Continuing from my previous column article on Newbees, Bee-Ware! (published in the January 2012 ABJ), we begin here with the author’s comments about the reported poor wintering of top-bar hive (TBH) colonies in the northeast (just before point four on page 42). In the last section of her article (TBH Problems to Overcome), I am including here her point number two, More care needed with overwintering, since it deals with wintering too.

With its Greek and African origins, it might seem like the TBH is a warm weather hive, not suited for cold winters. However, a TBH is a horizontal hive (combs arranged like slices of bread in a loaf). In Europe, horizontal frame hives (same comb orientation as a TBH and without supers) work in climates with long cold winters (see Figures 1, 2 and 3). In addition, TBH beekeepers winter bees in the western United States with long winters.

Closer to the region in question, in Connecticut, a famous commercial frame-hive beekeeper named Allen Latham built his own hives, particularly his once well-known “Let-alone” hive. He produced section comb honey in the late 1800’s and extracted honey in the early to mid 1900’s using supered hives typical of beekeepers in those times. Unlike the typical beekeeper, his homemade brood chamber was extra-large (which included the nonsurplus honey) and fitted with extra large (and extra deep) frames. He wintered colonies (as best as I can tell) in this large single story hive. Removing Latham’s various experiments, his hive functioned like a horizontal hive (a single tier of frames), and he had excellent wintering success in the northeast1. Therefore, from America or Europe, today or historically, the evidence indicates the horizontal hive design, TBHs included, should not be detrimental in long cold winters. (Nevertheless, I have several research questions about wintering TBH colonies through such winters in order to provide the appropriate recommendations for beekeepers, research that would help TBH beekeepers winter colonies with better success.)

The author reported northeastern TBH colonies starving, “freezing,” or dwindling to small clusters. Without knowing more evidence, that suggests fall or winter management problems. Several possibilities exist. Here’s a typical one for TBH colonies in their first winter. The bees did not complete enough combs, most importantly combs extended to the floor of the hive. They could have had “shallow” combs, which were built only about halfway down. Even many of these shallow combs are not sufficient for colony survival in a long winter. Part of establishing a package bee colony is making sure the bees have enough completed combs. When a TBH colony dies in the winter, I want to know the number of combs and the actual comb dimensions since these can differ from the frame dimensions. (Colony mortality assessment in TBHs can be crucially different from that in frame hives.)

The “shallow” comb problem can be more systemic (widespread). TBH construction dimensions are not standard. If the hives were built so that the combs were too small, most critically lacking enough comb depth, colony survival in the winter could be difficult. Remember the deep combs of the horizontal hive just shown, an adaptation to long winters. (A smaller comb size would probably work fine in the south with mild winters and may even be preferred there given the hot summers. Smaller combs, less deep and with less loading, may withstand the heat better. Perhaps one universal TBH size does not exist because of climate. Rather larger and deeper combs may work better in the cold north and smaller combs down in the hot south.) Particularly without enough comb depth in the north, the honey-band width above the winter cluster remains chronically narrow. (Expect some of that honey-band width to depend on management, fall flow conditions, and the strain of bee). If in the winter the bees cannot break cluster (to move honey) for too long a time–they could starve or apparently “freeze.” If so, it would not be the first time something like that has occurred in our apicultural history.

In the 1800’s, skeptical beekeepers, comfortable in box-hive beekeeping, first tried a new hive called the Langstroth hive. It had strange movable frames inside, one for each comb. Far from being empty like a box hive, the frame hive let beekeepers think about colony management in new ways while others thought the new hive was too complicated. Then came winter. Some colonies starved on the frame-hive combs–built too “shallow.” The reaction was swift, absent careful thought: the frame hives were no good. That conclusion was perhaps also clouded with an effort to reaffirm box-hive beekeeping, a traditional way threatened by the new hive. As the benefactors, we know what prevailed from this reactionary skirmish. The frame-hive design was fine; just the frame dimensions needed adjustment (and beekeepers spent plenty of time working on that before the standard sizes). One lesson here is to distinguish a hive’s design as separate from its dimensions, and consider the following.

I would suggest the idea that when copying TBH plans from the internet or buying a hive, technically you are assuming those hive dimensions will work for your local environmental conditions (and that is usually correct). For wintering, besides the winter’s length and severity, that would include how often the bees can break cluster and move honey during warm snaps. (Whether the hive needs adjustment depends on bee management too, like fall or spring syrup feeding). Over the years, one of my standard recommendations has been advising beekeepers not to build too many TBHs when starting out (try a maximum of three). Something in the design might need changing (or later you may see a feature just more desirable).

(My other bit of advice is not to destroy your first TBH, though tempting when overhauling hives to “a new standard.” You might regret that some future day. Or be grateful for the foresight to keep that first memorable top-bar hive, the life-changing hive. Although I have built over 250 TBHs, I still have my first one, built for Pat Powers in the 1970’s, still in its original paint from a leftover can, the same color as my childhood house, and with all its (now) endearing design flaws. The hive that started my TBH “empire.” Keep the one that starts yours. And on the frame-hive side of my beekeeping life, I still have my first frame hive too, kept since I was 10-years old, painted the same color as the first TBH, yes from the same leftover house paint, kindly donated by an understanding father.)

More complications swirled around in those uncertain times in the 1800’s, somewhat reminiscent of current events with TBHs. Initially box-hive beekeepers did not know how to manage bees in their new frame hives. They went from no control over the combs to complete control over individual combs–in one giant leap. Consequently, at harvest time, some beekeepers took too many combs of honey. Spring brought shocking news–the bees starved. Conclusion: again blame the hive. The real problem–poor management–and a need to train beekeepers properly to manage bees in their new frame hives. Likewise, many of the complaints and problems concerning TBHs come from a lack of understanding about bee management specifically for TBHs. Looking above the details, the big picture is this: either in the 1800’s with the once new Langstroth hive or now with the TBH, we are seeing a repetition of historical patterns associated with learning about a “new” hive design.

While it is easy to incorrectly blame the TBH, or even the frame-hive in its novelty days, the way to help beekeepers, particularly TBH beekeepers, is with more education on TBH colony management. For example, fall colony management is critically important with TBHs. One should expect high winter colony mortalities with northeastern winters when beekeepers are inadequately trained in TBH colony management in the fall (as we will see below with, “… only the 2 inches of honey above the brood cluster …”). To be fair and compassionate, these beekeepers are also hampered by not having the correct support equipment like efficient high-capacity syrup feeders for fall feeding (as we will see below with, “There is no good way to feed inside the hive …”). Now back to the Newbees, Bee-Ware! Article at point 4.

Point 4 Disease and chemical build up is lessened. It has been my experience that TBH beekeepers avidly try to avoid the hard miticides. The author is correct that these hard miticides can contaminate TBH combs as they would combs in frames. Nevertheless, brood comb contamination can be greatly reduced with an Integrated Pest Management (IPM) approach to management of varroa in TBHs that uses these hard miticides as an absolute last resort (if ever). The beekeeper could also reduce this wax contamination by limiting the working life of TBH brood combs to a few years. (TBH brood combs can last quite a long time. I have some over 15 years old, similar to brood combs in frames.) Some TBH beekeepers do not use the hard miticides and eliminate this brood comb contamination route. Other TBH beekeepers have quit using miticides and their bees are surviving. I quit all miticides and any other varroa treatments (drone brood removal, etc.) in 2003 for my North Carolina bees and in 2005 for my Virginia bees. Initially colony losses were high, and occasionally I take some hits, but my varroa populations usually stay low. I have not checked to see this is a cell size effect. My data shows that the trait Varroa Sensitive Hygiene (VSH) is reducing the varroa populations, which came about by natural selection. Other traits probably help to reduce my varroa populations too, which is how nature (reality) typically works. (Humans tend to emphasize just one trait.)

Now let’s examine the comments about TBHs not being compatible with “fuming miticides” because “there is no space above the top bars, and no space between them for the fumes to sink down between combs.” Because of this top-bar configuration, the claim is that the soft miticides (thymol based) cannot be used in a TBH.

The following TBH experience, which I suffered through about 25 years ago, becomes quite relevant now. In 1984, tracheal mites were discovered in the United States. In the spring of 1989, tracheal mites killed half of my TBH colonies. A dreadful setback (and that was before my colonies had varroa). I had to save the rest of my bees or risk seeing them to slaughter. For tracheal mites, the frame-hive recommendation was 50 grams of menthol, another “fuming miticide.” For a frame hive, the menthol treatment was delivered in two screen packs placed on the top bars in the upper part of the hive so the fumes would go down between the combs. Of course that kind of fumigation was not possible in a TBH as noted above. Nor was it needed. I hung the menthol screen packs in the back of my TBHs. The fumes easily permeated the hives, even with the horizontal volumes. (One could use a following board to shut out the empty volume at the back of the hive, restricting the volume with the colony to fumigate.) And like my frame-hive neighbors, I eliminated my tracheal mite losses.

In principle, the soft miticides for varroa treatment, where the active ingredient vaporizes and fumigates the hive interior, should work with TBHs. The chemicals will still vaporize in a TBH, disperse by diffusion, circulate by fanning bees (because generally these materials are irritants) and perhaps move also by convection. So instead of rejecting the soft miticides as treatment options for TBH beekeepers, their use is entirely feasible. And going even further, the safest approach on behalf of TBH beekeepers would be to conduct scientific research to work out an effective treatment procedure (a delivery system, dose adjustment if needed, etc.) with a well-designed experiment for each soft miticide. Of course, this scientific research is not for newer beekeepers or even accomplished beekeepers/scientists with little TBH experience because one needs to understand colony management in TBHs, including the nuances associated with bees in this hive design that could bias data and lead to inappropriate conclusions. Such treatment recommendations would be very valuable because varroa populations can grow large enough to damage TBH colonies. Then TBH beekeepers may need the soft miticides. The hard miticides would be effective if the varroa mites are not resistant. Even if that were not a concern, TBH beekeepers might reject the hard miticides on philosophical grounds, more so by those who have taken up this hive design in the first place. Yet like frame-hive beekeepers, TBH beekeepers should have more science-based options, including the soft miticides, to maintain low varroa populations without abandoning their beekeeping philosophies. In short, soft miticide use is feasible with TBHs. The wiser approach is that it should be investigated to help TBH beekeepers. Certainly do not think that choosing to become a TBH beekeeper limits one to using just miticides in strips dominated by hard miticides. There are other IPM options.

For the comment about honey produced from new, fresh comb, I agree with the author’s comments. Furthermore, for liquid honey (analogous to extracted honey, but with TBHs there is essentially no extractor), I recommend harvesting only honeycombs of pure wax with no previous brood rearing. (To consistently keep queens out of those honeycombs, I use queen excluders.) I crush the honeycombs and drain the honey from the wax, somewhat similar to draining honey from capping wax in a frame-hive operation. With TBHs wax production is higher and valued because of its uses in various hive products. Moreover, crushing combs for honey requires about the same labor as extracting frames, my opinion in agreement with history. In Latham’s book one finds an illuminating chapter Honey Without an Extractor, where he crushed honeycombs in a similar manner from 200-300 shallow supers and came to the same conclusion. My TBH experience and Latham’s work crushing so many combs from frames suggest that crushing honeycombs from TBHs can scale up to much larger operations, which runs counter to the “small scale” thinking with TBHs (but you must have good apiary locations).

Another TBH product is cut comb honey, sold in inexpensive clear clamshells (see Figure 4). I recommend separating honeycombs containing different honey colors (from different plants). Those honeys usually have different flavors. (Latham recommended that too before crushing the combs.) Then beekeepers can usually offer some different honey colors (flavors) without moving hives, but this does depend on local honey flows. After cutting the honeycombs, the odd-shaped leftover sizes get cut into smaller pieces. The TBH beekeeper can give them away as free samples to boost honey sales. Or sell a selection of comb honey flavors (colors) together in one variety “snack pack” (clam shell). Then customers can sample local honey flavors in one purchase and come back to buy their favorites. For TBH honey marketing you just need to think creatively. (My upcoming TBH book has a detailed chapter on liquid and cut comb honey processing.)

Under the section, The key problems with TBHs are hardly ever mentioned, let me begin with the frustration in trying to feed sugar syrup to a TBH colony. The fundamental problem is using frame-hive feeding equipment in a TBH–which does not work very well. Kindly abandon this frame-hive feeding mindset. And come to the light. Use Top-Bar Hive feeding equipment. For me, that called for redesigning feeders for TBHs, which was a lot of work and thought (thinking about feeding from a bee’s perspective), time, trial and error, but the benefits have been tremendous and long lasting. The internal feeder I designed has a high capacity (almost two gallons) and with a syrup level close to the cluster. The bees easily empty the feeder so the colony gets plenty of syrup quickly. Since the late 1980’s, I have used this feeder design, made from cheap containers, most recently with small plastic trashcans cut down to fit in the hive (see Figure 5). I score the plastic trashcan on the inside and provision it with floats in the usual manner to reduce drowning (like a division board feeder). With the entrances in the front of the TBH, once the package bee cluster forms around the queen cage, I slide up the feeder so it goes into the back edge of the cluster. Technically, I want the adjacent edge of the feeder just into the (coming) cold-temperature edge of the contracted (smaller) cluster, which requires a little guesswork. The goal is to have the cluster in contact with the feeder continuously so the syrup level is just inches away, even as the level falls. Then the bees have just a short walk down to a large quantity of syrup. They walk right from their warm cluster–not a long hike over cold wood to some “far off” (for a bee) frame-hive feeder near the back of the hive on the floor. As the combs grow, I move the feeder back, out of the way of the combs, but still keeping it in contact with the back of the expanding cluster. For feeding an established colony, the feeder touches the last comb so the bees can easily walk in the can (see Figure 6). Another TBH feeder I designed in the late 1980’s plugs onto the front of the hive (see Figure 7). Now beekeepers can refill feeders without opening hives or handling feeders (as with replacing dozens of inverted jars when feeding through the tops of frame hives as done in some commercial operations). (There are other technical aspects of using my TBH feeders correctly, too much to cover here, but explained in my upcoming TBH book, including feeder construction.)

For feeding pollen patties in TBHs, I have been working on some methods (in response to the many emails I receive). The idea is similar to syrup feeding: bring the food to the edge of the cluster (but do not interfere with the construction of straight combs). Figure 8 shows the idea for summer patty feeding in a pollen dearth when small hive beetles could infest a patty on the hive floor.

For the comment on harvesting combs of sugar syrup, I do not see why a following board would have honeycombs (unprotected) behind it, the combs separated from the main colony. A following board reduces the volume of the hive with the colony leaving empty unused space behind the board. In the wintering description above, I have already commented on how comb depth accommodates a cluster’s upward movement and winter survival (although in frame hives some clusters stay low and other clusters start high and stay there).

The article’s comments “There are only the 2 inches of honey above the brood cluster in the fall. Bees in TBHs are forced to move horizontally … .” shows a common problem I have seen over the decades. Beekeepers need more training in the management of colonies in TBHs. Two-inch honey bands in brood combs may be acceptable in a frame hive with its vertical design and honey supers just above. In stark contrast however, two-inch honey bands in top bar brood combs are a huge fall management mistake with the hive’s horizontal design (obviously no supers above). From a fall inspection or by hefting the TBH from its ends (which I do as a management technique, analogous to hefting frame hives), that honey deficiency can be detected and corrected in the fall. The safest management correction (for the beginner) is syrup feeding in early fall (using my high capacity feeders). Another correction is repositioning honeycombs, a more advanced topic, to get the proper food organization, which is mentioned in the article. To stress the severity of this fall management error, I would not let a TBH colony winter with such thin brood-nest honey bands–even in Virginia (having much milder winters), even with solid honeycombs beside the cluster. The organization of honey in a TBH for winter is just as important as the amount of honey in the hive. I want wide honey bands over the cluster with some empty cells below for the bees to enter. (These bees form the core of the winter cluster.)

And can our apicultural history offer any wisdom here? Yes. One can even see colonies dying from “two-inch honey bands in the brood nest” as a repetition of our forgotten beekeeping history. In Allen Latham’s book (published in 1949), again wintering bees in Connecticut in his extra large brood chambers (with deep combs), he explains how colonies can starve from two conditions: the central combs have only “a narrow strip of honey” and the cold does not allow the bees to get honey from the outside combs. Latham also tells how to correct these problems in the fall by feeding or repositioning honeycombs with care1. His correction is essentially the same as fall management for TBH colonies with similar problems. In all fairness, Latham’s book is fairly rare. The recent 1949 publication date is misleading regarding rarity. Some much older bee books from even the 1800’s are easier to track down than Latham’s book. It took me years of dedicated hunting before I found Latham’s book, long before the ease of internet book buying. (I bought it at a flea market from a guy who lived in his car, and the book turned out to be a signed copy.) Yet Latham was a maverick thinker, and his book continues to yield gold. He should not be forgotten.

