Know your Queen cells

Kirk writes:

I have noticed that new beekeepers have a hard time telling if a Queen cell is a queen cell. Now the books say it looks like a Peanut, and they're right. Here are some queen cells with some peanuts for all the New beekeepers to see. Notice the size—they are long, almost 3/4 of a inch.

kirkobeeo

Freeing The Bees

In the aftermath of the Bee 911 Disaster/Adventure, we had a chainsaw crew come in to remove the enormous Eucalyptus that fell in our yard and overturned our bee hive.


We wanted to put the hive back in its original location once the work was done, so on Kirk's advice I plugged the opening with cheesecloth and set the hive in the shade while the crew cut up and removed the tree.


Here's what it looked like when I let them out.

The Original "Bee Movie"

Backwards Beekeeper Phil sent the link for Bee City, a 1951 educational film that gives a thorough and knowledgeable account of life inside the hive. The photography is impressive for its time—and because it was made before commercial beekeepers started dumping all sorts of noxious chemicals on their bees, it also fits the Backwards Beekeeping philosophy pretty closely, except for its advocacy of queen excluders.

Best of all, though, is the voice-over. Editor and narrator John Kieran sounds like an easily-distracted grandfather after a couple of glasses of wine, regaling the family with stories during a home movie.



Via the essential Internet Archive.

UPDATE: A reader adds:

Love the blog. I have it linked from my own. Good stuff and very entertaining!

I am a second year beekeeper here in North Carolina, and we're on a winter weather watch for 5-8 inches of snow on Friday. I will be so glad when spring arrives. Wish us luck and that the snow goes away faster!

I wanted to send you a link to a theater short made in 1933 called "Her Majesty The Queen Bee". Its an oldie, but goodie...and it was filmed in Cali. Just thought you might want to share it with your readers.

Mark C.
Reidsville, NC

Thanks, Mark!

Viewer mail

A reader from Silver City, New Mexico writes:

I'm a recent subscriber to your blog, after reading about the insane (imo) behavior in the food industry regarding bees.

Great work, first off. Thanks.

I am wondering if you have any insight into setting up hives strictly for a permanent establishment of a hive, with no honey collection, and hopefully little to no maintenance. I'm mostly concerned with the bees being happy and self sustaining. Would there be anything that would be done differently? In nature, I would assume the bees would naturally achieve this balance.

Would love to hear any insight on this topic.

--Ed C.

Kirk replies:

Well, My Philosphy is to do what is best for the bees. For example, there is a Bee Log at Farmlab in downtown Los Angeles, where we have our bee club meetings. Those bees will be in that log for as long as they chose to be; no one will mess with them.

I have Hives I go check maybe three times a year, and sometimes remove no honey. We let all our bees draw their own comb. Backwards Beekeepers are low-impact beekeepers, and let the bees do the Managing.

kirkobeeo

Backwards Beekeepers TV: The ShopVac Bees

Backwards Beekeeping guru Kirk Anderson (aka Kirkobeeo) brings a ShopVac-turned-beehive over to Erik & Kelly of Homegrown Evolution..

Once there, he shows us how to do a cut-out, which is a live transplant of a bee hive from a bad location into a good one.



By the way, these bees continue to live happily in Kelly & Erik's yard (along with chickens, dog, and various urban wildlife).

Beekeeping On Portland's KBOO Radio

Carole writes:

You have a great website and resources down there in LA! I thought your group might be interested in this BEE SHOW we're airing here in Portland, Friday, Jan 29, 6-7pm. You can listen online at www.kboo.fm and, of course, feel free to call in to let Portland know what LA is doing about bees! On the show we'll have some local backyard beekeepers and do a honey tasting. Bee songs, too!

Carole Scholl
Bread and Roses Collective
KBOO Community Radio, 90.7-FM
Portland, Oregon

Let 'em hear you up in Portland, beekeepers.

Kirk Anderson, Reality TV Star

Kirk shot a segment for a reality show on USA called Character Fantasy about a month ago, and now the episode is here.

Kirk's going to need an agent pretty soon. Talk about a total TV natural (as if we didn't know that already).

Yin: My Beekeeping Experience

Backwards Beekeeper Yin writes:

My bees came to me several years ago. One day in my back yard in a ceramic jar I saw a lot of bees buzzing in and out, a bee hive settled down there. A couple of years later I found the bees abandoned the hive. I felt upset they left my yard. We cleaned the jar and put it back to the same place. Without paying any attention to it and to my surprise another hive came in there again. I was so happy to see them back again.

