Deep Deep vs Deep Medium

The last couple weeks I've done preemptive splits on my few remaining hives with two deep boxes. Last year I started moving to a single deep and a medium as my brood chamber. The idea is that the bees will still have plenty of space to lay and store food, but won't spend the entire June nectar flow filling every corner of 20 deep frames. Instead they'll start putting nectar into supers sooner, which means more honey during the flow window. At least that's the idea. And this winter, which was exceptionally long, they survived very well in this configuration. The one concern I have is whether this exacerbates swarming...but in my experience the bees get the urge to swarm in the spring no matter how much room they have in their hive.

Specialists

One of the things that makes honey bees great pollinators is that each bee tends to specialize in a particular food source. In other words, they will visit the same kind of flower over and over again. It's more efficient to learn how to get nectar or pollen from a certain flower, and then just keep working that flower until it's no longer productive. Under close inspection, you'd see that each flower is its own little puzzle, and the bees minimize the time spent unlocking the puzzles if they don't bounce from species to species. This is also good for the plants, because it means they're visited by bees that have often just come from another flower of the same species--vitally important when you rely on animal pollination for survival.

Incidentally, it's a late year for foraging here in Missouri. Compared with bloom times from previous years, we're almost a month behind. I'm not complaining...it's comforting to have an unexpectedly long winter after so many unexpectedly early springs.

Red Handed

In February I posted that I had signs of a skunk in the bee yard. In the same post I mentioned that the visitor could've been an opossum. At the risk of tooting my own horn, I was right. Twice. My hive camera shows I had a skunk and an opossum eating bees on several occasions in February.  They tried to do some damage, as I sometimes found entrance reducers pushed off the hives; but at the time it was probably too cold for them to lure out live bees. So they were mostly left scavenging dead bees on the ground. I'm cool with that. But if they make a habit of eating my live bees, I'll deploy carpet tack to gently persuade them to find food elsewhere.

Opossum (possum) at a honey bee hive

How Bees Fly in Cold Weather

Honey bees are not cold-weather flyers. Their muscles seize up if they get too cool. When this happens, the result is the stuff of nightmares--a bee may be alive and otherwise healthy while she lays on the cold ground unable to move herself to warmer climes. (Gen X'ers may recall Metallica's horrifying video for the song "One.") She'll ultimately succumb to the cold unless the weather quickly changes in her favor.

Beekeepers usually espouse 50° as the minimum temperature a bee will venture outside the hive, and that's not entirely untrue because 50° is the lowest temp in which a bee can fly for prolonged periods. But we've all seen bees flying on days when it wasn't 50° and wondered why they weren't following the rules we gave them.

Enter an article in the January 2018 American Bee Journal titled "Cold Flying Foragers: Honey Bees in Scotland Seek Water in Winter." It's the most interesting bee-related article I've read for months, and it explains how bees thermoregulate their thorax temperatures to make flight under 50° possible (but only for short distances). I've spent so much time thinking about this new information that I decided to make it part of a beekeeping display at an upcoming festival. The picture above is the visual aid I made to spawn discussion with festival attendees. Feel free to download a higher resolution bitmap here if you’d like to use this for your own presentation or display. I hope you find as insightful and fascinating as I do.

Survivor

This worker bee was one of thousands gladly taking the syrup I offered on a warm day last week. If you look closely at her thorax (the middle section of her body), you can see how worn her hairs are. Her tattered hair reveals that she's a winter bee who made it through the coldest months and is now working to usher in a new generation. And it hasn't been an easy winter. She didn't have the luxury of hibernating or hiding away in a pupal state. No, with every degree it dropped, she shivered more to generate the warmth needed to keep her sisters--and her mother--alive. And now, with temperatures barely warm enough to sustain flight, she forages for nectar and pollen to feed the brood that's quickly taking over the comb in her hive. She will die soon, and the progeny she's worked so hard for will carry on. And they'll only live for about 4-6 weeks. This girl, however, has been alive for 6 months. In human terms, this is like some people living to 320 while the rest of us die at 75. Despite these seemingly impossible odds, she has survived just long enough to ensure her family sees another winter. As long as I don't screw it up for them.