THE SWARM! (Part 3) and Botrytis

**NOTE: I’m going to add some pictures to this one… but I wanted to get it published because a lot of people seem to be following the swarm saga.

**NOTE 2: Changed my mind.  I’ll just make a new post for the pictures.

OK, the most exciting thing here lately has been The Swarm so we’ll start there.

If you’ll recall in our last episode, our hero had just gone willy-nilly into his hive and yanked out a few frames for a new hive in the hope that he’d move the queen over to the new hive and convince the little buggers that they’d already swarmed and just forgotten… sometimes called a “shaken swarm”.  Sadly, his mission was complicated by a severely agitated hive getting “all up in his business”.  And he’s fairly ignorant– this being his first year at this.

We join our hero today… not willing to go back to the nursery again today for more irrigation parts… spontaneously deciding to don his suit and go hive diving.

There I was… again with my silly white suit on… again facing the possibility that I’ll crack open the hive to find another mob scene, a post-swarm apocalyptic wasteland, or, most likely, a bunch of stuff I don’t understand… again… gooey, waxy, bee scuz.

But, no, today was different.  I have been forged in the fires of impulsive stumbling forward.  I can almost feel my ignorance dissipating a bit.  First, I get bees without knowing a queen from a more masculine homosexual.  Then, I randomly pile on boxes, excluders, and supers without following any particular plan– just my feeling about the state of things I saw in my clodhopper hive inspections in which nothing really happened other than that I was happy to not have been stung.  And surprise!  The most likely thing to go wrong… went wrong!

Anyway, see part 1 and part 2 to get caught up…  I’ll wait…

Go ahead.

Great.  So today… I opened up the hive (hive one, currently referred to as the Washington hive)… and they didn’t get very worked up.  In fact, it was almost like the old days… they pretty much just went about their business while I did mine.  So, I started picking through… the honey super… mostly empty… took that off and removed the queen excluder* as had been suggested until they start loading up the super.

*The queen excluder is a classic example of the seemingly arbitrary, completely conflicting, and religiously followed Dark Ages-era beekeeping technique.  It’s basically a screen that the queen can’t fit through.  You place it between the brood and honey boxes to keep her from laying eggs in the honey– for obvious reasons.  It is seen by 50% of beekeepers as a de rigeur piece of gear and 50% refer to it as the “honey excluder” and insist that just keeping the queen in the lower brood box will suffice.  You are either responsible or a moron for using it.  Absolutely.  This also goes for things like slatted bottom racks, top entrances, 9 frame spacing, and plastic “woodware”.  For what it’s worth, I am currently of the opinion that queen excluders reduce honey production and contribute to swarming.  I’ve removed mine.

First frame I pull is one of the new ones… and they’ve been drawing out the comb, but it’s mostly empty.  The next one is one of the originals… it’s got… open comb… but mostly looks like nectar.  That’s not good.  It’s apparently a classic sign of a terminally queenless colony.  Anyway, I worked through the first box and saw no eggs, a little brood, and a fair amount of comb drawing out but not much else.  Plenty of bees.

However, in the bottom box, things are clearly different.  Firstly, it’s pretty well full of bees.  I start pulling frames, and what I notice, aside from oodles of burr comb* is… eggs– quite a few.  Before too long, I’m face to face with her royal highness herself.  She appears completely normal in all respects.  She’s relatively fat and calmly wandering around doing her thing.  Nowhere do I see any swarm cells.  It seems that they have torn them down.

It seems that a) you can never, ever replace a colony swarm back into its hive unless b) you can.  See notes on queen excluder advice.

A little more looking around, and I don’t see anything foul broodish, chalky, or otherwise honey bee pestilent and so I move on to the new hive (heretofore, until I change my mind, referred to as the Adams hive).  That one just takes a minute, but also shows some interesting stuff.  First, there are bees in it.  That’s kinda weird given that I didn’t actually get the queen in there.  What I do see is swarm cells (or supercedure cells, I’ll be damned if I know what the difference is supposed to be and whether it matters).  No eggs.  Plenty of capped brood and honey.  I.e., everything looks cool– albeit queenless.

In a nutshell, everything is pretty much back to normal.  Washington seems to be back in normal business.  Adams looks like it was probably an unnecessary split but on its way to establishing itself.  I’ll keep an eye on things, but it seems like disaster may have been averted despite my best efforts.  I certainly learned a lot.

I wanted to mention that there ARE other things going on in the garden besides this bee stuff.  Most notably lately is the outbreak of a nasty case of botrytis on my strawberries.  If you’re not familiar, botrytis basically causes your strawbs (and grapes and other things) to rot.  When you see a bunch of them with gray mold on them… that’s probably what’s up.  Botrytis is super common and mostly controlled through cultural means… i.e., it’s sort of self-induced when you neglect to clean up yer fields or water in such a way that it splashes up from the soil.  I did both.

It seems that I don’t believe that your bees will swarm or your strawberries will rot until I’ve retrieved my bees from the neighbor’s tree and thrown away all my disgusting, moldy strawberries.  Experiential Learning Pedagogy Reliant Disorder (or ELPRD).

Basically, I left a lot of leaves on the strawb plants, and before I got my irrigation in that area fixed this spring, I was just overhead watering.  I did mulch, but I like to use actual straw, and I think that may have contributed to the problem (by providing warm, damp areas for the fungus to thrive.)

I’m going to treat them as best I can.  I’m checking out a product called “Serenade” that is a strain of bacillus subtilis bacteria, which has shown promise in controlling the disease (once it’s already established).  Just to be safe, I’m also using my old friend neem, too.  I may throw in some baking soda to boot.  I know, it’s not scientific.  So sue me.

Elsewhere, it seems my edamame seeds have just rotted in the soil.  Maybe we’ll try that again, but start them in the greenhouse and transplant.  I’ve got quite a few green tomatoes.  The kids split the first snap pea yesterday (the middle of June… eesh…)  Everything’s growing pretty well, but so far, it’s been mostly lots of  potential harvest.  We did clear out a bed of daikon and turnips because I was getting sick of watching them and the daikon were starting to bolt.  We tried a couple new pickling recipes on those with moderate success.

I’ve replanted that bed with okra.  Lots and lots of it.  I am not at all sure why I planted so much okra, other than that I failed with it before, and I wanted to see if I could actually grow it if I made it prominent enough that I had to pay attention.

OK, off to build hive stands since I noticed this morning that ants seem to be establishing a nest in Washington.  Sure, why not?