Therefore, not only my southern (mid-Atlantic) words, but also a northeastern historical beekeeper are in agreement that this problem, “2 inches of honey over the brood cluster,” is not some dead end fatal flaw, rather one with a management solution. More broadly this problem shows that fall management with TBHs is critically important, analogous to fall management with frame hives. In my upcoming TBH book, the management chapter is by far the longest. I even chose not to begin the management chapter in the spring season, though definitely an important a time of expansion and production as the nectar flow comes. Rather to also preserve its importance, I began the seasonal management chapter of a TBH colony in the fall season, a time to hunker down and prepare the bees to endure the winter and survive healthy for the spring.

In part three of this series, I will finish my commentary on the rest of the article, Newbees, Bee-Ware!, including more photographs.

Acknowledgments
The author thanks Suzanne Sumner for her comments on the manuscript.

Literature Cited
1    Latham, A. (1949). Allen Latham’s bee book. Hale Publishing Company, Hapeville, Georgia

Honey Bee Biology  - April 2012

Honey Bee Biology  - March 2012

by Dr. Wyatt A. Mangum
Mathematics Department, University of Mary Washington, 1301 College AvenueFredericksburg, Virginia 22401-5358e-mail:  wmangum@umw.edu

In my top-bar apiary, the hives are on elevated stands, allowing some equipment storage below, keeping it close at hand yet out of the weather. Mostly these are extra top bars stacked neatly under a few of the hives. Upon my return to the apiary, occasionally a mysterious critter has rifled through the top bars knocking them all which-a-way. These nosy neighbors have been coming to my apiaries for years rearranging most any small stuff I put under the hives. I really do not mind these minor intrusions, but I always wondered what was doing it, guessing they were opossums and raccoons.

That was nothing compared to the fur-covered bombshell that blew up one of my apiaries–a bear. A bear in my top-bar apiary found hives, which were easy to smack open and contained nothing but pure combs inside. No frames with end bars and bottom bars to chew around. I was well versed in the emotional trauma bears inflict upon beekeepers from working at North Carolina State University. I knew North Carolina beekeepers who would become agitated at the mere mention of that four-letter word (bear). With expanding bear populations in my part of Virginia, I figured their destructive shadow would eventually darken my beekeeping. Luckily, I had only two colonies in that apiary and a bunch of empty hives strategically stored there for the following season. The bear consumed both colonies; literally the monster ate most all the comb from two five-foot long colonies, roughly the comb equivalent of about 40-50 brood frames (from deep supers). The hive equipment, scattered on the ground, was not damaged (broken or chewed), just “cleaned” of comb. I took an extensive set of photographs of the destroyed apiary–as if it were a crime scene. (I will publish a bear article when I get additional pictures.) Hunters “chased” the lone bear out of the area, but others should be coming.

One thing was clear from these incursions, both small ones and the large destructive one: I wanted camera surveillance of my apiaries to study the wildlife around my hives. In addition I wanted to know if any curious people were coming to my apiaries, although vandalism is rare at my locations with them so secluded in rural settings. Not even a cell phone signal can “find” some of them. My apiary locations are also near swamps, the haunts of lots of animals, and one is on a game trail with plenty of wildlife traffic. One day, while inspecting hives there, a fox trotted right through the apiary, missing me by about ten feet (he had places to go, I thought). Even at my other apiaries, I have seen wildlife coming to the hives. Once while kneeling in front of a hive repainting its identification number, a raccoon waddled out of the weeds heading right for me. It just did not see me because I work very quietly when in the woods (and I was downwind). As I stood up, the raccoon realized its mistake and scampered away. I have even seen a skunk in the apiary in the daytime. This encounter and the others in the daytime are exceptionally rare because these creatures normally forage at night.

So the camera I needed should take pictures at night with infrared light, a light invisible to us and to various animals (an assumption). Infrared light is a far better choice than a brilliant burst of white light from a typical flash that would startle nocturnal animals. For me that meant learning how to photograph with infrared light in a close apiary setting where glare from reflections (from hives or the animal itself) can cause over exposure. That can ruin an image of an animal making an uncommon and brief appearance in the apiary. This situation is different from pictures of, for example, deer in a field, set back further from the camera in an open space, a more typical use of a game camera (see Figure 1).

A game camera is also motion-activated by the animal to take the picture. I needed to adapt my photography to that too. At first my setup was just to document an animal’s appearance and movement in the apiary. As I gained a better understanding of a camera where I could not “pull the trigger” and where pitch black darkness rules, my pictures “evolved,” striving for better compositional impact, not just documentation. In the final instant, mere chance composes a game camera picture. Even with exceptionally good pictures, the composition may not be what a photographer would choose. Considering all the random elements coming together to produce these pictures, they can still create compelling images, revealing apiary visitations by animals rarely seen by beekeepers.

In my soon-to-be-released (extensive) book on top-bar hive beekeeping, I included some of these compelling “artistic” game-camera night scenes in addition to other pictures more of a documentary style. All of these pictures show elusive nocturnal creatures occasionally visiting my apiaries: opossums, skunks, raccoons, rare foxes–and even mice trying to get in the hive at night. That is definitively a unique application of the camera. For example, here are three night scenes more on the “artistic” side (see Figures 2, 3, and 4). Here are three pictures more on the documentary side (see Figures 5, 6, and 7), still revealing, nonetheless. Figure 8 shows a mouse, stretching out, just ready to hop up on the alighting board of a hive. (The game camera pictures in these articles do not duplicate the ones in the top-bar hive book. Those unique pictures will have their separate unveiling when my book comes out.)
Occasionally wildlife may visit apiaries. The beekeeper may never know they were there — unless the apiary has eyes.

Acknowledgments
The author thanks Suzanne Sumner for her comments on the manuscript.

Honey Bee Biology  - February 2012

by Dr. Wyatt A. Mangum
Mathematics Department, University of Mary Washington, 1301 College AvenueFredericksburg, Virginia 22401-5358e-mail:  wmangum@umw.edu

Excerpt

The Response to America's First Catastrophic Bee Pest Invasion -
The Wax Moth - and How We Relive History with Varroa Mites  

The previous article described how the wax moth did not initially arrive with bees in America. Bees began coming to America in the 1600’s, but the wax moth apparently did not arrive until around 1806. Upon their importation, wax moths slaughtered numerous colonies and caused many beekeepers to quit their remaining hives. As the wax moths spread across the country, wreaking havoc, not much else could top their destruction in the mind of the American beekeeper of that time, a sentiment that scarred deep for decades. Based on their limited understanding of wax moth biology, beekeepers made hives that tried to control the moth. Described below are two hives where I managed to find the original hive and hunt down its original documentation (no copies). The second hive even shows us that our struggle with varroa mites shares certain similarities with our beekeeping ancestors when they battled with wax moths in their uncertain times. No wonder some called the wax moth the bee wolf.

In 1849 J. A. Dugdale of Selma, Ohio patented his “Moth-Proof and Non-Swarming Bee Hive” (see Figure 1). The structure housed two colonies of bees. A pair of entrances, upper and lower, allowed flight for each colony (see Figure 2). The entrance side of the hive was recessed back so that a door could close over all the entrances leaving space between the door and the entrances. In that space, the closed door would not crush bees clustered around the entrances, typical of a summer night in the moth’s active season. On the door, a screen panel provided ventilation to the hive when closed. It was common knowledge that wax moths tried to gain entry into the hive at night. Therefore, the plan was to close the screen door in the evening and open it in the morning (see Figure 3). Knowing the wax moths would still come to the hive, Dugdale diverted them into a special trapping chamber. Under the four entrances and closed screen door, a small slit remained open (shown in Figure 3), touted to be wide enough for the moth but not a bee. Inside the hive, the slit went to a thin tube, originally ending at a basin filled with arsenic and water meant to kill the moths. Or this “moth room,” as Dugdale called it, could have pieces of old combs to attract moths. Once the old combs became web covered, he advised they should be tossed into a fire. At the back of the hive, a small door opened to the moth room allowing the beekeeper to remove the pests without exposure to the flying bees (see Figure 4).

The two colonies resided in a pair of removable boxes, one above the other, on each side of the moth room. Surplus honey went in the upper box, and nonsurplus honey and the brood nest went in the lower box. Each box has a glass window in the end so the beekeeper could see when it was full. To allow bees to move vertically between a pair of boxes, they have aligning holes between them. At the end of a box, opposite the window, another opening matches the entrance hole in the case, providing flight from either the upper or lower box. (The upper boxes also have aligning horizontal holes, so bees could move between all four boxes, letting one large colony reside in the hive. These holes can be seen in the right picture in Figure 4. Or these holes could be blocked probably with a tin sheet slid between the upper boxes to have two separated colonies.) Dugdale took the approach that his hive could become a night fortress against the moth. The designer of the next hive accepted that moths would invade the hive and made a trap for their larvae. This old trap design of the 1850’s is eerily similar to the current screen hive floor and sticky board, which would not reappear in American apiculture for well over a century later as beekeepers adapted their hives to another catastrophic bee pest–the varroa mite coming in 1987.

Honey Bee Biology  - January 2012

by Dr. Wyatt A. Mangum
Mathematics Department, University of Mary Washington, 1301 College AvenueFredericksburg, Virginia 22401-5358e-mail:  wmangum@umw.edu

Full Version

America’s first catastrophic bee pest invasion
was not a mite but rather a moth.

Honey bees (Apis mellifera) are not native to the Americas. Early settlers brought bees to the new world. Once in Colonial America, the immigrant bee population flourished, beginning in Virginia by 1622. That makes ecological sense. These were temperate-evolved bees from the Old World transplanted to a similar climate. The late Eva Crane, world famous apicultural historian, summarized the spread of the bees with a table giving the state and year when bees were first recorded there. Some of the highlights, in addition to Virginia, are Pennsylvania 1630/1707, Ohio 1754, and Missouri 1792.¹

As the bees spread out in young Colonial America during the remaining 1600’s, and throughout the 1700’s, just into the beginning of the 1800’s a catastrophic event took place. After things settled down, beekeepers of those past times missed its lessons and just suffered its consequences. And we still suffer from them today. What was this stupendous event? It was the arrival of the wax moth to America. Specifically the greater wax moth, Galleria mellonella, found near Boston in 1806 even though bees had been in America since the 1620’s (see Figure 1). (It is possible that wax moths had been here since the 1600’s and a virulent strain arose near Boston around 1806. However, its port location is highly suspicious. In addition, so far in my searching, I have not found a domestic wax moth complaint prior to that time.)

How American beekeeping remained apparently free of wax moths for about 184 years is a mystery. In the Old World bees and wax moths had been intertwined since antiquity, setting the stage for the mystery. It would seem wax moths could not be avoided as skep stow-a-ways shipped across the Atlantic, made more likely with multiple bee importations before 1800 (except during Revolutionary War times when immigration to the colonies effectively stopped). One difficulty is that we do not know the packing method for skeps making the voyage in the 1600’s and 1700’s. Perhaps the pest stages could not survive for example a winter crossing of eight weeks (arriving in the spring) with skeps packed in ice-cooled barrels (which was one idea) in a cold part of the ship. (The literature reports that freezing kills all wax moth stages.)

What is the evidence for beekeeping without the scourge of wax moths? Scattered in the old beekeeping literature are various rare comments telling of the moths’ late arrival to either the United States or to a particular state as the pest expanded its new range. The problem is finding these comments, which are sometimes only a line or two in beekeeping books that are themselves quite rare. I have even found these comments in ultra-rare bee books with limited printings, typically small paperback books with less than 100 delicate yellow pages telling of old beekeeping before wax moths came. Since learning of the moths’ mysterious late arrival some 30 years ago, I have been collecting these comments together. Here is some of what I have found.

The Rev. L. L. Langstroth, inventor of the movable frame hive, the foundation of modern apiculture, also deserves the credit for keeping the late arrival time of the wax moth from becoming too obscure. In the third edition of his book, Langstroth on the Hive and Honey-Bee (published in 1859), is a letter from Dr. Kirtland who gave an account of the wax moth found in the Boston Patriot in the spring of 1806, describing its recent appearance near the city. Kirtland goes on to say that within two years four-fifths (80%) of the apiaries in that vicinity were abandoned.

In the summer of 1810, Kirtland resided in Trumbull County, (Eastern) Ohio. The wax moth had not reached there. Beekeepers prospered and some frequently owned two or three hundred hives. In 1818 he visited there again, and in 1823 permanently resided there. In both periods he found the beekeeping “still prospering.” In August 1828, while visiting a sick family in Mercer County, Pennsylvania (western Pennsylvania bordering Trumbull County), he observed a large apiary “suffering severely from the attacks of the worm. The proprietor informed me that it had made its appearance for the first time the present season.” Within a year he said wax moths had spread over northern Ohio. In the winter of 1831/1832, he learned from the legislature that they were in every part of the state.

Still in the state of Ohio, R. Wilkin from Cadiz published the Hand-Book in Bee-Culture in 1868 with another printing in 1871 (see Figure 2). Wilkin said the wax moth “… first made its appearance in this State about thirty-five years since,” or arriving about the year 1833, using the 1868 printing year (1868-35), which is fairly close to Kirtland’s dates (1828 to 1831). With bees first arriving in 1754, Ohio was perhaps wax moth free for roughly 79 years (1833-1754). Wilkin also mentioned “the bee moth or worm first appeared in the East about sixty years ago, but it is now found as generally as the bee.” That timeline would put the moth’s arrival time at 1808 (1868-60), close to 1806 the original date reported by Kirtland.

From one page in many hundreds, comes a brief story from a discontinued bee journal, hardly heard of today, The Bee-keepers’ Review, published by W. Z. Hutchinson who lived in Flint, Michigan. Among the piles of old journals came another testimony of moth-free beekeeping. At the time, this rare gem had deep roots, still living, and for us back to a familiar place. In 1911, Mr. John Cline of Darlington, Wisconsin was thought to be the oldest beekeeper in the entire country, having kept bees for 86 years. Hutchinson, also the Editor of the Review, wrote to Cline for a photograph and some comments on his long beekeeping life, thinking they would be of interest to his readers. Cline responded.

As I read your letter, memory went back to the days of other years when I was a lad of seven. That was 86 years ago. At that time my parents lived in Mercer Co., Penn., and kept a few bees. My mother was a weaver of blankets; while I watched the bees. When a swarm issued, I rang the bell until the bees clustered on a rose bush. I would then set a skep close by and sweep the bees into it. For this work I was given a colony which I kept for five years.
About that time the bee moth came to Mercer Co., and destroyed all our bees.²

Incredibly, Cline’s beekeeping life was long enough to reach back to a time before the beehives of Mercer County, Pennsylvania had wax moths (see Figure 3). The destructive pest appeared around 1825 (1911-86), which is close to Kirtland’s August 1828 date–and remarkably for the same Pennsylvania county, Mercer County. Using 1707, the later arrival year for bees to Pennsylvania, beekeeping in that state could have been free of wax moths for some 118 years (1825-1707).

In the Midwest, early American beekeepers endured the destructive onslaught as wax moths came to their apiaries. Consider the State of Missouri from the perspective of an exceptionally rare little book, The Mysteries of the Honey Bee by A Western Bee Keeper, published in 1874 (third edition, see Figure 4). (The author’s actual name is unknown to me. The book is not in the extensive apiculture book list by Johansson & Johansson from 1972.) To tell the extent of Missouri’s wax moth problem, the main section titled THE MOTH began with “Here in the West, where foul brood and other diseases are almost unknown, it is a common remark that the culture of the bee would pay, if moth worms could be kept out of hives.” The next section titled WHAT ARE THEY? gave a basic wax moth description, nothing special after reading so many. The third section was most revealing and was titled ITS ADVENT, that is, telling the origins of the moth, a subject that hardly ever merits a section in these little bee books.

Into this country [the wax moth] is of recent date; some say since the introduction of imported bees. Not so in the old world. For centuries in Europe, Western Asia, and Northern Africa–in fact, as far back as we have any knowledge to the bee culture–it has been known as a pest of the honey bee…. Pioneers tell us that twenty-five years ago such a thing as a bee moth did not exist here in Missouri. Hollow logs were the only hives used by the early settlers, and bee culture was, in the fullest sense of the term a success. Liquid sweets were so plenteous, that this was indeed a land of milk and honey.

(Along with bees, dairy cows also came from abroad. Thus originally America had no milk or honey in the religious sense.) Using the 1874 publication date and the 25 year estimate puts the wax moth as entering Missouri around 1849 (1874-25). With bees entering the state in 1792 gave some 57 years of beekeeping and feral bee populations free of wax moths (1849-1792).