Last March I saw a swarm hanging in my tomato plant wire support , I called a beekeeper who always sells his honey at our school fair and asked for help. He gave me the instruction by phone and then I bought a box, and shook the bees inside the box. Luckily I got the queen inside the box. Since then the only thing I do to my hive is to keep adding the super on the top.

I am so happy to go to the urban beekeeping meetings and get to know the people there. I appreciate everyone who shared their experience with me. Kirk came to inspect my hive at the beginning of December and said I had a very healthy hive. All of this gave me confidence in my beekeeping. Kirk told me I could harvest honey at early Spring.

Can you believe my chickens gave me eggs for my Christmas gift and my sweet bees shared their honey with me at 2010 New Year! No gift is better than that!

When I took out the frame full of honey, my eyes were full of tears. Thanks nature and thanks to the busy bees!

—Yin

Bee 911 Disaster/Adventure

Amy and I came home from today's bee meeting to find that an enormous Eucalyptus tree at the top of our sloping back yard had fallen down, taking another tree with it. (Click the photo to enlarge it, and check out the picnic table at the bottom of the frame for scale.)


That discovery was dramatic enough.

Then we looked up the hill to see that the Eucalyptus had fallen right on top of our bee hive, leaving scattered boxes and a cloud of very confused and pissed-off bees.


The impact had crushed the giant ceramic pot that served as our hive base, but the boxes themselves were in surprisingly good shape. The bottom box (containing the brood nest) was upside-down, and when I turned it upright the bees really went into defensive mode.


Luckily for us, we have Kirk Anderson in the neighborhood, and he came by to assess the situation.

"Holy shit!" said Kirk, upon seeing the size of the fallen tree. It's pretty unusual to get that much of a reaction out of him. But when it came to the bees, of course, he was totally unfazed.

We found that the brood box had four broken frames, and that the comb had fallen away from each of them. Working together, we tied the brood comb back into the frames with kite string and put everything back in the box as it was before.



We removed all the honey comb that had fallen out of the other overturned boxes. We'll do a crush-and-strain harvest of the cured honey, and feed the uncured stuff back to the bees.


On Kirk's advice, the plan now is to plug the entrance of the hive tonight after dark and move the whole thing up the hill a bit so that a tree crew can come in and get chain-sawing.

Amy caught one sting. I got away without any, and if Kirk got stung he didn't mention it.

Kirk's good instincts and matter-of-fact approach made the whole repair job easy and straightforward. So despite our yard being a bit of a wreck, we got another good bee lesson in today.

Here's Kirk's re-cap:

Viewer mail

A reader writes:

Hi Kirk,

I am a small Idaho, (tag along), commercial bee keeper. I currently have 27 hives in Calif. helping the almond crop...

The first year I started with 12 boxes that I bought from another commercial bee keeper, split the strongest hives and fed well all season and ended up with 21 hives.

This last year after splitting I cut back on the feed all summer to save sugar cost, did not check them enough and found that I had starved out what were strong hives. Hard lesson!...

I just recently found your web site and really like your approach to bee keeping. Do you think that it is possible to start converting my boxes to small cell frames with the nucs this spring?

When I split [hives], I place 3 frames of brood and 2 with honey in each box. If all of the frames are of the large cell, do you think that the bees will draw out and convert over time to the smaller natural cells, by moving their brood and honey to the new natural frames that they will draw out?

Also there is the question of will the larger bees over power and rob the smaller natural bees?

I know that's a lot of 'ifs'.

Any insight that you can offer would be appreciated.

I would like to convert all of my hives over time, to the natural bees.

Thanks

Kirt M.

Kirk responds:

Bees in the almond orchards starve because there isn't enough in those Almond Blossoms to feed them. Feeding bees granulated sugar is used most times as an Emergency Feeding. Most commercial guys feed corn syrup because it is cheaper.

If you want to regress your bees, it is best to go to Michael Bush's web site and read it.

You can also join Organicbeekeepers on Yahoo.

Dee and Ed Lusby run 1000 hives, all small cell.

All chemical-free, treatment-free Natural Cell is naturally small. Natural Bees are Naturally small compared to Large Cell Bees. If you want to Have good Energy you have to Do What is Best for the Bees. If you are interested in Money, then work the bees to death and buy some new ones from Australia. If Nature treated me and you like Greedy Beekeepers treat their Bees, we wouldn't be here would we?

LIVE WITH NATURE NOT A GIN HER