What: I went for a wonderful walk on Saturday morning with my friend, Kate, to check out her topbar beehive. Her bees were reluctant to come out when we first arrived, but by the time we left the sun was out and it was about 43 degrees. Her hive is in full sun and has a dark cover, so it must have warmed the hive up much higher than that. Her bees were flying with great relish! I can only imagine the relief of being able to fly after spending a month and a half cooped up in darkness.
Bee flyling, yellow blotches on snow are their poop
They spend their time on warm winter days cleaning shop and making poop flights, for lack of a better term. The little yellow splotches in the photos immediately above and below are bee poop. We were both surprised at how much poop a single bee can poop; it was like watching a great blue heron or bald eagle fly over head and unleash a torrent of poop.
bee poop on surface of snow
Inside the hive, bees shiver to maintain heat. To fly a bee needs to be at about 85oF. It'll shiver and spike it's temperature to about 100o before taking off. If the weather outside is too cold, the bees won't make it very far. But their temperature can drop pretty low before they'll die. Bees on the inside of the hive that are on the outside of the cluster can have body temperatures as low as 41o. Below is one unfortunate bee. The dark bodies of the bees absorb the heat from the sun, so many had melted down into the snow.
When we inspected a couple of the bees that had flown and landed on the snow we found some varroa mites, which Kate wasn't too happy about. They look like shiny water pennies (a type of limpet). Below is the best my camera could do, they're about as big as a grain of sand so they're hard to spot.
What: Conner Roberts, a student in my CCV class Natural History of Vermont, found a wild hive of bees in our last class. We weren't sure at first if it was active, but putting my ear up to the hole you could definitely hear a buzz coming from inside!! When I took Zac out to see the hive he knocked and you could hear a furious buzz emanate from the hive.
I wish I could age the honeycomb based on color and texture so we could estimate how long the cavity had been inhabited by bees. Zac and I assumed that it was at least a couple of seasons old as the comb at the bottom (image below to right) was super dark and dense. The comb hanging down (image on left) seems like it's from this most recent season.
Ecological notes: A lot of folks ask me what bees do in the winter. They are such excellent pollinators because they need to collect and store enough nectar to sustain a population of a few thousand during the winter. The nectar is fanned and evaporated down into honey, then capped and store to be eaten during the long winter. The honey fulls their little bodies as they huddle and shiver to maintain the hive at a temperature of around 80 degrees! By staying active, they generate heat (much like running around or doing jumping jacks to stay warm on a cold day.
Pulp at base of pine (about 1/2" thick,
mix of pulp, seeds, and bee carcasses!
Where: Centennial Woods, old (maybe 150 year old) white pine tree that died about 15 years ago in the 1998 Ice Storm. The scar was created much longer ago and there had been enough time for carpenter ants to invade the tree, hollow much of it out, and then abandon their nest. I'll post more on the 1998 ice storm sometime this winter.
Other notes: Zac brought up the idea of search image. This is the second wild hive I've found, and they share quite a few features. Here's what we noticed that might help us cue in to future sites for a wild hive
Near an open field (about 20' back from edge)
Within 100' of flowing water
In a hollow white pine
White pine had several pileated holes in it (both were hollowed out by carpenter ants)
Lots of pulp at base of tree
Opening to hive elongated vertically, one hive was about 5" tall, this one was closer to 15"
What: We'd been noticing at my house for a few days the highway of bees zipping back and forth from the Japanese knotweed (Fallopia japonica, formerly Polygonum cuspidatum) to their hives. The Japanese knotweed flowers just opened up last week, signaling that the season of nectar flow is nearly done.
Ecological notes: Lots of flying insects (and a couple types of ants) were making good use of the flowers. I imagine that many flying insects that rely on nectar will start disappearing in the next few weeks as food sources drastically dwindle. From top left in clockwise order: House flies, blow fly, unknown ant, and yellow jacket.
Where: Knotweed grows in disturbed sandy soils. Roadsides and river banks are great places to spot the plant. Look for dense stands with the delicate white strands of flowers poking up from the tops.
Other notes: I love knotweed. I find it tenacious, elegant, and nurturing. I have fondness for its tender shoots in the spring, the echoing resonance of its hollow chambers in winter, and the sweet scent it radiates in early fall. I find it forgivable that it might not hold the Winooski's banks in place (it was brought to the states to be used to hold banks in place), but I find it dubious that a river 500 million years old doesn't want to sway and bend in a new dance every once in a while. Cheers be to the knotweed.
What: Callan, Zac, and I suited up and checked in on our hives. A few weeks ago we added supers to the hives and were hoping that the time for harvesting was finally here. And indeed it was! We gave one of our hives a headstart by giving it drawn out comes at the beginning of the season, and the upper of its two supers was completely drawn out with capped honey and no brood. The super probably weighed upwards of 30 pounds! The video shows a bit about the harvesting process once the frames had been removed from the hive. Zac also shows off some wonderful natural history knowledge.
It was amazing to see how much honey we harvested relative to the size of the super. The ball jars are actually sitting on a deep, which is 9 5/8" deep, whereas the super we harvested from is only 6 5/8" deep (its total volume is only about 1.2 square feet).
Ecological notes: A lot of the clovers are past their peak and the mints, late season squash flowers, and goldenrods are taking center stage. I've seen the first knotweed flower buds, which is among the last sources of nectar for honey bees before winter sets in.
Where: My backyard
Other notes: We got about 2.5 gallons of honey off of our first harvest. Last year we had an early and a late harvest off of one hive, totally about 5 gallons of honey. Hopefully we will be able to harvest honey from our other two hives this year if we get a good flush of nectar over the next few weeks.
