My guess if you were able to talk to a bee, they would be a big supporters of drafts. Not the military kind, but the cooling kind.

You see, while it’s cold in the winter and they huddle in the hive to keep their queen warm, they also have to deal with the summer’s heat and the humidity. The brood nest needs to be kept a constant 94F, and that’s easy to do in the summer until temperature outside the hive gets hot. While humans find a place with air conditioning, the bees need to resort to other methods. When this happens, they cool the hive by fanning the entrance, creating a draft. The draft carries away the humidity, and that lowers the surface temperature in the same way that a breeze does with your sweat. The bees know how the basic principle of a swamp cooler works, and they figured it out millions of years before we did. Smart little buggers.

So to help my bees handle the heat this summer, I am building, and thus experimenting with, a short, stubby box that has vent holes around it, often referred to as a “vented super”. So that the bees don’t have to defend the holes from intruders, and am going to put some screen over the holes to allow only air to pass though. By placing this box on top of the inner cover, the vent holes provide a place for warm air to rise up and out of the hive. Plus, it creates some cross ventilation from the horizontal nature of a breeze across and through the vent holes.

Of course, this will be a summer add-on, and will be removed in the fall. New England winters can get cold, and I don’t want the poor workers struggling to keep their queen warm as they wonder who left the screen door open.

This is gonna be a big topic, but I wished I’d known more before I started, so here is my attempt at helping others…

Summary

• Learn all you can, but form your own opinions
• Decide what type of beekeeper you want to be
• Start with a nuc, not a package
• Give the bees a natural habit
• You can’t train bees

You can’t possibly know enough

If a topic interests me, I learn about it, so I thought I had it solved when it came to beekeeping. Read a few books, take a class, and I’d be done. I’ve taken care of dogs and cats at various times in my life, so bees seemed pretty straightforward. Lesson learned – no beekeeper ever knows it all, and it’s one of the things that makes the hobby enjoyable. So get ready to learn, and keep on learning. Beeks (shorthand for a beekeeper) love to talk about bees, so if you want to learn about beekeeping, ask a beek, and make sure to take notes as they tend to share – a lot.

If you don’t know where to take a class, look for a local beekeeping association or check with the local gardening clubs. It’s a small world out there, and gardeners know beeks – it’s a symbiotic relationship.

If you’re looking for books, I can recommend The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Beekeeping, a well-written practical primer despite its name. When you want to overload yourself at a more advanced level, The Practical Beekeeper, written by beekeeping guru Micheal Bush, is an excellent source but a long read. Besides those two, hundreds of other books on beekeeping expound a slightly different theory.

Decide what type of beekeeper you want to be

There is an old beek expression, “If you ask a question of 10 different beekeepers, you’ll get 11 different answers”.

Yeah, I’m OK with the Socialists in my backyard.

To be candid, I’m more than OK with it, I put them there, I’m giving them free room and board, and I hope they stay. Thousands of Socialists in my backyard, and I’m helping them out. I must being going insane.

Honey bees are socialists – every single damn one of them – and I’m fascinated by it. I’m fascinated because I can’t imagine what it’s like to live as part of a collective; always working in complete harmony with the thousands of others around you. You never want more or less than you have, being perfectly content to take your assigned place, and work you entire life until you die – all for the good of the colony.

Call me a capitalist pig, but I just can’t see wanting that little from life, and working tirelessly for the good of the whole and nothing else. Hey, I think a little pro-bono work is an important part of one’s life, but this kind of selflessness stuns me. I’m not referring to the selflessness of giving of yourself as you would to your family or your community. It’s more of having no “self” – or no sense of self. I need to know I’m an individual, and have control over my own destiny. I need to have a sense of “self”.

But honey bees are different creatures than humans. They don’t operate as individuals. They don’t have a concept of self, just of the colony. It shouldn’t be so hard for me to grasp this. Nature has quite of few of these creatures; ants included. But yet, I struggle to think of their lives. So meaningless to me, but I am sure, full of purpose to them. They start working moments after being born, and for 90% of the hive that are workers, they die on the job, flying until their wings disintegrate.

I have grown to have great respect for them. For their tireless work. For their sense of duty to the colony. And for their lack of “self” that allows the colony to exist. I respect them, I am fascinated by them, but I don’t want to be them.

To each their own.

For many years now, some beekeepers have been using hives made from polystyrene. The compound is lightweight, rigid, and is a pretty good insulator – all good things for a hive. But it’s styrofoam. The stuff that the crappy little coffee cups and the containers from McDonald’s food comes in. The stuff that won’t biodegrade. The stuff that’s made from petrochemicals – yeah, sludge from the bottom of oil barrels. I’m sure I’d be thrilled to live in a home made of it…

Now I’m an “organic beekeeper”. Whatever that officially means I don’t know, but to me it means doing everything I can to keep human-made products away from the hive. Now let me be clear, I use wooden hives and parts that are made by humans, so I’m not that hard core. I use a metal hive tool, and I’m quite sure my bee jacket isn’t 100% cotton, but I try hard to make sure that my bees aren’t exposed to more chemicals than they have to be, so I focus on keeping the hive all wooden, with a little steel (nails and screen) where needed.

