Riviera Honey

It’s springtime again, and with it comes flowers, nectar, and lots of honey… but mites also become an issue early on in the season. Once they reach a certain threshold, they can do irreplaceable damage to a bee hive; it’s important to keep their numbers down come spring, so that your bees can make it through next winter.

Mites can easily get out of control.

Mites are little red bugs that latch onto and feed on honeybees, and weaken their immune systems so that they die of other diseases. There is no way to keep mites away from your bees, although some bees have been bred for their “hygienic” behavior, taking turns picking them off each others backs. Regardless of the types of bees you have, its good practice to take some precautionary anti-mite measures:

1. Screened bottom boards: Even if your bees are hygienic, it won’t make any difference if the mites can reattach themselves to another bee after falling down to a normal wooden bottom board. By using a screen board, with an oil lined pan underneath, you can trap mites and have a rough idea of what kind of mite problem your facing.

2. Sprinkle some sugar on ‘em: Mites can’t hang on to bees when they are covered in powdered sugar. So you can take a sifter, some powdered sugar, and sprinkle it on the bees in the brood chambers (where mites are concentrated). Works great with the screened bottom boards.

3. Drone traps: Mites are apparently very attracted to the larger brood comb that is used to make drones, and lay their eggs inside them whenever they can. By setting up some empty drone comb (larger size cells) and letting the queen lay some drone eggs inside, you can then takeout the comb before the drones hatch (24 days after being laid) and freeze it, you will eliminate a large population of mites.

4. Formic acid: Taken from a defensive chemical naturally produced by some ants, this is made into patties you can place on the hives. Mites can’t handle the stuff, and it can be used as a last resort to handle really bad situations before the hive collapses. The bees don’t really like it that much either. This stuff only works in weather up to 85 degrees Fahrenheit, so its better suited to cooler climates.

5. Oxalic Acid: Mixing it with water and spraying it over your bees is very effective against mites (97% reduction claimed). But it’s also volitile (bad for bees) when used too much.

6. Lemon juice: 1 part fresh lemon juice to 1 part sugar syrup (water + sugar).  This is a non-chemical solution to the spraying technique. It is thought that the sugar syrup causes the bees to behave hygienically, and the lemon juice acts as a buffer preventing the bees from just eating the syrup.

Beekeeping trade journals are full of advertisements for queen bees that promise to produce bees of a particular variety. You can buy Cordovan Italians that are bright yellow in appearance and have good wax-building and honey production qualities, Carniolans (originally from Slovenia) that have superior mite resistance and have a darker appearance, in addition to the many other varieties such as Russian, Buckfast, and other various hybrids.

There also different methods of inseminating the queens prior to shipment, which also offer different advantages. Female bees (including queens) have two sets of genes, while males (drones) only have one. Normally, a queen’s eggs contain the genetics of its particular mother and father, and the drones she produces will only contain these genes. In nature, a queen will fly up on a warm spring day and mate with many drones whose genetics will eventually be expressed in her female offspring (should she make it back safely).

The “advantage” of laboratory insemination is that the queen is guaranteed to only produce bees of the type that their individually selected fathers (drones) and mother is. In this way, it is possible to produce bees that are all bright yellow (Cordovan trait is recessive, so both mother and father must have had the same gene for the phenotype to be expressed) or pure Italian, Russian, etc. While it might be really neat to have bees that are bright yellow (and be able to tell which bees are yours in the neighborhood) the downside is that the loss of genetic variety takes away the bees’ natural method of adaptation to changes in their environment. It might be better to have bees with a variety of specialties, each doing what it does best. Some queen bee farmers offer this kind of queen, that is of a particular type but has been naturally inseminated.

However, is it really necessary to buy queens? Although I have succumbed to the temptation (the banner I have shows bees with the Cordovan trait), I only do so if I have lost a queen for some reason and there is not enough time or bees for a successful natural supercedure (bees can raise their own queen by taking a female larvae in the appropriate stage and feeding it royal jelly).

Bees have relatively short life spans and queens are produced each spring and are given the ultimate test of survival. In nature, if feral (typically, Italian, over here) bees do not survive, then their genes are not expressed in future generations. Therefore, probably the best kind of bee to use in your are are local feral swarms that have already adapted to the climate of your area. Interestingly, feral bees tend to be smaller than commercially produced bees and make smaller comb. I have noticed myself that feral bees are also great honey producers and don’t wait around so long at the entrance before entering and storing the honey or pollen. Since commercial bee keepers maintain the practice of replacing their queens every year with commercially produced queens, the responsibility of keeping the various local feral gene pools in tact lies totally on the backyards beekeepers spread around the world.

Unlike its name suggests, “creamed” or “whipped” honey does not contain any cream and neither is it whipped like whipped cream. It is ideally pure honey in a very finely granulized form (with the consistency of a butter spread, and much easier to work with on bread).

There are various ways to make this honey. The “Dyce Method,” for example, calls for cooking honey to a certain temperature and mixing in some already creamed honey in a 1-10 ratio and stirring until evenly blended. Then you just wait until it sets and you’ve got more creamed honey.

