Exploring Mysteries of the Bee Yard (235)

Episode 235 – Exploring Mysteries of the Bee Yard 

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Jim: Hey listeners, it's Jim coming to talk to you here, and it's one of those days, but the show must go on. I'm here with Jason Ferrell. Say hi, Jason.

Jason: Greetings.

Jim: Jason's crazy enough to be out here on a rainy, cool, brisk day with me.

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Jim: Honestly, I had a plan, and can we just talk about it for a minute? I don't think I'm going to do it. I was going to open a colony, one of those packages. I think they've got their own coin now, and I was going to talk about it, but that's got to be for another day. Stand by while we make plans to discuss something of equal importance but different.

Introduction: Welcome to Honey Bee Obscura, brought to you by Growing Planet Media, the producers of the Beekeeping Today podcast. Join Jim Tew, your guide through the complexities, the beauty, the fun, and the challenges of managing honey bees.

Jim hosts fun and interesting guests who take a deep dive into the intricate world of honey bees. Whether you're a seasoned beekeeper or just getting started, get ready for some plain talk that'll delve into all things honey bees.

Jim: Jason used to work in my lab years ago. Hey, Jason. That's the strongest thing I've ever seen.

Jason: Yes, Jim, what are these bees doing?

Jim: What are they doing? I'm not making this up. I'll have to make a photo of it. It's about 51 degrees. It's lightly raining. Jason's going to snap a picture of it and we'll post it on the webpage, but there's about a dozen bees that are just sitting in the cold, gloomy weather on a white top. There's one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine bees on this gloomy day. I thought at first, Jason, they were pollinating those flowers, but there's multiflora rose, but they're not. Are they just warming up, or for some reason is that white top attractive?

Jason: Their tongues are out. It looks like they're maybe getting something off of this. What is this, a hive cover here?

Jim: Yes.

Jason: I think maybe they're getting something off of that. Their tongues are out, their abdomens are pulsating

Jim: Whatever it is. This is the only site that's of interest. I'm sorry, listeners, you can't see this, but we were going to talk about other things, cold springtime. What is the last day of spring?

Jason: Oh, I don't think we're there yet. I think this is spring.

Jim: Summer's coming up soon, right away. Anyway, it's disappointingly cold and I don't know what these bees are doing. [laughter] It's just annoying. You've spent all your life trying to figure out bee stuff, and then you walk out with one busted topic and walk into something I can't answer.

Jason: They are working the flowers, too, though.

Jim: Well, they're on the flowers.

Jason: Yes, they're on the flowers.

Jim: If you look at the flowers over there, there's nothing over there. Whatever they're doing is in this general area here, it's a top that's just laying on a woodpile, and it's raining and it's cold or certainly chilly. There's about 9 or 10 bees that are something you do with that top. They're not doing it anywhere else from the yard.

Jason: We're about 8 feet away from the hive, I think. We're not far from the hive at all. They're just finding this on their own.

Jim: They are. I don't know why they're out.

Jason: Because being this close to the hive, they wouldn't be able to communicate it to their sisters, right?

Jim: No, not that I know of. 51 degrees Fahrenheit, and it's about a 41-degree wind chill. I don't know what's up with that, Jason. Just another mystery in the bee yard. There's that. The thing that's unique about the bee yard is that the way the energy waxes and wanes, we're walking around here, so you'll hear grass rustling and whatever, but of course, there's no energy today. I came out the day before yesterday, and the enthusiasm has calmed. When they come out of spring, they're keen to build up, they work, work, work. They fly, fly, fly, they do whatever it takes, and there's all this bee activity, clouds of bees.

Then they go through the swarming behavior, and then it's like they take a break, they yawn and say, "Well, so much for that. That was fun while it lasted, but I'm done with it now." The yard calms down and then approaches the summer doldrums, so that the yard is already past that spring energy than it did. There's a fair amount of flight. Jason, I spent a lot of time several years ago trying to understand how bees fly in the rain, because when a drop of water hits a bee, that'd be like somebody dropping about 200 pounds of water on me. It would be something I would notice right away.

Jason: I was thinking exactly that as I was driving to this undisclosed bee yard.

Jim: This hidden yard?

Jason: Yes, this hidden yard. Somewhere in the marshy expanse of Wayne County, Ohio. I was wondering about that because the relative size of a bee and a raindrop.

Jim: Two things happen, from what I can understand. Number one, yes, they do take a beating if the drop hits them and it's a good-sized raindrop, they take a beating and they're really knocked around. If, on the other hand, it's just a passing raindrop, the hairs on their body make the water just flow right off them. Almost like one of those silicone products you put on your windshield. The water droplet seems to break up, and the water seems to shed off them fairly quickly.

I don't know why a bee would take a chance on flying in the rain. What could it possibly want other than if it happened to really need water? I guess it could get it off the front board. Why this one colony is flying as much as it is in the rain, I'm at a loss to explain. Give me your best guess. There's one beehive here that's really somewhat active, and all the other colonies in the yard are just totally quiet.