Including the comment of virtually no foul brood during the times before the wax moth arrival, apiculture in early America seems to have been some Shangri-La-like beekeeping paradise, at least from a pest and pathogen perspective (not including droughts, etc.). For minimal or no bee management, it was a perfect fit for the times. Then, with little or no warning came the shell shock of wax moth comb slaughter. Masses of chaotic webs consumed once orderly combs, particularly of weak colonies. Before wax moths, weak colonies (usually lightweight hives) would have gone on their way to the brimstone (sulfur) pit yielding a bit of honey instead of having them starve in the winter, which would waste all the honey. Now those hives became moth factories. The carnage must have been magnified in the beekeepers’ minds. From the durations of the tranquil time periods, having pest-free bees for at least a generation of beekeepers, that was all they knew. Now that was paradise lost, never to return.

Not surprisingly, many beekeepers quit their hives, unable to make the transition to a beekeeping world with wax moths. That situation is reminiscent to when varroa came to America in 1987. Some beekeepers, only knowing simpler times without varroa (but with moths), gave up, never venturing into the more complicated bee management conditions with adversarial mites.

In the next article we will see the beekeeping response to wax moths. One hive had a screen floor. Screen floors did not originate with varroa. They far predate that disaster. Another hive was promoted as “Moth Proof,” designed to keep moths out of the hive. I have this hive, but it took some 20 years to find the original documentation (which I just recently found). Next time you will see it all.

Acknowledgments
The author thanks Suzanne Sumner for her comments on the manuscript.

Literature Cited

¹Crane, E. (1999). The world history of beekeeping and honey hunting. Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd. London

²Cline, John (1911). The man who has kept bees the longest of any one in the country–86 years. The Bee-Keepers Review. 21.

Honey Bee Biology  - December 2011

by Dr. Wyatt A. Mangum
Mathematics Department, University of Mary Washington, 1301 College AvenueFredericksburg, Virginia 22401-5358e-mail:  wmangum@umw.edu

Full Version

Top-Bar Hives Reveal Subtle Comb-Building Behavior

In the previous article we learned about the Greek origin of the top-bar hive. We saw that if the entrance is in the middle of a top-bar hive, the bees put the brood nest in the middle with the honey at the ends of the hive. If the entrance is at the end of the top-bar hive, the bees place the brood nest at that end with most of the honey in the rear. Therefore, the entrance location determines how the bees will organize the contents of the hive.

Apparently, the bees follow the rule, "put the brood close to the entrance and the honey away from it" (at least in a horizontal hive). On a practical level, with the entrance at one end of the hive, the top-bar hive beekeeper opens the hive from that end and enters the brood nest quickly without having to lift the heavy honey at the rear of the hive. The hive's entrance holds another secret bit of bee biology lost in the world of standard frame hives. 

Beekeepers often ask me why my top-bar hives have six entrances as three holes above and three below as shown in Figure 1. Besides their ease of construction and keeping the structural strength of the corners, the holes' placements make use of a subtle bit of comb-building behavior that bees rarely get to display when working from foundation sheets in frames. In a top-bar hive, the bees build their own combs. However those combs must be straight and centered on the top bars since colonies must be managed (to control varroa, small hive beetles, foul brood, etc.). To get straight combs I have always used strips of foundation instead of wooden comb guides. Foundation strips, about an inch and a half wide, consistently give combs as straight as combs found in frames, but in top-bar hives. So even with 200 top-bar hives, their combs are interchangeable just like a frame-hive operation (see Figure 2). Once the bees extend a comb a couple of inches, which is well past the foundation strip, the building decisions are left to them. Nothing is imposed on the bees like a sheet of foundation. The bees build their combs like they are back in the woods except their combs are straight. Now we see how the bees treat the hive entrance when it comes to building comb.

The first top bar, parallel to the entrances, usually has only a small comb, not a completely built comb extending to the hive floor, stopping just a bee space above it (unless the colony becomes excessively crowded against the front wall of the hive. In the spring, that is a management mistake, which could lead to swarming. I shift the brood nest back a few top bar widths and put top bars with built comb between the cluster and the entrances. The brood nest expands forward into the natural space for it.) The bees resist building comb near entrances, usually keeping a somewhat smaller first comb that is easier to remove.

Figure 3 shows a comb that was adjacent to the entrances where the bees did not complete it, although they could have given the prosperous conditions. The three holes in the upper part of the comb match the three upper entrances, the bees refraining from building comb that close to the entrances. Typically the bees do not build out the upper corners of the combs so the two corner holes do not form. Without the corners of the comb, there is little or no comb attachment to the sloping hive walls. The first top-bar comb comes out easily. To show this comb is not full size, I put it in one of my top-bar observation hive supports (without the glass) that has the same cross section as the other hives. Notice the comb does not extend to the hive floor. Rather it stops right above where the lower three entrance holes would be (as indicated by the arrows). Again, the bees are reluctant to build comb near entrances. On a practical level if a top-bar hive beekeeper understands that bees are reluctant to build comb near entrances, then entrance placement can make opening the hive easier. The first comb, leading directly to the brood nest, is small and is easy to remove. If the bees are building it too large, I just move it back in the hive and replace it with a top bar having a foundation strip.

To get experience with working a much different top-bar hive, more like a Greek basket top-bar hive with interchangeable combs, I have two large basket top-bar hives (see Figures 4-7). The coarse weave left small openings in the walls of the hives. The bees did not seal the holes shut as one might expect, although propolis collection is a genetically variable trait and another bee strain might have done so. In the winter, I put boards around the hives to block the winds. Winters in eastern Virginia are fairly mild, and wintering bees with this arrangement works well. In times long ago, the old Greek beekeepers would have plastered mud into the walls of the hive (from both sides) filling the holes in the coarse woven material. Next season I am planning to do something similar with slumgum, a leftover mixture of wax and propolis from the solar melter. Slumgum will also waterproof the hives even though I have them under a shed roof.

The sides of these hives slope in only slightly, much less than my regular top-bar hive (as can be inferred from the angle of the sides of the comb in Figure 2). I do not recommend keeping bees in these baskets because they do not have enough slope on their sides. The bees will attach too much comb to the upper sides of the hives. The sides of a top-bar hive slope to help reduce these attachments (but proper colony management and the intensity of the nectar flow can have large effects too).

The combs of the basket hives are about twice as big and much deeper than my regular size combs (the one in Figure 2). With these big combs or with regular size combs, the bees rarely attach a comb to the lower corner of the hives. And remarkably, they virtually never attach the comb to the floor of the hive. A standard hive obscures the bees' aversion to attaching comb to the floor by attaching a foundation sheet to the bottom bar, enticing the bees to attach comb to the bottom of the frame. Under the bottom bar, the bees accept the artificial gap between it and the hive floor since they leave a gap between natural comb and the hive floor, refusing to build any attachments between the two.

On a practical level, the top-bar beekeeper just cuts the small upper corner attachments. The comb comes right out since the bottom of the comb is not attached to the floor, which would be miserable to cut for each comb if the bees did not have their rule.  From a scientific and biological perspective these comb-building examples and the one concerning the brood nest placement clearly show a warning. When exploring the full range of bee behavior, the hive design itself may in subtle ways obscure some of it.

Acknowledgments
The author thanks Suzanne Sumner for her comments on the manuscript.

Honey Bee Biology  - November 2011

by Dr. Wyatt A. Mangum
Mathematics Department, University of Mary Washington, 1301 College AvenueFredericksburg, Virginia 22401-5358e-mail:  wmangum@umw.edu

Excerpt

Journey to the Origin of the Top-Bar Hive
(Travel Hint: Don't Start in Africa-Go to Old Greece)

 
With the growing interest in top-bar hives, here is my perspective on them to add to the mix. I have kept bees since the age of ten. First I kept them in frame hives, accumulating 125 of them by high school and producing honey by the ton. I switched to all top-bar hives in 1986. Eventually, my top-bar hive operation grew to 200 hives. The 1980’s were a time when top-bar hives were relatively unknown. Besides honey production in five-foot long hives, I have used top-bar hives for a highly mobile pollination operation (moving two-foot long hives by pickup truck and trailer), as well as for producing queen bees and even for package bee production.
To appreciate the top-bar hive design we see today, let’s look back into the annals of global beekeeping history. Beekeepers familiar with top-bar hives may know about the hive’s recent (1960’s) connection to Africa, which was critical. But let’s leap farther back in time because there is more to the top-bar tale—that is, the obscure origin of the top-bar hive. We begin in the 1600’s in Europe where once the common hive was the skep. In its simplest form, a skep is a nearly cylindrical woven basket turned so its closed end, which is shaped like a dome, is upwards. The bees built their combs inside fixing them to the top and sides. That made the skep a fixed-comb hive. The beekeeper could not remove the honey without tearing out the combs and causing considerable damage to the colony. To harvest honey, the beekeeper waited until fall and selected the heaviest skeps, which yielded the most honey, and the lightest skeps. Those light colonies would probably starve, wasting that honey. So the beekeeper took light skeps too. The beekeeper killed the bees by putting the skep (its bottom was open) over a pit of burning sulfur. The fumes smothered the bees. The beekeeper kept the medium weight skeps for the next season. Catching swarms replenished the hive numbers.
From England in 1682 came a remarkable book for top-bar hive beekeeping, though you would hardly know it from the title, A Journey into Greece by George Wheler. From his travels, Wheler described life in Greece. In Book VI (page 412) is a short passage on old Greek beekeeping including a sketch of the hive he saw in use there (see Figure 1).

Honey Bee Biology  - October 2011

by Dr. Wyatt A. Mangum
Mathematics Department, University of Mary Washington, 1301 College AvenueFredericksburg, Virginia 22401-5358e-mail:  wmangum@umw.edu

Excerpt

Beehive Development Seen in Miniature

Quarter to eight in the morning I was almost out the door to check apiaries, beating the summer heat of the day, when I heard the phone ring. I stopped in my tracks. No one calls that early unless there’s trouble. Suzanne answered the phone and sure enough called me back. A farmer I know had a tree fall in last night’s thunderstorm. The tree had bees in it. The bee tree was near his house, and he wanted to know what could be done. I agreed to at least come look over the situation on the way to my apiaries.

Sure enough, the bees had been in an oak tree about 30 feet high. Their section of the tree took a hard crash in the fall and partly split the upper end (see Figure 1). I saw all the combs, which were just new brood combs and no honeycombs (see Figure 2). This was a new colony, probably a late spring swarm, since it had no honey stores. While swarms are impressive, seeing a cluster pitched in a tree or a swarm cloud flying aloft, underlying those sights is a struggle to survive and a race against time. The chances of a swarm surviving its first winter are questionable. Consider what a swarm faces after leaving the hive. The bees must find a nest site. Then they must build a set of combs, which are energy expensive in terms of converting honey and pollen into wax, not to mention the effort in collecting those food resources. The new colony must also store enough honey to survive the coming winter, some 50 pounds or more. And during this herculean effort, the colony must continue rearing enough bees to replace the ones that wear out and die. Late swarms missing most of the main spring nectar flow may be doomed from the start. Sure, they may build enough combs and swell their ranks with plenty of bees, but the best nectar-bearing flowers are gone. Without an exceptionally good nectar flow in the fall, winter starvation is the fate of the new colony. In my area summer nectar flows are weak and the fall flow is not much better. This colony would starve early in the winter (unless it absconded and usurped another colony that happened to have ample stores).

Without a nectar flow to stir any bee flight and still in the cool morning, no returning foragers clouded overhead looking for the entrance. This was the perfect time to remove the bees. As usual, the landowner wanted the bees off the site immediately. I agreed to remove the bees so they would not be killed, provided a person was willing to cut out a section of the tree with the bees using a chainsaw. I could protect him with the smoker and tell him where to make the cuts. I also offered to give the chainsaw operator a veil or some other protection. Upon hearing that, the farmhands looked at each other to see who would “chainsaw the bee tree.” A volunteer was pried from the ranks upon finding out that I would have no protection (dressed as seen in the column picture, which is not recommended) and that I have been working with downed bee trees since a teenager.   

The first cut to remove the top of the tree went fine. Removing the bee section from the trunk caused it to split even more. Moving the section would become difficult. It would probably split in two and spill the bees. No problem. When working with bee trees you have a plan, which may only last a minute. Be flexible and always have another plan. The ability to improvise and overcome is paramount here. My next plan was to put the entire colony in a cardboard box and take the bees to my closest out-apiary. Since the colony did not have any honeycomb, just first season brood comb, this was a reasonable approach. The farmer brought me a couple cardboard boxes for a temporary transport hive. On the farm these boxes were for packing squash and had large ventilation holes. No problem. I taped the holes closed from both sides so the bees would not get stuck in the glue. In a couple of places, I cut entrance holes and left lower flaps for alighting boards.

Now to put the entire colony in the box. The first thing in the box is not comb or bees but should be several small sticks (about a half inch in diameter). These sticks hold up the combs so the bees can circulate under them. As combs went in the box (almost vertical), more sticks go in between them to provide additional gaps allowing the bees to walk over the combs. Cutting the combs essentially destroys the gaps between them, and the sticks provide crude substitutes. The bees fill the spaces between the combs, helping to get the colony in the box. Using only a pocketknife, I cut out the combs with the adhering bees, always watching for the queen. I had a queen cage on the fallen tree, easy to grab, should I see her (the cage is seen at the top of Figure 2). Generally speaking, comb removal and placement in the box is typically slow. The queen usually has plenty of time to run and find a hiding place. Still, if I got lucky and saw her, the queen cage was ready. My rule is to always have a queen cage ready when removing a colony from a tree or a building, even when I have a vacuum to remove the bees.

Each fallen bee tree is a bit different and calls for a creative approach. With the box at the end of the split and the flap pushed into the groove, some of the bees just marched into the box as I filled it with combs (see Figure 3). About half the colony had clustered off the combs in the back in the cavity, but within arm’s reach. I scooped them out mostly by hand (no gloves). The tree cavity was irregular, and I had to feel for where the cluster ended. I removed the bees from the back of the cluster first, working to the front. This reverse approach helped to keep the bees from running deeper into the tree. To dislodge the bees, I let my fingertips nudge the first bees in the chains (festoons), the ones holding on to the wood. Once they released, the ones below fell into my palm. When I felt a handful, I gently shook them into the box. I worked slowly and imagined the cluster and the cavity roof as I felt it. You need not see all that, somewhat like not visually seeing a quarter in your pocket when you touch it. Then you imagine the quarter in your mind. Reaching into the tree to scoop out handfuls of bees is an easy way to get stung. And I expect it. Rarely is the stinger embedded very deep and not much venom gets injected. On one fingertip though, a sting did hurt. After removing the stinger I washed the site with water and gave it a blast of smoke. Otherwise, I would be reaching in the hive with alarm pheromone (scent) on my hand. In some places I could scoop out the bees with a small drink cup provided they did not become irritated.

Once I had all the combs and most of the bees, the box was full. I never saw the queen, although I could have missed her in the confusion. With the heat of the day coming, I had to move the bees because they would start flying out. With the box open on top and just a towel wrapped over it, I closed the entrance flaps. I put the box on the front seat of the truck. The box would leak some bees, hopefully not too many. I released the leaked bees in front of the new hive site upon removing the box. These precocious bees could join their colony, just in a different hive (see Figure 4).

The usual procedure with standard hives is to cut the brood comb to fit into frames. String or rubber bands hold the comb in place until the bees attach it. That method is not feasible with my top-bar hives since these are movable comb hives without frames. I put their comb in the back of the top-bar hive, again using the sticks to provide gaps between the comb. As the brood emerged, I would remove the empty comb. At the front of the hive (next to the entrances) I got the colony established on regular top-bar combs. The problem was after a careful search of the combs and bees going into the top-bar hive, I did not find the queen.
So it’s right back to the bee tree. This time hunting just a queen. She should be with a small group of bees. The search was not for a single lost bee because other bees would be with her unless she had fallen into some hard-to-reach place, requiring a long exhaustive search, which has happened. In a few minutes, I found the queen way back in the tree among some other bees, quite typical. I caged her (see Figure 5), and brought her to the bees in the hive. With the disruptive transfer from the tree to the hive, the colony might try to abscond.   

To stop any absconding (assuming only one queen in the colony) and to let the brood emerge from the feral comb, I left the queen caged in the hive. As expected the bees built emergency queen cells. Usually I remove them, which would require a search through the irregular broken combs, but the queen cells happened to be well provisioned with royal jelly so I let the colony rear another queen. When larvae were in the top-bar combs, indicating the new queen had mated successfully, I removed the former queen, still in her cage. I introduced her into another colony, giving me the mother queen and her daughter for next season’s study. At that time the feral comb was mostly empty (see Figure 6), so I removed it and began feeding the colony to prepare it for winter. Otherwise the bees would store some syrup in their feral comb.

