New episode is up! Find it on Podbean, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
I hung a cabbage for the girls as a form of enrichment, and my friend took pics with her snazzy camera! A great time was had by all, and the chickens appreciated the snack,
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Hive news:
Okay, so my last update covered what was happening with the bees up until March 26th so today I’ll discuss what I have seen since then.
Thursday, April 2nd
Warm (50F+), moderate wind, sun/shade
Hive #1 (Cerridwen)
Queen, eggs, brood; all found
Crazy growth!!
From 1.5 frames brood to 5-6 in a week!
Using up honey stores
Took mouse guard off
Reversed boxes again; brood on bottom, honey+empty comb, empty box
Took 2 frames (med) of mixed brood for hive #3; replaced with empty comb
Added a little extra pollen to their feeder
Candy board and wrap still on
Hive #2 (Macha):
Queen, eggs, brood; all present
Increase in brood but not explosive like hive #1
Added a little pollen
Candy board, wrap, and quilt box still on
Hive #3 (Morrigan):
Queen, eggs, brood; all present
Slow build up; only a little brood present
Reversed boxes so deep with honey on bottom and brood box above
Added medium box with 2 frames of brood from hive #1; rest empty comb
Used newspaper between this medium box of brood and rest of hive
Took quilt box off
Candy board and wrap still on
Added a little pollen
Monday, April 6th
Low 50s in afternoon, windy, sun/shade
Hive #1:
Queen, eggs, brood; present
3 full frames of brood (most capped) in bottom box with great pattern
Bottom box: med
Middle box: deep
Queen in middle box looking for places to lay (some eggs); empty frames and honey frames on edges
Top box: deep; mostly unbuilt up frames with one frame honey (that I moved up)
Removed candy board and wrap
Monitor this hive for: signs of swarming, enough brood to make nucs, wax build up
Population is big and strong; lots if activity!
Hive #2:
Queen, eggs, brood; present
Bottom box: medium
Top box: deep
Queen and brood in bottom box
3 frames of brood, mostly full, good pattern (of 3 frames, middle frame is fullest, outer frames have less brood and more eggs)
honey/pollen frames around brood nest
Upper box: filling with honey and pollen; mostly built up comb
Left candy board on as they’re still using it
Removed wrap
Population pretty good with good activity
Hive #3:
Queen, eggs, brood; present
Bottom box: deep, mostly honey and empty comb
Middle box: deep, honey, some built up frames, 1 frame sparse brood and eggs
Top box: medium, 2 full frames of brood and eggs from hive #1
Removed newspaper
Candy board off
Wrap still on
Activity is increasing but queen does not seem to be laying as much (although overcast sky made it hard to see eggs)
Hoping the added brood will help give this hive a much needed boost!
Thursday, April 9th
Been checking on the hives every day; just keeping an eye out for signs of trouble or activity. With this cold snap, they're taking advantage of any warm moment to do their cleansing flights. One afternoon, we had 2 hours of warmth, and the girls came out to celebrate.
The weak hive always takes a little longer to wake up:
Next up is a book review! I'm hoping to turn this into a series, where I review different bee, chicken, and homesteading books (both fiction and non-fiction).
Book Review #1: ‘Top-Bar Beekeeping; Organic Practices for Honeybee Health’
Authors: Les Crowder and Heather Harrell (husband and wife writing team at the time of publication; since divorced)
About the authors (taken directly from the book):
Les Crowder: “has devoted his entire adult life to the study and care of honeybees. Dedicated to finding organic and natural solutions for problems commonly treated with chemicals, he designed his own top-bar hices and set about discovering how to treat disease and genetic weaknesses through plant medicine and selective breeding. He has been a leader in his community, having served as New Mexico’s Honeybee Inspector and president of the state’s Beekeeper Association. He is an avid storyteller, and has spoken at the New Mexico Organic Farm Conference every year for over fifteen years.”
Heather Harrell: “Her love of nature soon had her pursuing a life as an organic farmer, focusing on flowers, then medicinal herbs. Over time, and through her work with honeybees, Heather has moved her focus to the study of multiuse permaculture plantings, which support a diverse network of interrelationships in the natural world. Along with a wide variety of vegetables, she grows medicinal herbs, which offer nectar and pollen to pollinator species. She is very interested in how soil biology is affected by using biodynamic methods of planting, and is currently studying compost teas incorporating various types of manures and plant materials.”
Focus on the book is on ‘natural’ methods of management, or as natural as possible.
