nucs and that is likely to be a monumental task.

As you can see in the picture at the top, the yard looks markedly different.  I've removed most of the real estate from the hives that are not doing what they should be doing at this time of the year.  The middle hive in the left row is the one wherein the Harden Method is being used, and the very back corner one is the queenless one.  Its queen is in the nuc behind the bricks to the left of it.  All the honey stored from last year in the puner hives is being stored on the big nasty hive in the front.  This year, it is the designated honey producer.  It is a very active and healthy hive, but a little too mean to breed from.  Such a shame.

29 mating nucs is going to be a marathon!

Feeding Sugar

Here is the latest picture of the home yard.

 Not the clearest, but you can see that many of the trees have lost their leaves, but the cherry in front of the yard has just started.  Got the hole filled where I dug out the rock in the back as well.

As I've mentioned a few times, we had a really wet spring, and a really dry hot summer leading to there being very little stored honey in the hives and necessitating taking action and feeding them.  I fed through the fall with 3:2 sugar syrup and now that they're not longer taking syrup, I'm feeding with granulated sugar.  Granulated sugar has some goods and some bads.  The goods are that the bees can take it even when it's cold, it doesn't cause robbing, and it helps absorb moisture in the hive.  The bads are that the bees don't always take it and they might just clean it out like any other refuse.

The shims that I use (which I lovingly refer to as 'Parker Shims') make a good space to pile sugar on top of a paper towel.  To the left in the picture below, there is a frame feeder and it is full up with sugar as well. We'll see how this turns out.