You never know where your next colony of bees may come from. For a feral swarm in a fallen tree, I did not want to see a potentially valuable survivor stock go to waste, besides not wanting see the bees killed. This episode also shows how to work with hardly anything, mainly some sticks and a box, to save a colony of bees. At the heart of it is creative innovation.

Acknowledgments
The author thanks Suzanne Sumner for her comments on the manuscript.

Honey Bee Biology  - September 2011

by Dr. Wyatt A. Mangum
Mathematics Department, University of Mary Washington, 1301 College AvenueFredericksburg, Virginia 22401-5358e-mail:  wmangum@umw.edu

Excerpt

Beehive Development Seen in Miniature

In Phelps's time hives were designed to control wax moths, sometimes with the beekeeper's assistance. Back then most beekeepers regarded wax moths as the primary cause of a colony's demise, not as a secondary invader coming after the colony became weak from some other cause as we see the situation today. Moreover, it was not generally understood that a strong colony could keep out wax moth infestation. The situation may have been more complicated because before the introduction of Italian bees, which are better able to withstand wax moths, the bee stocks then in use were thought to be more susceptible to the pest. On the other hand, beekeepers knew debris on the hive floor provided a refuge for wax moth larvae, an infestation that could ascend to the combs. Besides making it easy to remove the trash with a hinged floor, Phelps gave the larvae a place to hide, in the grooves located on the hive floor between the tin and wood of the strips. The trap was the groove, and the convenient accommodations worked essentially like bait. At the back of the hive, out of the bee flight, the beekeeper withdrew the traps and cleaned out the wax moths (larvae and pupae) from the grooves and reinserted the traps to catch more. Given the beekeeping situation and the limited understanding of wax moth biology, the design is quite clever.

Honey Bee Biology  - August 2011

by Dr. Wyatt A. Mangum
Mathematics Department, University of Mary Washington, 1301 College AvenueFredericksburg, Virginia 22401-5358e-mail:  wmangum@umw.edu

Excerpt

Beehive Development Seen in Miniature

In the previous article we saw how the beehive progressed from a skep or box hive to a chamber hive where the bees put honey in honey boxes at the top of the hive. Below the honey boxes the rest of the hive was still a box hive. At harvest time, the beekeeper removed the honey boxes instead of killing the colony, a big step forward for the times.  Eventually the chamber concept extended to the brood nest, partitioning everything inside, resulting in various unusual hives. European hives may have influenced some of these hive designs; others were probably purely American creations. Dividing the brood nest into compartments provided some limited management. And in a beekeeping world where the movable frame was yet unknown, a box containing brood combs could itself be the movable unit for splitting a colony.

 In addition, wax moths had a huge effect on American hive makers. At one time the prevailing strategy was to have the hive rid itself of the pests, by some device, or to build a wax moth trap in the hive. (Later it became known that a strong colony could keep wax moths at bay.) Along with the compartments, a hive with wax moth protection just amplified its strange appearance, perhaps to the point where a modern beekeeper might not consider it a beehive at all.  Then comes an unexpected complication to identify old exotic hives after some 170 years, approaching two centuries. First of all, virtually all of these relics have vanished. Some were tossed out as trash to rot or were burned for stove heat. The last holdouts became outcasts, illegal for their fixed combs after the acceptance of the movable frame. Which of these pristine exotic hives would remain for study? Ironically some of the survivors were never meant for use as working hives. Never meant to hold bees or endure the weather outside. Rather, to live strictly indoors and not take up much space there either. Given the decades ticking away, passed from one household after another, their original function could become forgotten. Or perhaps a shred of some handed-down memory manages to hang on, over-simplifications in the retellings. For example, you put a queen bee in it, is a typical scrap description of an imagined (for a higher price) beekeeping antique. By the time it gets to market, that‘s what I hear. And that baited the hook of the following hive, because when I bought it, I wasn't sure it had anything to do with bees. Now though, I know most old hive design elements quite well. 

Honey Bee Biology  - July 2011

by Dr. Wyatt A. Mangum
Mathematics Department, University of Mary Washington, 1301 College AvenueFredericksburg, Virginia 22401-5358e-mail:  wmangum@umw.edu

Excerpt

Beehive Development in America

Honey bees (that is, bees of the genus Apis) are not native to the Americas. The first bee importations came with the colonists. While little is known about early hive designs in Seventeenth Century America, the common one had to be, at least initially, the skep, the traditional hive of England and Continental Europe. A skep is a tightly woven basket to house a bee colony (see Figure 1). They were made from various woven materials and constructed in different sizes and styles. In 1609, the Rev. Charles Butler, known as the father of English beekeeping, published The Feminine Monarchie. This influential book was a practical treatise of skep beekeeping. Yet it also included first-hand observations on bees. One observation was quite surprising: hand-drawn musical notes (of the chirps) made by piping queens during swarming. As opposed to a verbal description, the notes served as instructions for reproducing the sound at the reader's pleasure. Not only would sound itself give a better description than words, it freed the reader from being present during a part of the swarm cycle when piping occurs, which can be brief, fickle or lacking. In that same year over in the New World, the first flowering of such nuanced esoteric queen knowledge was truly a world apart. The fledgling Jamestown colony, planted just two years earlier, had entered its "starving time," when the desperate colonists turned to cannibalism.

Despite this and other setbacks, starting in the early 1600's, bees in skeps crossed the Atlantic Ocean from Europe with diverse settler groups that would melt into America. How the bees survived the crossings-in the 1600's-is a continual source of mystery. A couple of records from the 1800's offer some insights. Horn (2005) relates a description from a book published in 1830 telling of hives secured in crates and bolted on a platform to the stern of the ship. That would keep the bees as far as possible from the crew and passengers. W. C. Cotton, an English beekeeper, proposed to pack skeps in large barrels (hogshead), provisioned with ice to keep the bees quiet for a five-month trip to New Zealand. He even provided a diagram in his book titled My Bee Book, published in 1842. On a more contemporary note, I have investigated keeping bees in skeps and found them to be quite compact, portable and durable. From those experiences, it is reasonable to extrapolate that colonies in skeps, heavy with honey, properly packed and well ventilated, would stand a good chance of surviving a winter crossing of several weeks over the Atlantic.

Once in Colonial America, the immigrant bees flourished (for more details see Horn, 2005), and spread south and west (for maps see Kritsky, 1991), which is not too surprising. After all, from an ecological perspective, these were temperate-evolved bee populations expanding in a similar climate. The environment provided plenty of nectar and pollen, apparently with low levels of native insect competition. The climax forests provided an abundance of hollow trees for feral nest sites. What also fueled their flight to the woods, building up feral populations, was a skep bee management system that promoted swarming. As for a honey bee invasion of the Americas, nothing this dramatic (at least in the east) would be seen again for three centuries until the importation of African bees into the South American tropics in 1957, and their long-distance expansion northward, eventually reaching the southwestern United States in the 1990's.

Honey Bee Biology  - June 2011

by Dr. Wyatt A. Mangum
Mathematics Department, University of Mary Washington, 1301 College AvenueFredericksburg, Virginia 22401-5358e-mail:  wmangum@umw.edu

Full Version

Small Hive Beetles

With so many new beekeepers and the approach of summer, I thought a review of small hive beetle biology with some new pictures would be appropriate.

Let's begin by learning how to identify small hive beetles. The mature adults are black in color (see Figure 1). The beetles vary a little in size, which probably depends on the food availability when they were larvae. Generally the adults are about six millimeters long and three millimeters wide. Their size makes them small enough to pass through the screen of a package-bee shipping crate or through the eight-mesh wire of a screen bottom board used to monitor and reduce varroa populations.

Finding adult beetles is made more difficult since they flee from light and hide upon opening the hive. Typical hiding places include the corners of the hive, between the ends of the top bars where they rest on the ledge in the hive body, or under the trash on the bottom board. Beetles also get into open cells along the edges of the combs. Provided the colony is strong enough, the bees hold the beetles in those places, denying them access to the pollen and brood needed for beetle larvae to feed on. Other beetles resembling small hive beetles, which are scavengers, can be found in hives. They have always been there passing unnoticed before beekeepers became sensitive to looking for small hive beetles.

Beekeepers need to correctly identify small hive beetle larvae and to not confuse them with greater wax moth larvae. Small hive beetle larvae have distinguishing characteristics. They have little spines down their back, which wax moth larvae lack, and three pairs of legs near their head (see Figure 2). The beetle larvae are whitish in color, but sometimes they appear in shades of light brown if they have been crawling through the slime they produce when destroying comb. Sometimes fly larvae are present in the hives, particularly if something like rotting brood is present, but these larvae look different from small hive beetle larvae. (If you find suspicious larvae in the hive, get a qualified person to make the determination.)

During hive inspections, beetle larvae crawl away from the light. And like the adults, avoiding light makes larvae harder to find too. They will go to the bottom of cells or burrow under the detritus accumulated on the bottom board. I have found a dozen or so beetle larvae under trash littering the bottom board of somewhat weak colonies in the summer. A check of their combs may not reveal any damage or beetle larvae (just adult beetles). Nevertheless, these colonies had chronic low levels of beetle production from the trash. The trash can be "dry," that is, with no slime (see Figure 3).

Part of my standard hive inspection, definitely for weak colonies, is to look through the trash on the bottom board for adult beetles or any kind of larvae, beetles or wax moths. With wax moth larvae, silk webs will be present sticking the bits of trash together. However, larvae of the two species, small hive beetles and greater wax moths, can occur together in the trash on the hive floor.
Some kind of management intervention is needed with these colonies. For example, first remove the larvae and scrape clean the bottom board. Then for long-term care, requeen the colony with vigorous stock. Give the colony a frame, perhaps two, of sealed brood to boost the colony's population (provided the bees can cover and protect it).

Small hive beetle larvae can infest just a local place on the comb as they expand the area of comb destruction. These situations may have slime or be relatively "dry," at least for a while. Figures 4, 5 and 6 show different situations.

While immature larvae shun the light, mature ones become attracted to it and crawl out of the hive. They fall on the ground and bury themselves into the dirt. Beetle larvae are reported to leave the hive in the evening, but I have seen them leave in the afternoon in a shaded apiary. Most of the larvae enter the soil within a few feet of the hive and dig down several inches.

After forming a small underground chamber, a beetle larva changes into a pupa and then to an adult. A new adult beetle digs its way out of the soil. Newly emerged beetles are light brown in color and gradually darken with age. After becoming sexually mature in about a week, female beetles lay eggs in cracks and crevices in the hive or on brood comb if not prevented by the bees. The eggs are very small and rarely observed by the beekeeper, so it's best to look for adults and larvae. (Adult beetles spend the winter in the cluster with the bees, not in the soil as pupae as far as I know.)

Keeping colonies strong is one of the general recommendations for controlling beetle reproduction. That, of course, is not always easy when confronted with numerous factors, which weaken colonies (or kill them): varroa mites, pesticides, failing queens, poor forage, stress from transporting hives, and the microscopic pathogens in the bees.
If the colony becomes weak and vulnerable, its beetle population explodes. Here is an example from the summer of 2007 in one of my apiaries in North Carolina. In those apiaries, at least several adult beetles can be found in most any hive, even strong ones. This colony was a spring swarm, which landed low. I felt lucky to be in the apiary that day to catch it since these locations are a three-hour drive from home, and I do not bring a ladder for swarm catching. (I rely on bait hives to retrieve at least some of the swarms.)

Later in the summer on a routine inspection, I knew there was a bad problem upon pulling up in the truck. Slime and beetle larvae were leaking out of the bottom of the hive. Inside of the hive, thousands of beetle larvae had demolished and slimed the combs. The colony may have gone queenless and failed to replace her. The bee population would have decreased, combs then became exposed and beetles moved in. This time beetles even beat out the wax moths, the traditional comb destroyers of weak hives in the summer (see Figure 7). Slime and webs are now the symbols of comb slaughter in the southeast.

For cleanup I put the combs and beetle larvae in a heavy-duty trash bag and tied it off. While I worked the rest of the hives, I left the bag on the black bed liner of the truck to get a thorough sun scorching, flipping the bag over periodically. The heat kills larvae quickly. Since many mature larvae had been left in the hive, without a ground application with a pesticide a surge of adult beetles will come later. (Contact your bee inspector about this treatment.) A burst of beetles can be particularly damaging to small colonies like nucs, meant for building to larger honey production colonies, or mating nucs, which are managed at a small size.
To kill the larvae from small clean ups like those caught from the bottom board of the hive described above, put the larvae in a small clear plastic container and close it tightly. Putting the container in hot direct sun will kill the larvae quickly and cleanly while the beekeeper continues inspecting colonies. I just keep a clear container in the toolbox on the bee truck as part of my standard equipment. For any clean up, do not let the beetle larvae get on the ground because they try to dig in. The larger ones may be able to complete their development to adults.

In areas with beetles, extract honey supers soon after harvest. I would say no later than a couple of days. The combs are unprotected and adult beetles almost certainly are in the combs even from supers taken from strong colonies. Processing smaller quantities of honey at a time may be needed in some situations in order not to leave a stack of supers standing in the honey house for too long.

Particularly if small hive beetles are new to your area or if you are new to beekeeping and have never had these pests before, contact your bee inspector or others with beekeeping extension responsibilities for help. Do not underestimate destruction by small hive beetles.

Acknowledgments
The author thanks Suzanne Sumner for her comments on the manuscript.

Honey Bee Biology  - May 2011

by Dr. Wyatt A. Mangum
Mathematics Department, University of Mary Washington, 1301 College AvenueFredericksburg, Virginia 22401-5358e-mail:  wmangum@umw.edu

Excerpt

Varroa Immigration and Resistant Mites

Knowing about varroa mite immigra tion is essential for beekeepers using Integrated Pest Management (IPM) to monitor their mite population numbers. As a last resort, IPM allows miticide treatments. If enough miticide-resistant mites are present, the miticide will not be effective. This article shows how complicated that can be with data from a four-year study where I counted over 400,000 varroa mites on sticky boards using 100 screen-floor top-bar hives.

When a colony perishes in the summer because of a large varroa population, other colonies quickly rob its honey while the mites are still alive. The parasitic mites, supposedly doomed for killing their host colony, can escape by riding (hitchhiking) on the robber bees to their colonies. (It is not "beneficial" for a parasite to kill its host as when varroa contributes to a colony's winter mortality, but that negative effect is not present for summer mortalities provided the mites can spread to other colonies.) To study the varroa coming into my apiaries, I collected data on their immigration for two summers. The technique was to start with colonies virtually free of mites in the spring. (I prepared the colonies the previous fall.) Then I gave them a continuous strong miticide treatment for the season (a scientific research method not at all recommended for beekeepers). Any mites falling on the sticky boards were the ones just arriving on the bees. I counted these mites on the sticky boards every 2-3 days from several colonies at two apiaries.

In 2003, hardly any immigration occurred (all mite counts about zero), demonstrating that sometimes immigration does not add much to a colony's varroa population. However in the previous summer (2002), immigration had contributed a substantial number of mites to a colony's varroa population. For example, Figure 1 shows the mite immigration for one colony (designated FT94) from May 17 to October 8, 2002. (FT stands for fire tower, a local apiary landmark.) On the horizontal axis the counts are just plotted as 1, 2, 3, etc., so I put some dates on the graph. The vertical axis gives the number of immigrating mites with a scale from zero to 50.

The immigration rate was low in the spring nectar flow before June 22. At this location, the summer nectar flows were marginal or nothing. In the beginning of the dearth, the immigration rate rose slightly (June 22 to July 21), as colonies were still in good condition following the spring nectar flow. As the summer dearth wore on, the immigration rate increased dramatically, probably as weaker colonies in FT94's foraging range succumbed (none were in the apiary). The immigration rate typically decreases with the return of forage, here the fall nectar flow in September. In this situation, the fall nectar flow was marginal and the immigration rate still remained somewhat elevated compared to spring, until cooler weather. On the graph, the sharp increase and decrease in immigration form a spike in late summer. Most of the other colonies showed similar immigration spikes. Other researchers have observed this general immigration pattern too, a rate low in a nectar flow and large in a dearth.

The total number of immigrating mites accumulated by FT94 over the season was 2,213 mites. To get a better understanding of the size of this number, the extension recommendation puts the natural mite drop treatment threshold at 60 mites per 24-hours averaged over 2-3 days (for the southeastern United States in late season). That sample value from the sticky boards corresponds to a (total) treatment threshold population of about 3,200 mites. The 2,213 immigrating mites are 69% of that threshold population. Had the immigrating mites been allowed to reproduce, of course that population would have been much larger, probably more than the threshold population of 3,200 mites. Therefore, in one season, this colony would have gone from having no mites in the spring to surpassing its treatment threshold population, a growth fueled mostly by immigration. The other four colonies in the apiary had 1933, 1487, 337, and 1107 immigrating mites (average = 1,415; n=5). The total number of mites immigrating into the three hives at the other apiary generally ran somewhat lower 1550, 499 and 977 (average = 1,001; n=3). Nevertheless, here we see that immigration can boost varroa populations across different apiaries at the same time, even though these locations had separate foraging ranges.