So when I read about polystyrene hives, and the inevitable trouble beekeepers have with them, I am just shocked that they still exist. Somewhere in my semi-logical mind I would have thought they would have faded out like a bad fashion trend. Something that beekeepers could look back on and say “Remember when we used those polystyrene hives? Yeah, what were we thinking? {laughter}…”

If you’re thinking of getting into beekeeping, please start with wood and not plastic. If you’re afraid of deforestation, buy scrap wood – mostly it’s free. I’ve build all of my additional hive parts out of scrap wood. Their cheap to make, and didn’t hurt the environment. Plastic is just so… Yuck.

Wood is natural, and the bees love it. I mean, it’s wood – what’s not to love?

In the winter, people make a big deal about sealing up their hives. “The bees will freeze!” is often the battle cry. “You don’t know how cold it get’s on my property” is another one. As much as I hear this, I just have to smile. Like the old weather adage says, “it’s not the heat, it’s the humidity” silly!

An experienced beek will tell you, bees almost never freeze to death in a hive. Bees are amazingly good at keeping the queen and her eggs an impressive 94F, even when temperatures outside the hive are sub-zero for weeks at a time. However, the one thing they can’t tolerate is moisture which is another way of saying very high humidity.

Bees, just like any other animal, breath out warm, humid air. But unlike other animals, bees do it packed together, in an enclosed space. Not having enough ventilation in the hive simply to let out the humidity causes it to build up and condense on the inner cover as water. As it condenses, it forms drops of water that cling to the inner cover, randomly dropping onto the colony like bombs from an air raid, killing bees with each drop. Since the humidity can’t escape, more water drops form from the bees’ breath, and the cycle continues until the hive is decimated. Death from your own breath – what a way to go.

The only way to avoid humidity build up, besides asking the bees not to breath in the hive, is to allow the humidity to escape. Since human-built Langstroth hives often have an entrance on the bottom, holes are usually used towards the top of the hive to allow the humidity to escape. This occurs because of the “chimney” method which allows air to flow in through the bottom of the hive, be heated by the inside of the hive, and want to rise out the top of the hive, thus carrying the humidity out with it. And a dry hive is a happy hive. Well, OK, a dry, well fed hive with a laying queen and attentive workers is a happy hive. But I digress…

So all the fuss about sealing up your hive, wrapping it in tar paper, putting a heater underneath it; it’s all well intentioned, but misguided. If you take steps to make sure the hive is dry, the bees will keep it warm enough. Let them do what they naturally do best. Your job is simply to be a a benevolent landlord. Give them a nice place to live, and they’ll do the rest. It’s what they do; they’re bees.

My brother-in-law just started beekeeping last weekend. He’s been interested for some time, but last summer he came to visit, saw my hive, and clearly started thinking about it. A year later, he’s got a hive, a nuc, and he’s off and running.

Beekeeping is a funny hobby. It’s about helping bees flourish and learning about them while you do it. And it’s about keeping the knowledge and the love of bees flourishing too. So when a beekeeper can help another one along, it’s like the colony dividing and swarming, flourishing in another location.

So in a way, maybe I’ve done my first walk-away-split and I didn’t even realize it.

If nothing else, there’s more bees in the world, and in today’s environment, that a very, very good thing.

Now I know bees do what they want. This is the nature of, well, nature. You can’t make a colony do anything – you have to give them an easier path to do what you want, and hope for the best. But bees are bees, and sometimes they do weird stuff. I’ve seen crazy comb where the bees build comb at sometimes 90 degree angles to what it logical in the frame. But what is logical to a human, is certainly not logical to a bee. And when the spring build up comes around, and they start building like there’s no tomorrow, strange things happens.

And so, without further ado, I present to you, Potato Chip Comb.

Note the way the frames are positioned – left to right. They didn’t just build at 90 degrees. They built at 90, then decided to change direction and built in the opposite direction, bending back on itself, and making a potato chip shape. You just can’t make this stuff up…

Each year The Bee Informed Partnership works with the Apiary Inspectors of America (AIA) and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), and produces one of the best reports on how managed bee colonies (not the feral ones) are doing. 6,287 beekeepers were surveyed who are running 599,610 colonies or about 22.9% of the 2.62 million colonies in the US.

While the final results are not tallied, they are now estimating that individual beekeepers said they lost 45.1% of their colonies over last winter. So, looking at each beekeeper, almost half of their colonies died – 19.8% more than last year.

Looking at the losses across all beekeepers, not just individuals, 31.1% of all managed honey bee colonies in the United States were lost during the 2012/2013 winter. This is an increase of 9.2% over last year. Clearly CCD is getting worse.

Beekeepers are not shocked, but are certainly saddened. We all knew the news was going to be bad, but there was hope that somehow the anecdotal evidence we heard was going to be proved wrong.

For me, this just strengthens my resolve to raise genetically tougher queens. I can’t reverse the 31.1% losses across the country, but I can do my part to help the ones I have control over. Think Globally, Act Locally. Maybe beekeepers should adopt that mantra too.

The full report is available at http://beeinformed.org/2013/05/winter-loss-survey-2012-2013