Overall, I have mixed feelings about this book. I had heard this was THE definitive book on top-bar hives, and so was expecting quite a lot of detailed information about top-bar (TB) management, especially in regards to how this differs from Langstroth management techniques. Instead, the book is primarily an introductory guide to beekeeping in general with just one chapter really getting into the nitty-gritty of top-bar management.
Due to the time of publication (2011), some of the information is outdated, such as his claim that mites suck bee blood (they don’t; they consume the fat bodies of bees) but this is to be expected of an older book.
Throughout the book, there are a number of excellent citations but, when Les Crowder claims he is completely free of varroa mites, he has nothing to back this up. More on this later!
There’s also a distinct science/bad vs natural/good leaning to many parts of this book, which I find a little confusing considering the author will readily use scientific studies to back up his claims. It’s as if he recognises the value of the scientific method but is still somehow disdainful or suspicious of it. He does seem to consistently prefer everything natural, even his use of tools, from handfuls of grass instead of a bee brush, to a twig as a lava scooping tool for queen grafting; and, from having heard him talk, I get the distinct impression that he’s a bit of a hippy so perhaps his anti-science leanings are wrapped up in that? I have a hippy bent myself so I don’t use the term negatively!
Anyway, I’m going to break things down into what I liked about this book and what I didn’t.
The Good/What I Liked:
Les Crowder experimented with different sizes and styles of top-bar hives before settling on a design. I enjoyed reading about this process.
Book provides a good, clear guide on building your own top-bar hive (using one 1” x 10” x 14’ board for the hive body)
Concise overview of the role of bees within a hive (from worker to drone to queen)
Covers hive placement, weather effects on bees, smokers, obtaining bees, hive removals, swarm catching and prevention, transporting bees, etc.
Details two ways in which to transfer bees from a Langstroth to a top-bar hive:
‘Brushing a swarm’: find the queen in Lang and place her (in cage) into top bar hive; brush all bees from Lang combs into the top-bar; forager bees will return to the Lang and raise their own queen when they realise theirs is missing.
‘Top-bar hive super’: make a hole (4x4in) in bottom of top bar hive and place it over Langstroth hive; seal Lang carefully so the bees inside must go up through top-bar hive to exit/enter; basically using the top-bar hive as a super to the Lang. Once most of brood in Lang have hatched and top-bar hive has 6-8 combs, you can remove the top-bar and place in its permanent location; make sure to take the queen with you. Remaining frames in Lang can be given to another hive or allowed to requeen (if you ensure they have eggs to do so).
Hive management chapter has excellent diagrams and clear instructions on how to manage the comb and colony build up, such as how to space frames to encourage straight wax building, how to expand brood nest, how to rearrange frames for honey harvest, how to prepare for splitting the hive, etc. There’s even a diagram that shows how to turn a top-bar hive into a queen cell building colony.
Much discussion about the benefit of removing old comb, and how this appears to help prevent the spread of disease, as well as boosting overall hive health
Detailed instructions on how to best remove this old comb without wasting what the bees have provided us with
Dedicates a whole chapter (chapter 5) on the seasons, what to expect within the hive, and how to effectively manage it.
An entire chapter (chapter 7) on evaluating your queen, including egg laying, disease resistance, requeening, temperament of the colony, drone laying queens, and intercaste queens, which is a new one for me! An intercaste queen is created from an “egg reared as a worker bee before it was changed to a queen”. As a result, her ovaries never fully developed, and she is unable to lay fertile eggs.
Offers a quick rundown of some of the more common diseases and issues you might see within your hive, including nosema, insecticide poisoning, tracheal mites, etc.
An entire chapter (chapter 9) on raising queens that is thorough and easy to understand
The last chapter offers a list of plants that are good for the bees!
The Neutral/what I’m ‘eh’ about:
Feeding bees: Les doesn’t believe that hives should be fed but also states he is not ‘dogmatic’ about it and will feed a hive that needs the help.
He doesn’t like pollen substitutes and feels they’re largely unnecessary. I mostly agree but I’m still going to use them (just in case).
Wax moths as symbiotes: he talks a lot about how wax moths will live symbiotically in a healthy hive, using only the old/dark comb that the bees have begun to shun. He makes a compelling argument for why one shouldn’t panic at the mere sight of a wax moth, and suggests that you assume they are always present, even recommending that you always freeze cut-comb honey before storing it to kill any wax moth larva that might be present.
The Bad/What I Didn’t Like:
Honey feeding: Les Crowder claims that healthy bees can handle any introduced bacteria or disease from using honey but offers no citation. No mention of the biosecurity risk it poses, or the need to know where your honey came from and how those hives were managed. It feels irresponsible, especially for new keepers who might buy store bought honey that could be predominantly corn syrup with very little honey added (or worse, it could be chemically contaminated).