The timing of the immigration spike and the large number of incoming mites suggest sampling colonies more often in late summer, particularly in a dearth with stressed colonies. (Maybe conduct a natural drop sample every four weeks or so, instead of every six weeks.) A large late summer immigration spike also comes at a particularly bad time. In late summer (and into fall), a colony should begin rearing its long-lived winter bees. That burst of immigration could potentially disrupt the production of those bees and jeopardize the colony's winter survival. Besides the number of incoming mites, immigration can rapidly bring miticide-resistant varroa into a beekeeping operation, which may have been how my colonies first acquired them (because they appeared quickly in many hives).

In 2001 and 2002, I had been counting total varroa populations from my colonies (a population study). I had 100 top-bar hives with screen floors, and I counted the mites from about 50 of them per summer. (I was counting about 100,000 mites per summer.) At the end of the 2002 counting season (mid October), I suspected the presence of varroa resistant to fluvalinate (Apistan®), the miticide I used to remove the mites. So in 2003, I began collecting data on fluvalinate-resistant varroa (now a genetics and a population study). Starting in August with 53 hives in four apiaries, I installed the fluvalinate strips for 50 days, counting mites on the sticky boards about every other day in the apiaries. These bees had only been treated with fluvalinate. The mites counted during this time period were susceptible to fluvalinate. So far this was my prior procedure for counting the total varroa population in a colony. If, however, fluvalinate-resistant varroa were in the hives, they would survive, and this procedure would not count them. I needed to remove the fluvalinate-resistant mites with another miticide. At the end of the 50-day period, I switched the strips to coumaphos (CheckMite+^TM), a stronger miticide never used on the bees. (This is a scientific research technique in no way recommended for beekeepers.) Then I continued the same counting procedure for another 25 days. By then virtually all mite counts went to about zero, heading into October. The mites counted in this second period were the fluvalinate-resistant ones. The susceptible mites plus the resistant mites give the total varroa population in a hive.

Figure 2 shows the results for 2003 from counting total varroa populations in 53 colonies (at four apiaries) for a total of 110,372 mites. For each colony, the horizontal axis gives the percent of their susceptible mites (grouped in 10% intervals). If fluvalinate had been used alone, this would be the percent of the mite population eliminated from the hives. The vertical axis gives the number of colonies with those percents. For example, the bar over the 90% extends three units high indicating three colonies (of the 53) had ninety-some percent susceptible mites in their varroa populations. For those colonies, treating with fluvalinate alone would eliminate most of the mites. Colonies with varroa populations this susceptible to fluvalinate were once common. But quite rapidly in my operation, they had become rare.
In contrast, the bar in Figure 2 over the 20% extends also three units high. (Both bars being equal to three is just a coincidence.) These three colonies had just twenty-some percent of susceptible mites in their populations, the minority. Or conversely, they had seventy-some percent fluvalinate-resistant mites, by far the majority. With only a fluvalinate treatment, most of the mites would remain in the hives as resistant populations. While only three colonies had these very resistant varroa populations, with repeated fluvalinate use, the number of these populations would increase (provided the bees survived).

Between these extremely susceptible and resistant varroa populations were other more numerous intermediate populations. Together the bars in Figure 2 form a sort of "hump" shape. That is a graphical technique showing the variation in the fluvalinate susceptibilities (or resistance levels) of the varroa populations present at that time. That variation would also depend greatly on the beekeeper's management practices. For example, equalizing colonies by moving brood and bees among hives would tend to eliminate the variation in the resistance levels of their varroa populations making them more uniform. (For these 53 hives, that was not done.)

Using the threshold varroa population from above of 3,200 mites and taking 80% resistant mites as the lower cutoff, 2,560 mites would remain after a fluvalinate treatment (0.8*3,200). That would only decrease the varroa population by 640 mites, not much of a mite reduction given the expense and labor to install and remove the strips, essentially a treatment failure. This scenario demonstrates the wastefulness of treating when even some colonies begin harboring resistant varroa populations. And it emphasizes the great need to incorporate an IPM system for varroa well before resistant mites are found in the apiary, since these mites can immigrate into hives in large numbers.

When a miticide treatment must be given, a follow-up sample like a natural drop should be conducted after a treatment to check its performance. Continuing the treatment failure example from above, I would expect a colony with 2,560 mites to have its natural drop a little under 60 mites per 24 hours (the treatment threshold from above). Even though that natural drop is under 60, that's not the point here. The colony would be dropping far too many mites for having just finished a hard miticide treatment (one designed to eliminate most of the mites). On the other hand, don't expect to see zero mites on the follow-up sticky boards either. Typically there are a few. Just how many mites to count on the follow-up sticky boards in order to declare a treatment failure is difficult to say. As Figure 2 shows, the level of susceptibility of the varroa populations can vary quite a bit. Nevertheless, obvious treatment failures can be detected.

When a miticide treatment and especially the follow-up natural drop extend into the fall, be mindful of these considerations. In cooler weather, the bees are less active, and fewer mites fall from the cluster. The follow-up natural drop counts include this "weather effect." The numbers have a tendency to be smaller (a bias). The extra small numbers tend to make a miticide treatment appear to work well, when in reality it might not. Under some conditions in the fall, bees cease rearing brood (brood pause). The lack of brood forces all the mites from the cells onto the adult bees. Now the entire mite population is subject to falling. This effect would tend to increase the natural mite drop.

In addition, after a miticide treatment in the same apiary, it is possible to have the following situation with the follow-up natural mite drops. One colony's natural drop could be very low indicating a successful treatment (on its susceptible varroa population.) Another colony's natural drop could be too high, indicating the treatment failed (on its resistant varroa population). Those two results are not contradictory because the varroa populations in different hives can have different levels of susceptibility as shown by Figure 2. This further underscores the need for follow-up samples to check a miticide's performance, especially when resistant mites have been documented.

Acknowledgments
The author thanks Suzanne Sumner for her comments on the manuscript.

Honey Bee Biology  - April 2011

by Dr. Wyatt A. Mangum
Mathematics Department, University of Mary Washington, 1301 College AvenueFredericksburg, Virginia 22401-5358e-mail:  wmangum@umw.edu

Excerpt

Wax Moth Biology and Open Air Comb Storage

The greater wax moth destroys thousands of dollars of comb every summer. For southern beekeepers they are a particular problem with the longer warm season. To study wax moth biology in detail, I decided to raise them. Initially I was ambivalent about this approach. As a scientist, a closer study of the wax moth's life history was very appealing. As we will see, they are interesting creatures. But as a beekeeper trying to control wax moth damage, raising them was somewhat disagreeable, even though I knew other people raise the larvae for fish bait and laboratory experiments.

As one can imagine, raising wax moths is not difficult. I began by letting adult moths infest some old comb sheltered in a box. The box kept the comb in the dark and poorly ventilated, a situation very attractive to them. Since I started this project during the summer, a time of intense wax moth activity, they quickly found the comb. In a beehive, female moths typically lay their tiny eggs in small cracks, safe from the reach of patrolling bees (see Figures 1 and 2). Given their small size and concealment beekeepers rarely see wax moth eggs.

To photograph wax moth eggs, I collected some female moths from the combs and put them in a container with wax paper folded into pleats that simulate small cracks. The next morning I checked the wax paper, and found hundreds of eggs laid in sheets, one layer thick (see Figure 3). Seeing all of these eggs, one can better appreciate how a female moth can easily lay several hundred eggs, with some moths laying well over a thousand eggs. If kept warm, wax moth eggs hatch in about a week, and I wanted to observe this process. 
 

Honey Bee Biology  - March 2011

by Dr. Wyatt A. Mangum
Mathematics Department, University of Mary Washington, 1301 College AvenueFredericksburg, Virginia 22401-5358e-mail:  wmangum@umw.edu

Excerpt

Mutant and Gynandromorphic Honey Bees

Here's the opening scene in a beekeeping-situation comedy, if there were ever such a thing. A teenage-boy beekeeper is on the phone, calling for the first time the state bee inspector to report a strange alien-like bee captured in his only hive. "It has the head of a drone and the body of a worker. A stinger too," he says in a trembling cracking voice. "It's a bee part drone and part worker." The bee inspector remains professional, listens patiently, but secretly thinks this new beekeeping kid can't tell workers from drones. Was that kid correct? To find out read on, but here's a hint - I know him.

This article gives a brief introduction to some honey bee mutations with references to more detailed works. Understanding even some basic bee genetics helps not only explain the occurrence of these bees, but also leads to a greater understanding of other aspects of bee behavior. Since the honey bee's genetic code has been deciphered, vast new opportunities for understanding their social life are at hand. For now though let's begin with some basic terminology.

The nucleus of a cell contains special threadlike structures called chromosomes. The chromosomes carry most of the genetic information from parent to offspring. Organisms having a double set of chromosomes, one from each parent, are referred to as diploid. A female honey bee inherits two sets of 16 chromosomes, one from the mother queen and the other from the drone for a total of 32 chromosomes. Therefore, queens and workers are diploid individuals. Drones develop from unfertilized eggs. They have only one set of chromosomes, that is, half the number of female bees. Drones are referred to as haploids.
 A chromosome consists of a very long molecule known as DNA (Deoxyribonucleic acid). DNA is fundamental to the study of genetics because in its molecular structure are the instructions for the genetically inheritable traits that pass from parent to offspring. A specific functional unit of DNA is called a gene. In complex organisms, a particular gene, one of thousands, is composed of a tiny part of the total amount of DNA.
 
A gene can exist in slightly different (chemical) forms called alleles. The variability of a trait is partly due to the presence of different alleles influencing a particular trait. A diploid individual can possess only two alleles (for a particular gene), each one inherited from a parent, although several alleles may exist in a population. When those two alleles are the same, we say the individual is a homozygote. Conversely, when the alleles are different, the individual is a heterozygote. The specific allelic composition of a cell is the genotype. The term though is usually applied to a particular gene. The outward (visible) appearance of the trait, as instructed by the genotype, is the phenotype. The phenotype depends on such things as environmental influences, perhaps during the development of the bee and interactions among the alleles themselves (dominant/recessive relationships, etc.).

Honey Bee Biology  - February 2011

by Dr. Wyatt A. Mangum
Mathematics Department, University of Mary Washington, 1301 College AvenueFredericksburg, Virginia 22401-5358e-mail:  wmangum@umw.edu

Full Version

The Usurpation of Another Colony and

the Evidence Leading to That Conclusion

In the two previous articles, I gave considerable photographic evidence for colony usurpation, even showing the takeover of an observation hive. To review briefly, during our summer dearth (or with a minor summer nectar flow) a swarm, which has most likely absconded, invades a large established colony. Based on my observations so far, initially both queens, the resident (mother) queen of the colony and the usurpation (invading) queen of the swarm are balled. Quite quickly, easily within 24 hours, the usurpation queen gains acceptance and the bees release her. The resident queen remains in a ball and dies soon afterwards.

 I have studied queen introduction for years and gained a much finer understanding of the behavioral events leading to a queen's acceptance or rejection (death). Coming from that perspective, usurpation is a queen replacement that surpasses anything I have ever seen with "beekeeper-assisted" requeening.

 This new usurpation behavior is known to occur now in Virginia and North Carolina. However, the frequency of its occurrence is unknown. That could be because it does not occur in some bee populations. On the one hand, usurpation can be easily missed since the takeover appears to be rapid. A few weeks later when the now cryptic usurpation queen is found in the brood nest laying eggs, the situation can look like a familiar queen supersedure. Even if a beekeeper encounters a usurpation underway (without seeing the initial entry of the swarm, a dead giveaway), the situation could go unnoticed or be misdiagnosed as some other occurrence. Below I present a case that I am quite certain was a usurpation. I also included my reasoning to help prepare beekeepers to figure out what is happening should they encounter a similar situation. Notice that I do not just jump to a conclusion - usurpation. Rather I look for the evidence that could indicate usurpation or something else. Sometimes not enough evidence can be found and no conclusion can be drawn. That has happened to me too, once or sometimes twice at every apiary last season (about 10 times). (That might seem like a lot, but keep in mind I am actively looking for usurpations throughout my operation.)

 On August 14, 2010 at one of my small out-apiaries I noticed three or four bees flying in large confused circles just inches above the grass near the hives as I got out of the truck. It pays to be aware of all the bee flight in the apiary. After watching their low-level flight, I backtracked the bees to the remnant of a swarm that must have landed in the grass near the hives (see Figure 1). At this point, there is not enough evidence to conclude usurpation. I have had summer swarms in my apiaries, and found these remnants of swarms, without any apparent usurpation. At the time only two hives were at that location, which is not a research apiary so it is not carpeted. At my carpeted research apiaries, dead bees in front of the hive are quite noticeable, much less so here in the grass around these hives.
 
Nevertheless, one colony was evicting a few dozen dead bees, the dead scattered in the grass in front of the hive. That appears to be a symptom of usurpation during the brief takeover period as the bees from the colony and swarm fight. That mortality is also a symptom of a pesticide kill. This apiary is at a mostly non-agricultural rural location, but within foraging distance of several residential gardens, places of potential pesticide misuse. A minor pesticide kill is a possibility, although this location has had no history of that. Furthermore, the other colony was not evicting dead bees. I would expect a typical pesticide incident to affect both colonies to some degree (although I have seen counter examples where some colonies suffered mortality and others not, depending on their foraging patterns). Furthermore, the colony evicting the dead bees was too strong to be robbed, and no robber bee flight was observed, which could have accounted for the dead bees. (The colony lacked the symptoms of being subjected to mass robbing: characteristic zigzag flight of robber bees hovering near entrances and bees fighting on the alighting board.)
 
While having a swarm remnant and dead bee evictions occurring together is quite suspicious for usurpation, it is not conclusive. To hopefully make a better determination, the hive needs to be inspected (see Figure 2). If a usurpation is occurring, the ongoing bee evictions suggest the removal of the resident queen and her replacement by a usurpation queen have probably not concluded (at least based on the few prior cases in the two previous articles). Therefore, I am looking for any unusual treatment of a queen or queens, which includes queen balls or the multilayered bee courts.

 On the hive floor was a small queen ball containing a dead queen (see Figures 3 and 4). In the brood nest was a small-sized (flight capable) queen treated normally by the surrounding bees (a normal court). This colony had an unusually large brood nest (for August), which seemed inconsistent with the small size of that queen. Although those two things can occur together, it is just not likely. About a dozen bees were dead, scattered on the hive floor, from the continued fighting.
 
Finding one queen ball in the hive opens up another possibility that is not usurpation. A virgin queen from the other hive, returning from her mating flight, could have flown into this one by mistake. When a virgin queen flies into the wrong hive, the bees of that colony will typically ball her until she dies because she is foreign to them. A colony like that with one queen ball, could resemble a usurpation nearing the end of the queen replacement. By that time most of the fighting between the usurpation swarm and the invaded colony would have concluded leaving no dead bees that would help to distinguish the two possibilities. (Although I consider it exceptionally unlikely, I could have been seeing the final elimination of the old queen from a mother-daughter queen pair that had coexisted in the colony. That explanation still does not account for the dead and fighting bees in the hive.) Following the virgin queen possibility, I searched the other hive (of the two) for evidence of recent queen rearing (remnants of old torn down queen cells). There were none. That colony had not produced any recent queens.

 So it seems likely enough that I had come upon a usurpation towards the end of the queen replacement. (I am also factoring in that I have confirmed the behavior in another apiary within mating range of this one.) The resident (mother) was the one found dead in the ball. The bees would continue balling her until her odor diminished sufficiently. The small queen in the brood nest was the usurpation queen. She was small, able to fly with the swarm, given the pause in her egg laying.

 The important feature about this incident is that since only two colonies were in the apiary, they were easily inspected and found not to have produced any recent queens (for a usurpation swarm). Therefore, this swarm must have originated at some distant hive site and then "found" this colony. The behavioral mechanics of that will be most interesting to unravel. If the swarm (scouts) did choose between the two colonies, they picked, by far, the strongest colony to take over. (The invaded one was about three times larger than the other and had a far greater quantity of honey, more than sufficient for winter. The other colony, the smaller one, would require fall feeding.)
 