Jason: That one over there also seems to be--

Jim: That's one of the packages. There's a little bit of activity on that. Could you get all sappy and say, this colony has really strong foraging attributes? They're really hustling. They're wasting energy because the plants on this day are not going to be producing nectar or pollen. I'm at a loss to understand why Nick's second mystery, why these bees are so keen to be flying so much when all the other bees inside the other hives are sitting in, staying close to the fire and staying warm and watching old TV shows or whatever bees do inside the hive when it's quiet.

There's that. We're beyond all fruit bloom, and we're in a dearth. There's a few things blooming, but we're in a dearth until poplar and a few other things come along. Locust is blooming, but we rarely make anything from locust. It's just a downtime. That's my only working hypothesis about that yard energy thing, is that there's just nothing out there for them to go get, so they're not getting the recruitment procedures inside. The interest in the flight pattern seems to change to some extent. I don't know. When these bees come into this snout, they've got that brood patterned in there, and you can chill the brood down as long as it's not frozen.

I don't know why you'd want to do that, but the brood is more hardy than I think for, but they're going to be doing their thing inside the hive to keep it as warm as they can. Let's take a break, hear from our sponsor, and we'll come right back with more of a rainy day bee yard walk.

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Jim: Listeners, I don't want to drive you crazy about these packages. I'm just playing. I told you that I bought the packages just because I didn't want to be left out of the spring season, but I'll come back out on a better day, and we'll open that colony up just to be sure that it's queen-right. What I was thinking of when we did all that, Jason was, "What would I say to someone who was new to beekeeping?" In the old days, would call me and say, "I've got this queen problem, and they'd describe what I was going through." I was doing things that a beginning beekeeper could do.

When I pirated a frame of brood from this package to put in that package over there, and what I wanted to do was to see if they would begin to draw queen cells out on it, and that would tell me that they were still queenless. I came back about a week later, and they appeared to have brood there that they could not have had. They couldn't have produced a queen that quickly, I don't think. It looks a lot more than likely they had a queen in there the whole time. Can I admit this to you and to the listeners? It's a package of bees, and I couldn't find the queen. [laughter]

I looked over and over again, and I finally had confidence in myself and thought, "She's not here." Stranger things have happened, and we could have missed her completely.

Jason: She's just a sneaky one.

Jim: The season's been okay so far. It's been a lot of rain, but the rain means that there's nectar on the good days. Listeners, I want to talk to you about a project that I don't think I'm going to try to make into a full segment right now. I am reluctant to say it because I'm not a gardener, Jason, but I put in a flower garden. In fact, let's go have a look at it. Now, we've got wind blowing here in this open location. It's not going to matter, Jason, in the scheme of things, but if everybody planted a little bit, it would help. I've got a garden here. What size would you say this is, Jason? 25 by 25?

Jason: Yes.

Jim: All I did was order seed from a wildflower company, and I just got the northeastern wildflower seed mix. Now the people in the know who are listening are going to ask me what I planted, and I've got to go find the seed packet and see what's mixed here, but it's the usual conglomerate of daisies and sunflowers.

Jason: Milkweed?

Jim: Milkweed and lemon mint and whatever. It's going to take two years, because this year I'm probably just going to feed weeds and rabbits. I'm hoping that they get some seed base to it by next year. I'm doing it just because I like to watch my bees on flowers. I'm not really doing it because I'm trying to become a gardener. Just so I can watch what the bees are foraging on and get some sense that they appreciate being included. I have a problem with gardening, Jason, because I'm impatient. You come out here and you do all this work and get all this stuff tilled up and put some seed out, and I want to see something happen, but nothing happens.

You wait and you wait, and maybe nothing happens again. The other thing, I shouldn't say it. I'll lower my voice, so maybe everybody won't hear it, but the seed was not really all that fresh. Some of the seed was three years old. I've kept it in the dark and I've kept it dry. I didn't freeze it. Maybe there's not going to be that much seed set anyway. This year is primarily just an effort to get the plot tilled up, get the grass killed back. If I have to till it again, I'll till it again. Then I'm hoping, in earnest, by next year, I can start getting a good foothold on this. It looks like a garden, doesn't it?

Jason: It sure does.

Jim: It looks nice and wet and rainy right now. I guess we'll go back inside. I'm going to say goodbye to you here at this point, listeners. I always enjoy talking with you. Thanks for putting up with us on this rainy day. I planned to do a lot more than what I was able to get done. I'm saying bye. Jason, say bye.

Jason: Bye.

Jim: We're both saying bye, and somebody will talk to you about this time next week. I always seriously appreciate you listening in. If you have any idea of why you think those bees were on that white top, I'd like to hear from you. It's just one of the mysteries of the yard. [chuckles] Bye-bye.

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