Foulbrood: does not differentiate between European and American, and believes that foulbrood is a result of old comb not being removed. He really underplays how devastating American Foulbrood is to a colony, and how insanely contagious. He doesn’t discuss how to have your brood tested by a state inspector, even though this must have been one of his duties when he filled such a role in New Mexico. I do agree with his statement that the antibiotics that treat foulbrood should not be used prophylactically but, again, he makes no mention of testing. His solution is simply remove all old comb and breed for foulbrood resistance in bees.
Varroa. URGH. This is the biggest sticking point for me and also my biggest disappointment with this book! I’ve heard Les Crowder talk before on various podcasts, and he’s often referenced as someone who has ‘beat’ varroa through ‘natural’ beekeeping techniques, which was a big part of why I wanted to read this book. But he dedicates a mere 3.5 pages to varroa, and doesn’t cover testing or mite threshold levels at all. In fact, I inferred from his text that he doesn’t test at all and the only method of ‘testing’ mentioned is drone sampling; opening sealed drone cells to look for mites, as well as examining adult bees for mites. But visual inspection is not adequate testing. In fact, if you can simply see the mites crawling on your comb and bees, that colony is likely dead already (it just hasn’t stopped kicking).
If you are also hoping to know his secret on being varroa free without miticides, you won’t find the answer here, alas. Instead, Les Crowder simply states that he has “established total resistance to varroa mites in my hives”. How? Through using top-bar hives and breeding for resistance. Want more details on that, or, dare I say, any evidence? There is none. Well, not entirely. He does mention how he “selected for resistance” but doesn’t go into detail beyond mentioning that he used Russian honey bee stock. To be fair, he also experimented with creosote smoke as a miticide as well as using brood breaks but that’s about it. There’s no mite level counts, no details of how many hives abscond or swarm per year, how long it took to see mite resistant traits, whether he’s been re-infected by neighbours, etc. He simply states he’s varroa free and has been for years.
So I went looking to see if he’s written about this elsewhere but found nothing. He doesn’t have a website (his original one is defunct) and I couldn’t find any articles or forum posts on the subject of how he got to where he is. There’s a lot of referring to how long he’s been a beekeeper but appeals to authority aren’t as good as hard data. I also find it odd that he uses citations so well throughout this book but doesn’t provide anything to prove his mite-free claims! It's frustrating to have this idea of being totally varroa free without the use of miticides dangled in front of you, with no clear method offered as something we can emulate. Compare this to Randy Oliver (of scientificbeekeeping.com) who is wonderfully detailed and analytical in his posts, and, hilariously enough, opens an article on treating top-bar hives for mites with the statement “the varroa mite does not care that you’re keeping your bees in a top bar hive”.
Summary:
Les Crowder and Heather Harrell’s book on top-bar hive management is overall a good general guide to beekeeping using this style of horizontal hive, though the greatest value of the entire book is the detailed and clear diagrams on comb position and management through a variety of seasons and conditions. Otherwise, if you know bees and beekeeping, you won’t find a lot of new information here. You are expected to take some rather important points on faith alone, which I found disappointing.
I just ordered Christy Hemenway’s intro book on top-bar hives, and I’m looking for more on the subject so I might revisit this topic!
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Next book to be reviewed is a work of fiction!
I'll be doing a detailed review of 'The Bees' by Laline Paul. This is a wonderful book that follows the life of a single bee, Flora 717, in an anthropomorphized orchard hive. Although it's not entirely biologically accurate, the author clearly has a keen grasp of the structure of the hive and the life of the bees within it. Although some parts caused me great frustration, most of this book is beautifully written with vivid imaginings of the hive. It's honestly enchanting, and I think many beekeepers (and anyone with even a passing interest in bees!) will greatly enjoy it.
I'm also going to start working my way through 'The Lives of Bees' by Thomas Seeley. This book is a new(er) release that follows Seeley’s study of wild/feral honeybee colonies and their seeming resistance to varroa. Seeley is a scientist who has worked with bees for many years and this book is quite technical at points so I might only have a few chapters to discuss by the next episode! I’ll do my best, though.
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As always, thanks so much for reading and listening! I recently hit over 1K downloads of my podcast and could not have done it without you all so thank you so much for tuning in! I appreciate you all very much.
Stay safe out there! And, as always, hug your hens and then wash your hands. Take care!