Also with usurpation swarms, one must be careful with old assumptions, some of which may be false at times (as we have seen in the two previous articles). For example, if a usurpation swarm was found hanging in a tree by these two hives, then the well-worn assumption would be that the swarm came from one of the hives in the apiary and the swarm would be leaving. That is not necessarily true anymore. For a usurpation swarm, that swarm might not have come from the apiary. The swarm could have come from somewhere else and it is arriving (to take over one of the hives).
 Especially in these times, one needs to be mentally nimble and adapt swiftly to changing conditions coupled with the vision to see how things could unfold. For me, my bee research begins in the spring with swarm season (with reproductive swarms) and now continues into our summer dearth with usurpation season.

Acknowledgments
 The author thanks Suzanne Sumner for her comments on the manuscript.

Honey Bee Biology  - January 2011

(excerpt)

The Usurpation of an Observation Hive

by Dr. Wyatt A. Mangum
Mathematics Department, University of Mary Washington, 1301 College Avenue, Fredericksburg, Virginia 22401-5358e-mail:  wmangum@umw.edu

Honey Bee Biology  - December 2010

(excerpt)

The Usurpation (Takeover) of Established
Colonies by Summer Swarms in Virginia

by Dr. Wyatt A. Mangum
Mathematics Department, University of Mary Washington, 1301 College Avenue, Fredericksburg, Virginia 22401-5358e-mail:  wmangum@umw.edu

In this article I report on a novel and important behavior displayed by honey bees in Virginia called colony usurpation, also known as colony takeover. A swarm enters the hive of an established colony and eliminates the colony's mother queen. The swarm's queen, the usurpation queen, becomes accepted as queen of the hive and begins laying her eggs. Since mated queens carry the genetic composition of the colony, colony usurpation can drastically change that with the queen replacement. I have been studying summer swarms for several seasons, and suspected usurpation, but only in the summers of 2009 and 2010 did I finally get concrete photographic evidence showing usurpation in Virginia.

Colony usurpation has been reported with Africanized bees usurping colonies of European ancestry in the Southwest of the United States (Schneider et al., 2004). In contrast to those bee populations, the usurpations I observed were in several of my Virginia colonies. Before and after usurpation, these colonies have a gentle temperament, even after the usurpation bees have replaced the bees of the former queen. (To make this point crystal clear about my gentle bees, here is a secret that I tell now. The way you see me in my column picture is exactly the way I routinely work my bees, including the usurpation colonies described in the cases below. I use nothing more than a bee smoker and a hive tool.) Furthermore, even though I currently have four usurpation colonies (and suspect several others), one would regard them as typical colonies of European ancestry, nothing special in appearance or performance. These colonies are not even nervous on the comb when they are inspected.

How my bees acquired the (presumed) genes for usurpation is unknown, but it is an important question. My colonies are not migratory, and I rarely purchase commercial queen stock. (Purchased queens were limited in number, just for some aspects of my queen introduction research, and I have not bought any for about eight years.) I rear my own queens and open mate them. I do catch (spring reproductive) swarms with bait hives, most of which originate from my apiaries. Besides the genetic pathway (if there is one) to my bees, the important point for now is this: given that the usurpation behavior is present in my relatively isolated colonies, the behavior could be found in other managed hives in nearby states. As evidence for that, I am not the only observer of usurpation in this region. While working with honey bees in North Carolina, Dr. Deborah Delaney (now an Assistant Professor at the University of Delaware) saw one usurpation swarm invade a hive and heard of at least four other usurpation swarms in North Carolina plus one in Virginia.

Honey Bee Biology  - November 2010

A Queen Rearing Method with Top-Bar Hives:
Grafting Small Batches of Queens, Part 2

by Dr. Wyatt A. Mangum
Mathematics Department, University of Mary Washington, 1301 College Avenue, Fredericksburg, Virginia 22401-5358e-mail:  wmangum@umw.edu

Excerpt

In the previous article, I described my queen rearing method and ended by showing mature queen cells from a cell-builder colony. I want to begin here by discussing two interesting cases with cell builder colonies from this past season. Recall in this procedure the cell-builder colony is queenless. It receives the newly grafted cell cups and constructs the queen cells. (Some queen rearing systems, particularly for producing hundreds of cells, have separate hives for "starting" the new grafts, which are moved after 24 hours to other colonies that "finish" constructing the cells. The previous article and this one are geared for grafting small batches of about 20 - 30 queen cells. Just one colony, the cell-builder colony, starts and finishes the queen cells. While I can routinely get over 90% acceptance with the newly grafted larvae in the queen cell cups even in a summer dearth with temperatures climbing to almost 100°F, occasionally I do have "bad grafting days" and acceptance is poor. So, I just repeat the graft. Sometimes a hidden problem is responsible for the poor acceptance. When stocking bees in the cell-builder colony, the usual procedure is to find the donor colony's queen and set her aside. That does not guarantee, however, that the donor colony is queenless. Colonies occasionally have two queens, which could be an older queen being replaced by a daughter queen. The pair coexists for a while. I have even watched this coexistence in my observation hives.

Here are two interesting cases I encountered this past summer (during a dearth) from stocking cell-builder hives. Hive number 27, had terrible acceptance of the new grafts. Almost all the queen cell cups were empty when I checked them the day following the graft. All the work transferring the tiny larvae, keeping them from drying out, getting them quickly into the cell-building hive was - wasted. Very distressing. Hive number 106 of the same graft, done at the same time, had near perfect acceptance. Hurray for hive 106! The next day I repeated the graft for number 27, getting similar poor results, only four cells of 20 were accepted, which I just let grow. I had my suspicions but became busy with other hives. Three of the cells survived to be sealed (pupal stage). Then, the underlying cause became more obvious. One of the sealed queen cells had a hole in its side, indicating a possible queen in the hive (the developing queen could have also perished and the workers were dismantling the cell). Even though the combs were jammed full of syrup, a typical condition from all the feeding, I found some queen-laid eggs. (One egg per cell for queens, not multiple eggs in a cell, which indicates laying workers.) The colony was not queenless. Yikes! No wonder the bees would not start rearing all those queens. A queen could crawl around on the cell bar the whole time. Curiously though they did start four queen cells.

The second case, hive 125, was quite memorable. The colony accepted 15 out of 16 cells (94%). (In that batch, I was grafting two rows of eight cells on one cell bar for a total of 16 cells.) Four cells were dismantled in the larval stage, a number I considered large and somewhat troubling. Within a couple of days after the bees capped the queen cells, I found a side-hole in one of them. The damaged queen cell prompted a brood nest inspection where I found a small patch of eggs. This cell-builder had a queen roaming among the queen cells, too! Most striking though, virtually all of its new grafts, 15 cells, were accepted and most of the queen larvae survived to the pupal stage. Even though that occurred, the bees in the cell-building hive should be queenless. (Other methods have a queen in the hive, but she is separated from the queen cells by a queen excluder. I can also do that with top-bar hives.)

How can one make sure the bees are queenless? This is a problem confronting frame-hive beekeepers, too. One solution is to run the bees through a sieve box when starting the cell-builder colony. In its simplest form for a frame hive, a sieve box would be an empty super with a queen excluder for the bottom. All that would go temporarily on top of a brood chamber, which would serve as the cell-builder hive. The bees, shook in from above, would run down through the excluder to the stocked combs of honey and pollen below.

Honey Bee Biology  - October 2010

by Dr. Wyatt A. Mangum
Mathematics Department, University of Mary Washington, 1301 College AvenueFredericksburg, Virginia 22401-5358e-mail:  wmangum@umw.edu

Full Version

A Queen Rearing Method with Top-Bar Hives:
Grafting Small Batches of Queens, Part 1

Queen rearing is a rewarding endeavor with practical benefits, too. Locally produced queens from stock becoming resistant to mites (particularly varroa) and other pathogens should be highly prized. These queens help beekeeping become less dependent on miticides. Furthermore, these queens reduce the beekeeper's labor in applying nonchemical controls.

To produce queens, beekeepers customize their methods by selecting parts of other queen rearing techniques or by devising methods on their own. I have been tinkering with my method for decades. Plus I had the extra endeavor of developing a queen-rearing system adapted to top-bar hives. Along with that I wanted all the design components of my top-bar queen-rearing system to be able to scale up to a commercial level of queen production. What follows is a summary of my system, probably unique in the annals of queen rearing. Independent of the equipment, top bars or frames, I have added tips hopefully useful to those experienced in rearing queens or beginners just getting started.

Queen cell cups can be purchased from bee suppliers in either wax or plastic. In older bee books, there are methods for making queen cell cups from wooden dowel rods dipped in melted wax. Years ago I was fortunate and obtained a custom-made set of aluminum plates, weighing 15 pounds, that makes 114 queen cell cups at one time. After spraying the plates with a vegetable oil, as a releasing agent, the plates are put together, and melted wax is poured into the little holes (see Figure 1). When cooled, I pry the plates apart, and pop out the queen cell cups with the eraser end of a pencil (see Figure 2). Even after discarding a few culls, each run nets over 100 cups. After a couple of weeks, the vegetable oil evaporates. These queen cell cups have an extra thick base that facilitates handling them as queen cells, a feature I prefer in general even if working with other styles of queen cell cups.
My queen cell bars are extra wide (1 ½ inches) to hold a double row of cells instead of the usual single row of cells. Before the bees seal the newly made queen cell bar in wax and propolis, I mark grid lines on them to guide the placement of the queen cell cups. After warming the thick wax base of the queen cell cup on something hot, even a metal surface in sunlight, I press the cup on the bar and give it a one-quarter turn, and it is quickly attached (see Figure 3). This attachment is strong enough to hold the queen cell, but not too strong. When the queen cells are mature, they must be gently cut from the bar.

For grafting, admittedly the tedious part of queen rearing, here is my set up. (There are queen-rearing kits designed to avoid grafting.) The three main queen-cell production parts are within a few steps of each other: breeder queen colonies (the source of the larvae), the building where I graft, and the colonies receiving the queen-cell cups with the new grafts, which construct the queen cells. I'll call these colonies the cell-building colonies. (They start and finish the queen cells.) In the breeder-queen colony, I restrict the queen to one new empty comb, which had no previous brood rearing. Overnight she lays eggs in the comb. After three days the eggs hatch, and I graft one-day-old larvae, which are about the size of an egg (see Figure 4). These larvae are difficult to see down in the cells. I can sympathize with beekeepers' frustrations with grafting. My attitude is that the wee critters are going to come out of the cells. And that's all there is to it. Here is my procedure.

First, I remove the breeder queen from the comb, then gently brush the bees off the comb. Do not shake the comb (the same goes for a frame), which might disturb the larvae on their tiny pools of worker jelly. I cut out a piece of comb containing the larvae and wrap it in a damp cloth to keep the larvae from drying out. My top-bar queen-rearing equipment could easily handle producing hundreds of queen cells per week; currently I just graft small batches of cells, around 20 - 30. A small piece of comb, square about five inches on a side, has plenty of larvae.

The grafting room is my bee house where I keep 30 top-bar observation hives. In hot weather both ends of the building have drop-down screen doors for ventilation so the observation hives do not get too hot. For a graft, I close up the building (for a half hour or so), sprinkle water on the floor, and turn on the fans to increase the humidity inside. Just before I graft, I turn off the fans so the air is still and moist. The elevated humidity helps keep the tiny larvae from drying out in the queen cell cups. I graft the larvae "dry," that is, I do not prime the queen cell cups with royal jelly. A dry graft is susceptible to drying out, but I put each queen cell bar in the cell-building hive as it is finished. The hives are only a few steps away, and as described below, a queen cell bar can be put in a hive in a mere matter of seconds.

Here is the grafting lay out: a tilted working surface, the bars with the queen cell cups, an adjustable light, a small but very sharp knife, and a grafting tool (see Figure 5). Grafting on a tilted surface is more comfortable, and the angle, a little different for everyone, works with the light to better illuminate the larvae. About an hour before I graft, I put the bars with the queen cell cups in the cell-builder colonies to let the bees acclimate to them. Quite often, the bees will begin applying bits of wax to them even in that short time. Now having been retrieved, the cell bars are ready to receive the larvae.

For illumination, I use a circular fluorescent light. It does not emit much heat compared to an incandescent bulb. The larvae are tiny, and heat from a bulb can quickly bake them. With the sharp knife, I slice more than half of the cell walls off the new comb. Now the larvae are much easier to see. Without any previous brood rearing, the white wax is easy to slice with a sharp knife. I prefer a scalpel (with snap-on replaceable blades). The blade needs to slice through the cell walls and not just crush them. I have used dark brood comb too. The old cocoons fray upon cutting the cell walls, but the larvae are a little easier to see against the dark background. (Without cutting down the cell walls, which I used to do, it's best to graft from dark comb.)

For a grafting tool, beekeepers have different preferences. I have done it with various ones, homemade and manufactured. One of my favorites I made from a welding rod. The metal core is carefully filed down to pick up the tiny larva, and just as important, to safely set her down in the queen cell cup. If the entire larva is on the grafting tool, getting her off unharmed is virtually impossible. With this kind of tool, some part of the larva should hang off to help slide her onto the floor of the queen cell cup. The rod can be cut to a custom length, and its thick diameter has a comfortable feel in the hand. Simple grafting tools are available from bee supply companies. I have bought them over the years and can't help filing the ends to give a custom tip for my grafting. In my queen rearing toolbox, I have a set of small files and an ultra-fine emery board (for the final finish). These files are available from hobby shops. The grafting tool should approach the larvae from the outside of her "C" shape, away from the ends. With my small piece of comb, I can just rotate it if needed to get the next correct approach. In addition when grafting, the larva cannot be flipped over or bumped against the cell walls when transferred. The cell bar sits on the slanted surface. After I transfer a larva, I move a little piece of wax beside the next empty cup so I don't need to hunt for where I left off on the row of cups.

The grafting tool with a retracting tongue made of very thin metal (called the Master Grafting Tool in the Dadant catalog) does a good job and is a clever device (see Figure 6). First you depress the lever on top of the tool, which extends the tongue. The tongue slips right under the entire larva. To set her in the queen cell cup, slowly release the tension on the lever, retracting the tongue, sliding the larva off of it. As the larva comes off the tongue, I give it a little hook motion so she keeps her natural "C" position a bit better as she slides onto the floor of the cell cup. My advice is to rinse the tool right after finishing the graft. I just put a drop of clean water in a queen cell cup, hold the tongue in it, and repeatedly depress the lever a few times, extending the tongue.

If the tongue ever becomes stuck in the hollow shaft, presumably from dried worker jelly, depressing the lever can bend the back-end of the delicate tongue (near where a screw clamps down on it). The fix is easy. I take the tool apart (see Figure 7) and straighten out the back end of the tongue. Then, I insert the back end of the tongue into the shaft (just a few millimeters) to clear it. The grafting-end of the tongue has a precise but gentle curve to help pick up larvae. Do not change that bend, and make sure to put the tongue back in its original orientation when reassembling the tool. The tongue extension will also need a bit of adjustment so depressing the lever extends the right amount of length, but doing that is not difficult. As part of my set up procedure before a graft, I check to make sure the tongue moves properly.

Right after grafting a bar of queen cell cups, I wrap it in a damp cloth and take it to a cell-building colony only a few steps away. This colony has been prepared to provide an optimum environment for rearing queen cells. It is queenless with about three pounds of young bees shook directly from the brood nest of one or more colonies from the out-apiaries. The bees need to be young since they are predominantly the nurse bees that can readily convert pollen (protein) and honey or syrup (sugar) into royal jelly to provision the queen cells. In the cell-building hive is a special frame for holding the bars of queen cell cups. Ironically, these are the only "frames" in my entire top-bar operation.

On one side of the special queen-cell frame is a comb of mostly pollen (and the rest honey). On the other side is a comb of pollen and honey with a little patch of brood to draw the nurse bees to the queen cell cups. Sometimes I put in additional combs of honey and pollen. One comb next to the feeder, which is in the rear of the hive, is just empty. That comb gives the bees a place to store sugar syrup from the feeder. After remaining queenless and feeding on the syrup for 24 hours, the bees are ready to accept the grafted queen cell cups. When I come to a cell-building hive with my bar of newly grafted queen cell cups, I want the bar of cups to go inside quickly.

Here is where the top-bar hive design is so beautifully adapted to these and other frequent queen cell bar manipulations. My cell-building hives are under a shed roof adjoining the bee house so they do not need metal covers, eliminating that bit of handling. Unlike frame hives where the bees can go between the (more narrow) top bars, a top-bar hive has wider top bars, which touch along their entire lengths, forming a kind of solid roof. (The top bars space the combs.) The queen-cell frame is one of these top bars (which is even wider), and it has a handle on top of it (see Figure 8). To quickly install a bar of newly grafted queen cell cups, this hive is perfect. Using the handle, I merely pick up the queen-cell frame, just a few inches, slip in the cell bar from the side, and let the frame down - in seconds it's done (see Figure 9). Even when checking the queen cells, little or no smoke is needed and the nurse bees are hardly disturbed. Figure 10 shows a frame I built in 2000 with some queen cells from this past summer. This frame holds a maximum of 60 queen cells in three bars of 20 cells (as a double row of 10 cells.) My older style of queen-rearing frame, built around 1990, holds a maximum of 74 queen cells in double row cell bars. I usually just use the middle two cell bars of that one (see Figure 11).