At Riviera Honey, we never cook our honey. Every time you cook your honey you risk losing the original flavor and nutrients. So we place our honey into storage that provides conditions for crystallization, and upon the first signs of it we stir the honey so that the crystals are evenly spread throughout. This takes a little more time and multiple stirrings, but results in creamed honey that has never been heated and the taste really shows through. Some creamed honey makers add various extra flavors to their honey,  we keep it tasting like it did in the comb.

One of the many benefits of having bees around is that they pollinate everything nearby. This year, our apple tree has more apples than ever as the bees had pollinated them in the spring.

Lots, and lots, of apples

Our kumquat tree is producing  kumquats nearly year-round as is our orange tree, and finally our neighbor’s large avocado tree (which had not produced any fruit through most of its lifetime) is suddenly full of small avocadoes (this avocado is not a hybrid, but the traditional type that requires cross pollination from a tree of the opposite sex). Thus, bees bring more to their community than just honey (and its awesome smell), but abundance of fruit as well. Any gardener that wants to have a bountiful harvest should know that fertilizer and water are only part of the equation. The variety of nectars collected from the different trees also present themselves in the taste of the honey, which changes its character as the season goes along.

With so many apples, one has to come up with uses other than “an apple a day.” My favorite thus far is the freshly baked apple pie. Mmm, mmm.

Here is my take on the “queen excluder” vs. “honey excluder” debate. (If you’re new to this, a queen excluder is used by some beekeepers to keep the queen laying her eggs to a restricted area–usually the bottom–so that larvae aren’t being harvested with the honey later on. Some call them “honey excluders” because sometimes they hinder traffic of worker bees as well).

I think it really depends on the size of your bees, first of all. I have noticed that feral bees do tend to be smaller and bees produced from queens purchased through the mail tend to produce bees so big they simply can’t fit through the grill. So, if you are using a mail-order hive, it’s likely you will find a bunch of them stuck in the excluder and not very many above it. In this case, it is likely that you’re queen excluder’s best use here is to cook some tasty hamburgers at your next social gathering.

Emergency BBQ kit

However, it doesn’t always have to be all or nothing … one can use an excluder at different stages of hive development if working with smaller bees. I have started off some hives with one deep and a shallow with an excluder underneath and have found that the bees filled up the shallow frames pretty quickly during early spring. Then, when the colony builds up, one can add another box in between and remove the excluder so that they are freely moving around. The reason for taking it out is that there is plenty of room for brood on the bottom, and the second box will typically have some brood, some pollen at the bottom half, and honey on the top half; there is simply no reason to keep the excluder at this point, so I just take it out. I try to leave the honey and pollen in the second level untouched for the bees use, as happy, well-fed bees tend to not get sick and die off.

Excluders always have some wax build-up as time goes along, and I have even had some bees start making comb and filling it with honey at the excluder. I think this may have to do with some violation of “bee space” when the excluder is introduced (more on “bee space” later). For this reason, there is always some traffic being blocked and so most of the time I have my queen excluders waiting to be used as backup BBQ grills.

You may have heard or read about Colony Collapse Disorder, or “CCD” for short.  It refers to a hive with capped brood (developing babies) and a queen, but no worker bees. It is a situation no beekeeper wants to find a hive in, because it usually ends in no bees at all. Happily, I’ve never found one of my hives in this state, but it’s worth talking about because one might be tempted to feed your bees medicine for fear of losing them to the CCD monster.

First of all, CCD seems to primarily affect larger-scale commercial beekeeping operations.  Commercial beekeepers (some with thousands of hives) make the bulk of their money through annual pollination contracts and truck their bees sometimes thousands of miles to farms or orchards where the bees are free to enjoy millions of ONE type of flower. Although this does produce a very specific tasting honey, it is like feeding your kids only ham sandwiches for months. It is probably not good for their health (they would likely get scurvy pretty soon), and I’ll bet they would get sick of it after a while.

Ham Sandwich

Another problem big beekeepers have is the large areas of drugged plants their bees work around. Systemic pesticides were developed to be taken by plants through the roots and work their way into the leaves (as well as flowers and pollen) and serve as the ultimate protection for your plants against bugs. Seeds can be coated in the pesticide, or it can be applied manually after sprouting. The problem is that bees are also affected by these pesticides when they take pollen from these drugged plants, making them more susceptible to common pathogens. Germany (where such pesticides originated) has outlawed the use of systemic pesticides as has Italy, Switzerland, France and many other European countries.

A great documentary to watch on this subject is “Vanishing of the Bees” which includes interviews with the original commercial beekeeper that recently brought “CCD” to the US public’s attention most recently: Dave Hackenberg. The conclusion of the film is that systemic pesticides are a major cause of CCD.

If you would like to support your local feral bee population, plant wildflowers that are not treated with “systemics” and refrain from using pesticides generally. For the backyard beekeeper, although medicines and syrups can be tempting, remember that bees already get their share of chemicals from some flowers they visit, so you might want to try something that commercial beekeepers cannot: give them a variety of food sources, a source of water to drink, and leave them a fair share of honey. Finally, keep your bees as diverse as possible and they will adapt to conditions that a genetically homogenous colony would not (more on this later).

-Bee Dude

Hello honey lovers!

The First Hive

This site is dedicated to those who enjoy real honey and the marvelous little creatures that make it (especially the first swarm that got me started).  I’ll share some of my own experiences as a backyard beekeeper and offer my view on modern practices and other beekeeping-related subjects.