What: I've been thinking more about my last post and the importance of words in relation to our understanding of the world around us. I was telling a friend about the woodchuck that's growing fat off our kale, and how he had gotten the broccoli too. My friend asked how I knew it was a "he" and then pointed out how it was weird that animals automatically and unconsciously becomes "he" when the gender is unknown (I'm always conscious of when someone uses the pronoun "she" in a gender neutral situation). The pronoun "it" lacks so much emotion and humanity, like describing an automaton, so, because we like to anthropomorphize animals (e.g. Bambi), we assign gender to them. I even hear people refer to my bees and egg laying chickens as male.
As a naturalist my first questions are often around identification, particularly with insects. I posted an ID request to the bugguide.net community. John Carr sent a response "It's a female dolichopodidae." Well female is awfully specific, but animal scientific classifications ending in -idae (-aceae for plants) are family groupings, which are pretty general (Curculionidae, the weevil family, contains over 40,000 species). This is from a guy who specializes in IDing midges and their relatives, and he could get gender but only ID down to family. So what was he cuing into that said female and not male? Turns out the answer is more about what makes a male a male.
Ecological notes: So even with the vast evolutionary divergence of insects into every ecosystem around the world, some morphological adaptations are still conserved or at least have converged. One of those things is a male's ability to detect a female, and they do this in a variety of ways, like hearing, smelling, or seeing females from a great distance. Male mosquitoes, for example, have enlarged antennae to pick up that horrendous and penetrating bzzzzzz sound the females make as they look for that perfect patch of skin. What I'll call foot moths (and cover in a future post) have huge antennae for "smelling" the sex pheromones from females.
Male honeybees, aka drones, have enlarged eyes to spot a queen before other males do. The first picture in the post is a drone; note how the eyes are so big that they actually touch in the middle of the head. The next picture shows a bunch of females at the entrance to the hive, their eyes considerably smaller and not touching on the tops of their heads. Drones are pretty much useless to the colony other than for reproduction. They hanging around feeding on honey, begging for food, and grooming themselves. When the timing is right they'll start going for exploratory flights to breeding sites. These change frequently, so a male needs to be able to spot one from a distance. The story is far more complicated than this, but it's a neat start and I"m tired, maybe more later...
Where: My backyard
Other notes: Ryan Morra and I noticed a whole bunch of female worker bees crawling around on the ground near the hive. I went back with my camera after he left and spotted one a worker dragging another, much lighter colored worker out of the hive. At one point the lighter one started to fly and the other one held on and pulled it back down. Once it got to the edge of the platform the darker one left the lighter one to die on her own. In the middle of summer, this generation of worker bees have the shortest lifespan of just a few weeks (c.f. winter life span can be several months). Kicking out unproductive bees is essential, I guess, to maintaining efficiency.
WIND: The wind was so tumultuous yesterday. It tapered by mid-day, but at dawn it was at it's strongest. I was struck by the different ways the leaves of different trees moved with the wind. The compound leaves all had this wispy graceful way of flowing with the wind, while the stout leaves of the buckthorns seemed obstinate and reluctant to bend under the wind's influence. Last year I had girdled a Norway maple, this year the tree had both leafed out and flowered, which was impressive. During the windstorm I put my ear to the exposed wood to listen to the wind strain and contort the tree's long fibers. It sounded like the achings in the belly of a large boat. When I put my ear against the part of the bole that still had bark on it, the sounds were muffled, but still echoed that deep resonant strain on the tree.
BEES: The day quickly warmed and I spent some time watching our three beehives. It was funny watching the guard bees act as bouncers to returning foragers. Each colony has its own scent and the guards would presumably tip off the others if a bee from another hive tried to enter. Most of the time there were two bees guarding the entrance to the hive. The pair was constantly vigilant and would approach each bee entering (if only for a brief moment). I'm not sure how one bee will replace another as guard (how long could a sentry keep its guard up before it started to lose focus?), but I watched a pair on active duty for about 10 minutes without being replaced. Others guards would go into the hive or I'd lose track of who was who every couple of minutes.
In the video, all the bees returning with huge yellow balls attached to their rear legs are foragers carrying pollen back to the hive. Bees collect pollen for raising brood, and it is the colonies only source of protein, fat, vitamins, starches, and essential minerals. Pollen has a slight negative charge, bees have a slight positive charge, so a bee will literally pull the pollen right off a flower's anther. Bees are covered with hairs, which increases their surface area and their for the attractive force to pollen. While out foraging they will clean themselves and pack the pollen into "pollen basket," or corbicula, on their hind legs.
Not all pollen is created equal and protein concentration can range from 2% to over 60% protein!! Plants can be pollinated by animals or the wind, and so not surprisingly, the 2%-ers are wind pollinated (anemophilous), and the 60%-ers are pollinated by insects (entomophilous) and/or vertebrates (zoophilous). I've been out in Centennial Woods checking which species the bees are feeding on and I've spotted them on most of the clovers in flower - birdsfoot trefoil, crown vetch, cow vetch, and red clover. I haven't seen them on the flowers of white clover, but I've noticed an abundance of ants on these. Turns out white clover also has one of the lowest protein concentrations of the clover family (Fabaceae). Members of the pea famliy (Fabaceae), like clover, tend to have pollen with the higher concentrations of protein. Their flowers are also highly specialized for attracting insects. I'll post soon a video of insects manipulating birdsfoot trefoil flowers to show this. Asters also tend to have pretty high concentrations of protein in their pollen.
For a great description of other activities different castes within the bee hierarchy are responsible for, check out: http://bigislandbees.com/buzz/2010/05/19/bee-hive-hierarchy/.
For more on pollen concentrations:
http://www.devonbeekeepers.org.uk/downloads/articles/pollen_nutrition_roulston.pdf
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.JPG "Male honeybee (drone)")
.JPG "Female honeybees guarding the hive")