Next time we will continue with the queen rearing (sorry about splitting up the article, but I could write a whole book on queen rearing). And I'll show how I use my easy-to-open observation hives like mating nucs. I can check to see whether my new queens have mated anytime, day or night, rain or shine.

Acknowledgments
The author thanks Suzanne Sumner for her comments on the manuscript and Bill Sheppard, the beekeeping sage of North Carolina, who helped me get started with grafting queens.

Honey Bee Biology  - September 2010

Bees, Cherries, Night Foxes  . . . and Bees Again

by Dr. Wyatt A. Mangum
Mathematics Department, University of Mary Washington, 1301 College AvenueFredericksburg, Virginia 22401-5358e-mail:  wmangum@umw.edu

Excerpt

Honey Bee Biology  - August 2010

by Dr. Wyatt A. Mangum
Mathematics Department, University of Mary Washington, 1301 College AvenueFredericksburg, Virginia 22401-5358e-mail:  wmangum@umw.edu

Excerpt

As part of my routine seasonal bee management, I put out bait hives. A bait hive is an unoccupied hive that is made attractive to swarms when their scout bees are out searching for nest sites. This past spring, I put out 27 bait hives and caught 14 swarms (52% occupancy).
    The two main goals for the bait hives are first to catch swarms from my apiaries. I also, whenever possible, try to locate them in places with bee activity, but without nearby managed hives, that is, no beekeepers. These are most likely feral colonies that might be genetic stock surviving on their own with varroa mites. When these colonies swarm, I want to catch them. If it is a prime swarm, which has the mother queen, she carries the genetic attributes of the colony.
    When the colony is reestablished, its varroa population can be monitored. This strategy for bait hive use can take months of advance planning to find these locations. While these survivor colonies can be quite valuable, for example to help maintain genetic diversity in a varroa-controlling stock line with unrelated queens, in other situations a swarm caught in a bait hive may not be wanted.
    If a beekeeper lives in an area with Africanized Honey Bees or locations near their invasion front, or in the vicinity of ports where these bees could enter on ships, then getting swarms from bait hives may not be appropriate (because of the defensive behavior of these bees). When an errant swarm enters a bait hive, unless the queen was marked, its genetic origin is unknown, even though it could have been from another beekeeper’s hive with a gentle stock. If in doubt as to your location, contact your state bee inspector, extension personnel, or county agent to determine whether using bait hives is appropriate. What follows is my bait hive method, which other beekeepers can customize to their operations.

Honey Bee Biology  - July 2010

by Dr. Wyatt A. Mangum
Mathematics Department, University of Mary Washington, 1301 College AvenueFredericksburg, Virginia 22401-5358e-mail:  wmangum@umw.edu

Excerpt

Remembering the 99 Bee Periodicals that Perished
and the Miracle of the American Bee Journal

The American Bee Journal has reached its 150th anniversary, a pub lication milestone, a miracle that started in 1861. One way to better appreciate this feat is to see it in the big historical picture of all the bee-related journals begun in the United States. This perspective, rarely explored, is quite revealing.

 Many of these periodicals began in response to the initial formation of the beekeeping industry in the late 1800's and into the early part of the 1900's. Periodicals were a way for beginners to learn some basic beekeeping, and for all, even those with much experience, to keep up with current events, and disseminate new ideas. These were times when fundamental aspects of apiculture were being worked out, mostly without scientific methods that would bring more efficient techniques later. For example, various devices were offered for sale, often with poor testing beforehand. Do swarm-catchers that fit over the hive entrance really work? If they did, I dare say today they would grace hive entrances from coast to coast. And the limits of how much one could manipulate the bees were also encountered. Can queen bees be mated in a screen cage, that is, can queens be mated in captivity? Some beekeepers mistakenly claimed they could.

 Monthly beekeeping journals tended to tie these collective discussions together. For progressive beekeepers living isolated on rural farms, where long-distance travel to meetings was terribly limited, when addresses were only a name, town, county, and state, a bee journal's arrival must have been an intellectual breath of fresh air. A beekeeper-writer could see his or her ideas, either on management techniques or a newly devised piece of equipment, published before a community of readers. To some extent the periodicals were their version of the Internet for a loyal following of readers.

 Nevertheless, the birth of a beekeeping periodical did not ensure its survival - oh far from it. A. I. Root started what we know today as Bee Culture. He wrote about the early days of publishing his brainchild, originally known as Novice's Gleanings in Bee Culture, giving us a rare first-hand account of some of the initial logistical difficulties in starting a bee journal. (Novice was Root's pen name. The "Novice" part was dropped after the journal's first year in 1873. The name took its current form in 1993.) The first year was printed at the local newspaper in Medina, Ohio. For the second year, Root had his own foot-powered printing press. To ease the workload he hooked it up to his windmill, another of his fascinations besides bees. Root was quite pleased to see his two hobbies working together. The wind proved quite variable though and occasionally the copy came out crooked on the page. Root asked forgiveness from his readers, and they seemed to take it in good stride. Before the third year ended, he had a steam engine to supplement the foot power1. In my master collection, the year 1874 does have a few pages with crooked copy, now seen as heroic testament to Root's will to get out those early issues.

 The first few years of a bee journal's life with the workload falling on one dedicated person, or perhaps just a few people, would be a fragile time to maintain publication deadlines. A low starting circulation, too few advertisements and mounting expenses could doom a fledgling bee paper to a quick demise. While the American Bee Journal and Bee Culture are well known by today's beekeepers, far less appreciated is an obscure historical fact with important ramifications.

 A total of 99 other periodicals related to bees were started in the United States (and ten in Canada). A nine-page list of them, including short descriptions, appears in an unlikely place, the Report of the State Apiarist of Iowa for 1930, now a remote dusty corner of the beekeeping literature. Most of these publications led brief lives. They surely indicate long life for a bee journal was quite unusual. Overall, a survival rate of less than 2%. A mere two ticks from certain death. On the other hand, so many start-ups suggest a fledgling industry grappling with how to meet its demand for beekeeping information.

 Consider the heart wrenching yet quietly heroic story behind The Beekeepers Review launched in 1888 by W. Z. Hutchinson, a well-known comb-honey producer from Flint, Michigan. The Review was well received with informative articles. From the fifty or so issues I have managed to collect (far from a complete set), Hutchinson's long-standing style was to inform the readers of publication difficulties. So when his health weakened and finances tightened, requiring him to give up the rented space in town, and while watching a sick child and publishing the Review essentially from the living room of his home, the readers knew it was a true family effort. Hutchinson also had a terrible burden of family hardships to endure, threatening to unravel the Review, his main source of income.

 Apparently, it was fairly well known in beekeeping circles that Mrs. Hutchinson was not well. An editorial in the American Beekeeper, a periodical published in Jamestown, New York, reported in September 1897, "As has been generally known Mrs. Hutchinson has, for some time been in ill health, both mentally and physically ...." While that was common knowledge, what was coming sure shocked them and me too. As an apicultural historian, I have known and read about Hutchinson since I was a teenager. He wrote Advanced Bee Culture, a well-known book among bee-book collectors. Only a few months ago did I find the article telling the tragedy, written bravely and eloquently by Hutchinson himself, possibly to prepare his readers in case upcoming issues were late.

Honey Bee Biology  - June 2010

by Dr. Wyatt A. Mangum
Mathematics Department, University of Mary Washington, 1301 College AvenueFredericksburg, Virginia 22401-5358e-mail:  wmangum@umw.edu

Full Version

Fourth Annual Report on the Coexistence
of my North Carolina Bees with Varroa

In this article, I report on some of my varroa research for the summer of 2009. This research was supported by a grant from the California State Beekeepers' Association and with funding assistance from the Virginia State Beekeepers Association. As a lead up to that research, here is some background information.

By the 2008 field season, my North Carolina bees had survived untreated for varroa for six years. The data from that season suggested their varroa populations were indeed remarkably small. Using my digital camera technique to record their sealed brood and adult bee populations, along with the appropriate sampling, the average varroa population estimates were 628 in June and 398 in August. For all but one colony the brood infestation rates were well below ten percent1.

These low numbers and other observations suggested the varroa populations remained small. The bees, as the host, may have struck a balance with their varroa, as the parasite, a situation referred to as a host-parasite equilibrium. It is important to know how this host-parasite equilibrium maintains itself, a compelling point since it did not occur from the introduction of a resistant queen stock. Rather it occurred once the more susceptible colonies perished after I stopped applying miticides (although I was taking a sizable chance of losing all my North Carolina colonies).

Ironically while encouraging, these low varroa populations posed a problem for my 2009 field studies. I wanted to know if Varroa Sensitive Hygiene (VSH), a genetic trait, had been selected for, to the extent that it could be playing a role in protecting my colonies. With VSH, bees detect varroa within the sealed brood cells. The bees uncap the cells and remove the infested pupae2. Removing the pupae disrupts the mite's reproduction cycle. (A worker brood cell is capped for about 12 days. Initially the mature larva spins a very thin cocoon. Then, the larva stretches out lengthwise in the cell becoming a propupa, "pro" meaning "before" the pupa. The entire time period, which includes spinning the cocoon, propupa, and pupa duration, is collectively known as the post-capping time, "post" referring to after the brood cap. When removing infested sealed brood, VSH bees tend not remove spinning larvae or propupae, but rather show a preference for removing young pupae 3-5 days post capping2.)

If my North Carolina bees had the VSH trait at high enough frequencies, then they could be removing enough of the infested brood to reduce the overall reproduction rate of the mites. The reduced reproduction rate could then allow the bees and varroa to coexist. The problem was that the brood infestation rates, as indicated from the 2008 data, were already quite low. Therefore, I needed a method to increase the brood infestation, at least initially, and then see if the bees could decrease it. For that I devised the following procedure.

I caged the queens in six colonies. These colonies would donate one brood comb each with elevated infestation levels to six colonies to be tested for VSH. The queens in the donor colonies remained caged until all their remaining brood had emerged. The varroa in their colonies would reside only on the adult bees (as phoretic mites) since no brood was available for their reproduction. Next, each queen was released on one comb of worker cells. With my top-bar hives, I enclosed this comb between two plastic queen excluders cut to the trapezoidal cross section of the hive. The overall set up is shown in Figure 1.

Unlike the ease of placing a queen excluder on a standard hive, installing one in a top-bar hive takes more patience. I use the heavy grade plastic excluder and put wood strips along the edges to block the cut open meshes where a queen could get through. It has just become easier to attach these wood strips to the sides and bottom of the excluder with discarded telephone wire, letting the strips snug up to the sides and floor of the hive. A wood stick, just a top-bar cut short and turned edge-wise, is grooved to accept the upper edge of the excluder. This arrangement helps support the excluder from above as shown in Figure 2. (As a side note to reduce my emails, I also use these top-bar queen excluders in honey production hives. For "all-natural" top-bar beekeeping, a philosophy without plastics in the hive, a position I respect, I would offer an idea from our apicultural past. In my historical hive collection are a few hand-made queen excluders with "bars" made from hardwood strips, probably oak. I do not know how well they worked, but with precision woodworking, the same idea could be applied to top-bar hives for keeping queens out of the rear of the hive where the bees store surplus honey.)

Ideally, a queen would finish laying eggs in this single worker comb in about 24 hours, producing brood of nearly the same age (called a brood cohort). In this situation, however, since the queens were caged, which of course interrupts their egg-laying, they were not initially at full egg production. Nor was the season conducive for maximum egg laying, a hot summer with a weak nectar flow. Five of the queens began laying slowly. (One had to be removed from the experiment.) After three days, the queens produced patches of eggs large enough for data collection, although I left them on the combs for two more days, making sure plenty of brood would be present. With the required amount of brood, I removed each comb from between the queen excluders and placed it near the entrance end of its hive, where the bees typically form the brood nest. At brood-capping time, this comb position would give the maturing larvae maximal exposure to varroa-infested bees. The queens were recaged and placed near their brood combs, insuring that each colony had only one comb of brood.

A colony's varroa population, though low in number and now phoretic, must concentrate themselves on this one brood comb for reproduction. The percent of infested brood should be much higher compared to a normally larger brood nest where reproductive mites are more spread out among the cells (which greatly lowers the percent infestation).

Just after the brood was capped, while the larvae were still spinning their cocoons, I collected the five top-bar combs. For each one, half of it was cut away to record the initial brood infestations. The remaining combs were each placed in five test colonies and removed just before the brood emerged. From these combs, exposed to the test colonies for VSH activity, a final brood infestation was determined. Comparing the initial and final infestation should give an indication of any VSH activity. If considerable VSH activity is present, then the final brood infestation should be substantially lower than the initial infestation, and this effect should be consistent among the test colonies. For example, one colony had an initial brood infestation of 50.3%. The final infestation had dropped to 37.7%, a reduction of 12.6%. Overall the brood infestation decreased in all five colonies with an average reduction of 13.9%. This result does not mean that this bee stock can decrease the brood infestation by 13.9% all the time (for every brood cycle). Rather I would take a more conservative position. It shows that the colonies can consistently decrease the infestation level (a qualitative answer that the study was designed to give).

Interestingly, the elevated brood infestation levels (up to 61%) generated by the study were more like what I saw in the early 1990's, far from the low levels I see today. Also in the study, many cells had more than one invading (mother) mite (found either in initial or final brood samples). Two and three mites in a cell were common; a few had up to eight mites. One cell held the dubious record, far surpassing the rest: 13 mother mites crammed in it (from an initial brood sample). What a long time it has been since I have seen that. A flashback to the tumultuous "old" varroa days, a terrible time when strong colonies died suddenly in the summer. I remember their brood nests seething with thousands of mites. Robber bees plundering unprotected honey, free food for the taking. Or so it seemed. They brought home hitchhiking mites, the seeds to destroy their colonies. More deaths in a long chain of casualties. Not only were colony losses immense, but many people quit beekeeping too. More victims of varroa. Lately things have definitely been looking up, even with setbacks along the way.

While the 2009 field results suggest that these bees are disrupting varroa reproduction by VSH, other factors could be involved to maintain the host-parasite equilibrium. For example, the varroa mites (themselves) may also have lowered their reproduction rates or increased their phoretic (nonreproductive) period, becoming in essence less virulent, helping colonies to survive. These other factors need to be understood to see if and how they contribute to maintaining the equilibrium between these bees and varroa.

Acknowledgments
The author thanks Suzanne Sumner for her comments on the manuscript, and the California State Beekeepers' Association and the Virginia State Beekeepers Association for funding support.

Literature Cited
1Mangum, W. A. (2009). The third annual report on the coexistence of my North Carolina bees with varroa. American Bee Journal. 149: 63-65.
2Harris, J. W. (2007). Bees with varroa sensitive hygiene preferentially remove mite infested pupae aged ≤ five days post capping. Journal of Apicultural Research. 46: 134-139.

Honey Bee Biology  - May 2010

by Dr. Wyatt A. Mangum
Mathematics Department, University of Mary Washington, 1301 College AvenueFredericksburg, Virginia 22401-5358e-mail:  wmangum@umw.edu

Full Version

Apicultural History, Top-Bar Hives, and Comb Building Behavior Make an Interesting Mix

In the previous article, we examined a brief history of the modifications to the Langstroth frame. For efficient colony inspection, self-spacing frames are essential.  We saw an original Hoffman frame, a real rarity, that led to the simplified self-spacing frame of today. Having combs built straight in the frames is also a necessity. Before foundation was widely available, we learned last time that beekeepers of the late 1800's provided bees with a comb starting edge to work from either as a wood strip or a "V" under the top bar.  Building upon the previous article, this one combines apicultural history and bee behavior during comb construction that I have observed from keeping bees in 200 top-bar hives for well over 20 years. Hopefully this interdisciplinary approach will be illuminating. 
 Once I met a commercial beekeeper in Virginia who made comb honey by the ton from several hundred hives. He had the most unusual brood frame. Immediately upon seeing them, I knew their origins - Van Deusen Reversible Frames. The beehive version of taking a giant leap back in time a century or more. These frames have little cast iron corners with protruding "ears," as they were called, that spaced the frames (see Figure 1). These are also free-standing frames. The lower ears of the frames rest on two thin strips of tin nailed under the bottom ends of the brood chamber.  The brood chamber requires no frame rest (rabbet), which of course simplifies its construction or frames can be used in a standard brood chamber (with the tin strips). 
 Ponder this immortal and elegant aspect of the Van Deusen frame: the wooden part of the frame, like any other in a beekeeping operation, weakens over time from general wear and gnawing wax moth larvae.  Eventually the frame becomes too rickety and is discarded.  The wood part - not the ears. Cast iron ears had not been made since probably some time in the 1890's. So the precious ears, saved like a treasure, were nailed into the next batch of frames (see Figure 2). Over the decades, they passed through at least three beekeeping families, originating in New York, as the hives in this operation were bought and sold.  No telling though how many bee generations scurried over those ears. Digging deeper revealed some curious history about the Van Deusen frame and little-known behaviors about bees building comb.
 Since the frame is not suspended, but rather stands, and with all corners the same, the frame is symmetric. A beekeeper can remove a Van Deusen frame, turn it upside-down and put it back into the hive. Try that with a modern frame.  But why would you?  That is, why would a beekeeper want to replace brood frames upside-down?  Granted it's hard to conjure up one reason for such a strange maneuver. Would you believe beekeepers from more than a century ago had two good reasons for this? Originally, the Van Deusen frame was designed for producing comb honey. A problem with comb honey production was having too many unfinished sections. To help the bees finish them, the accepted old practice was to "reverse" the frames (particularly I think towards the end of the nectar flow). The band of honey, normally at the top of the brood comb, would be switched to the bottom.  Bees will not maintain that arrangement (unless the colony has no empty comb above, that is, conditions are excessively crowded). The bees will move the honey upwards, and into the comb honey sections and hopefully finish filling them. (These sections were directly above the brood nest in a single super.)
 The other reason for reversing frames probably resulted from not using complete sheets of foundation. Even if the bees built the comb straight in the frame, upon finishing it, the bees rarely attached the comb to the bottom bar. Instead, they left a gap between the lower edge of the comb and the bottom bar, a gap of about three-eighths of an inch wide1. This bottom gap made the combs weaker. Most likely it led to more breakage during colony inspections or when moving hives over rough dirt roads with horse and wagon. (This chronic bottom gap problem is not observed when foundation extends through the bottom bar, another reason for using complete sheets, though that reason is seldom acknowledged. I did see commercial bee operations in India with truckloads of hives moved over rough roads.  The broken combs mostly had the bottom gaps. The starting foundation had not extended all the way to the bottom bar.  From horse and wagon to the truck, history repeats itself.)
 The gap between finished comb and the bottom bar becomes essentially a bee space.  In my top-bar hives (Figure 3), the bees do the same thing. They build comb from just foundation strips (see below), my version of a comb starter, a situation very similar to that in the hives of the late 1800's. Upon completing the combs, the bees rarely, if ever, attach them to the hive floor. Rather they just leave a bee space under them, which is their passageway (Figure 4).  Therefore, back in the historical hives, the bees were most likely treating the bottom bars like the floor of the hive. (Also for this time period, 1880's and into the 1890's, beekeepers did not use double brood chamber hives, particularly for comb honey production.  So for the brood frames, all their bottom bars are next to the hive floor.)
 To strengthen the comb, the beekeeper from a century ago needed a way to make the bees fill in this troublesome gap. The trick was to move the gap to the top of comb - by reversing the frame. While it might seem unlikely, it's claimed the bees would fill in the gap when it's above the comb.  When I first read about this technique, I figured it would work. Here's why. First assume there is no super, then the reversed frame would have the gap near the very top of the hive. Now this situation is similar to an experience with my top-bar hives. 
 A very windy spring caught a few of my hives light on stores and flipped them over.  The hives, located a three-hour drive away, remained upside-down for several weeks.  To put it in our historical context, the wind "reversed" all the combs. The gaps the bees left at the bottom of the combs and floor had become gaps between the top of the combs and ceiling. I learned the hard way that bees would not tolerate long thin gaps up there.  They may leave a few holes for walkways, but mostly the little welders fill in the gap, making hive and combs all one. I had to cut out the combs to fix them, a long miserable job. Likewise it seems reversing a Van Deusen frame would have fixed their bottom gap problem.
 The comb-starting techniques we examined in the previous article do not lie dead in the past, forgotten on the yellowing pages of old bee journals. Rather they have returned to the present, reincarnated in another hive, the top-bar hive. One technique I have heard of is to cut a center groove down the middle of the top bar. Then, for the wood strip (a comb starting edge), a beekeeper fills the groove with popsicle sticks (inserting them parallel to the bar). This avoids having to rip numerous thin strips on a table saw. This modern method is essentially the same as having the frame with the wood strip (comb guide) under the top bar. In addition, somewhere I saw a booklet or article on top-bar hives where the underside of the top bar was cut as a "V," complicating the simplicity of the hive. This method uses the old frame idea with the V-shaped top bar.
 A typical top-bar hive question I get is how to make the bees build straight combs from the bars. The wood strip is not always satisfactory (which probably goes for the "V" strips too). Furthermore, my suspicion from "reading between the lines" of the old bee literature was that beekeepers of the past were not generally satisfied with these designs either. Here is one way comb construction can deviate from the comb guides. As mentioned in the previous article, bees elongate honey cells. When bees build a set of combs, they sometimes bulge the honey cells, particularly toward the upper corners, on one comb before they lengthen the adjacent comb. When the bees extend that next comb, it must curve to avoid the bulging ends of the preceding comb (see Figure 5).  As this problem repeats, the set of combs begins to curve. If the curvature is severe, combs become attached to multiple top bars.
 What will deter excessive comb bulging (and just a general curvature of the comb) is an adjacent sheet of foundation. When foundation first became readily available, it could be expensive for beekeepers. Not surprisingly, they sometimes cut foundation sheets into strips, and attached them to the top bars with melted wax, using the strips more like comb starter. That works unless the strips are too narrow. To keep my top-bar combs straight, I mimic the top of a full sheet of foundation by providing a wide foundation strip (about an inch an a half).  Figure 6 shows my setup for attaching the foundation strips with molten wax to a big batch of top bars.
 Standard equipment has made the beekeeping industry more efficient and profitable. Nonstandard operations, now so exotic, are reminders of past historical diversity. Some of those old designs had their illuminating points, perhaps in unexpected ways that are even relevant to research today. One should keep in mind that in subtle ways the hive design itself limits the manipulations on the bees (say with suspended frames) and may narrow our observations on them (as with complete foundation sheets) and cause us to miss some of their interesting behaviors.

Acknowledgments
The author thanks Suzanne Sumner for her comments on the manuscript.

Literature Cited

1Alley, H. (1885). The bee-keepers handy book: Or twenty-two years' experience in queen rearing. Published by the Author. Wenham, Massachusetts.

Honey Bee Biology  - April 2010

by Dr. Wyatt A. Mangum
Mathematics Department, University of Mary Washington, 1301 College AvenueFredericksburg, Virginia 22401-5358e-mail:  wmangum@umw.edu

Excerpt

Innovations That Led the Langstroth Frame to Its Full Potential

   Profound innovations often need refinements and modifications to become truly useful. That's what happened to the movable frame, a momentous revolution in apiculture.

In October of 1851, the Rev. L. L.  Langstroth struck upon the fundamental idea. Enclose a comb in a wooden frame leaving a three-eighths inch gap between it and the sides, floor and top of the hive. The bees would leave this passageway open, neither filling it with propolis for being too narrow nor comb for being too wide. The bee space, as it came to be known, allowed inspection of individual combs, forever divorcing beekeepers from the drudgery of cutting combs from the hive. Centuries of that collective misery were banished from most parts of the beekeeping world by his careful observation, insight, and practical problem solving.
 Langstroth secured a patent by the following October of a hive with movable frames (patent number 9,300). Even though the bee space idea was an exceedingly simple idea, compared to the typical beehive patent, Langstroth's was about twice as long. There were other components besides the movable frame included in his patent: double glass hive walls, a device to trap wax moths, and honey receptacles (see Figure 1). In 1853, the first edition of Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee, a Beekeeper's Manual was published. In this now rare edition, Langstroth described the bee management benefits of his hive with movable frames. He also offered to sell individual or farm rights for others to build his hive. Or assembled hives could be ordered from him directly.
 Unfortunately, the movable frame hive did not bring Langstroth the financial reward it should have. Others violated the patent by making their own frames. In addition, the Langstroth frame needed modifications. As originally conceived, the Langstroth frame was not self-spacing. The beekeeper had to manually space out the frames. No doubt, a time consuming task.

Honey Bee Biology  - March 2010

by Dr. Wyatt A. Mangum
Mathematics Department, University of Mary Washington, 1301 College AvenueFredericksburg, Virginia 22401-5358e-mail:  wmangum@umw.edu

Excerpt

Using Old Bee Supply Catalogs to Reconstruct the

Histories of Beekeeping Equipment

In my studies of beekeeping history in the United States, I have been collecting and preserving old beekeeping equipment since the 1970's. Driving around the country, thousands of miles, whatever it takes, to get old rare hives, extractors and numerous other things beekeepers of the past used. If the equipment was manufactured in a big factory or a small shop, then somewhere there was literature on it in an advertisement, sales catalog, booklet, or perhaps some obscure pamphlet. Then, my job is to reconstruct the history of the equipment, which admittedly may take years.

Looking back into the late 1800's and past the turn of that century, numerous bee supply companies dotted the populated areas of our country. Bee suppliers promoted their particular hive styles, while others acted as hive distributors. Some of the hive designs were quite exotic; other designs were simple and more practical. Besides hives, other implements used by beekeepers also have lost histories: bee smokers and all kinds of unusual equipment for producing comb honey sections (in the wooden boxes). I have even tracked down the histories of queen cages from the 1880's.

Most of these pieces are quite rare. When found, they should be preserved and their history reconstructed. If the piece was manufactured, quite often the maker is unknown, unless the item was marked. To figure out who made it and when, one must resort to the old beekeeping literature - usually books and journals. Other fruitful identification sources are supply catalogs, part of the subject of this article. Included in my collecting has been building a reference collection of them, some several hundreds dating back to the 1870's.
 
Consider a hive purchased from an elderly commercial beekeeper in New York years ago (see Figure 1). He had retired and none of his family was interested in beekeeping. Nevertheless, he wanted to find a home for the clever old hive design lest it get thrown out someday. From the outside the hive looks fairly typical. The difference is on the inside. The frames are suspended from pins near the upper corners. The manner to space the frames is also different. The end-bars are straight and wide all the way down, instead of being wide just near the top as with a standard frame (see Figure 2).

Honey Bee Biology  - February 2010

by Dr. Wyatt A. Mangum
Mathematics Department, University of Mary Washington, 1301 College AvenueFredericksburg, Virginia 22401-5358e-mail:  wmangum@umw.edu

Excerpt

The Bingham Bee Smoker: Marketing Lessons from the Master

In the previous article, we learned how Tracy F. Bingham improved Quinby's original invention, the bee smoker, increasing its practical value to beekeepers. Bingham's contributions were leaving a gap between the bellows and firebox to keep it lit, a wire handle for refueling a hot smoker, and a smoke deflector to keep sparks from falling on the bees. These improvements helped make the smoker a more reliable beekeeping tool. And demand for bee smokers increased. But with demand came competition. Other manufacturers popped up, advertising their smokers in the bee journals, finding distributors, and cutting into the market. Bingham had to compete with them. Or get pushed out.
 One competitive advantage was to offer smokers in different sizes, letting beekeepers choose the one best suiting their needs. At first Bingham gave his smokers rather dull, drab, amorphous names like "extra large" and "plain." Later the names changed. The new names were a stroke of marketing flair. They showed an empathic understanding of what a stung-up beekeeper endured with defensive bees and little means to control them.
 In 1885, a Bingham advertisement caught the reader's eye with a smoker named "THE CONQUEROR," emblazoned across the page, boldly in banner headline style, as if some glorious battle had ended in a victory - this time for the beekeeper. Another Bingham smoker carried a less audacious name, the "Doctor." Nevertheless, it suggested a certain amount of corrective medicine for irritable bees.
 The Conqueror and Doctor were fairly large smokers with barrel diameters (the fireboxes) of three inches, and three and a half inches, respectively. Later on an even larger smoker size was offered with, by their old standards, a whopping four-inch diameter barrel. It was aptly named the "Smoke Engine." For beekeepers of the 1800's, that name probably conjured up images of a giant rugged railroad steam engine belching out huge columns of dark smoke into the sky, a mighty source of strength, power, and awe. What a perfect image for a bee smoker.
 At the opposite end of the size spectrum, a small petite smoker, with only a one-and-three-quarter inch diameter barrel, carried the do-not-underestimate-me name of "Little Wonder." In later years, its size slowly increased with diameters of up to two and a half inches. Although lower in price, smaller smokers were generally harder to keep lit, which most likely accounted for the size increase. Small smokers could have appealed to beekeepers with a few hives who perhaps only needed smoke for short periods of time. On the other hand, large smokers, smoldering all day, would be favored by beekeepers with many colonies. So to some degree, each smoker size probably found its own niche market among a range of beekeepers maintaining different size operations. Still, each smoker size had to compete with the other sizes or face the possibility of being discontinued. Figure 1 dramatizes the competition aspect with the dwarf-like Little Wonder squared off against a giant Smoke Engine, a kind of David and Goliath scene from a long forgotten bee-smoker world. 

Honey Bee Biology  - January 2010

The Bingham Bee Smoker:
Innovations Were Key to Success

by Dr. Wyatt A. Mangum
Mathematics Department, University of Mary Washington, 1301 College AvenueFredericksburg, Virginia 22401-5358e-mail:  wmangum@umw.edu

Today kids grow up never knowing a world without the Internet, digital cameras, cell phones, and that most momentous decision of all - what ring tone to choose. Well, I submit a bit of historical perspective is in order. What about today's beekeeper? For well over a century, we have "grown up" in a beekeeping world never knowing it without our trusty protector - the bee smoker.

Once, before the standard bee smoker became so iconic, smudge pots or other creative contraptions were supposed to waft smoke upon irritable bees. More often the beekeeper disappeared within an eye-blinding cloud of smoke, doubling the pain of opening the hive. Corncobs aplenty littered the old country farms of the 1800's. Many a beekeeper-farmer made use of their smoldering properties trying to subdue their bees - powered by human breath until dizzy. But away the world spun, they were helpless to run, and again the bees won.
 
These painful tribulations, now mostly forgotten, are scattered through the yellowing pages of the old beekeeping literature. In this article and the next, I will show what made them so obscure - the development of the modern bee smoker. I trace out one historical bee smoker lineage, starting in the late 1800's. That path will eventually lead to the modern smoker for sale today in the catalog of the Dadant and Sons Company. It's a kind of bee smoker genealogy, except we start from the beginning and go forward.

The pivotal year in the development of the bee smoker occurred in 1873, when Moses Quinby of St. Johnsville, New York produced a bellows smoker1. His smoker began to resemble the modern form, though the funnel pointed straight up (see Figure 1). His lightweight smoker could be operated with one hand, the funnel directing smoke right to where it was needed. Yet particularly among Quinby's earliest smokers, the fire went out prematurely. Quinby may have corrected this flaw, but in 1875, he died suddenly. Nevertheless, he purposefully did not patent his crucial invention, and instead he gave it freely to the beekeeping community.
 
Other beekeeper-inventors made improvements on Quinby's breakthrough design. The lineage we will follow is from Tracy F. Bingham of Abronia, Michigan. We will see that he was not only a clever inventor, but a master at marketing smokers too. A patent issued to him in 1878 marked the beginning of a smoker allowing a passive airflow to maintain the fire so it would not go out leaving the beekeeper unprotected. Interestingly, back then there was no patent classification for "bee smoker." Ironically Bingham's invention was classified as a "Device for Destroying Insects by Fumigation." Instead of a solid connecting pipe between the firebox and bellows, as in the original Quinby design, Bingham left a small, but critical, gap between them. This arrangement allowed air to draft upwards from the bottom of the firebox, through the fire, and flow out from the funnel when the bellows were not pumped. In the patent, Bingham explained,

It will be observed that an open space is left between the bellows and the opening of the stove [firebox]; the object of which is to allow the air to pass freely to both the stove and the bellows, and at the same time to enable the air to be forced into the stove to project the smoke in the direction desired.

With this patent description in mind, Figure 2 shows a comparison at the base of the smokers between an original Quinby smoker of the early 1870's and a Bingham smoker. This Quinby smoker was made by Quinby himself. It is not the style of Quinby smoker manufactured by Quinby's son-in-law L. C. Root after Quinby's death in 1875. The large prominent connecting pipe on the original Quinby smoker would definitely help inject air into the bellows. This solid connection would not, of course, allow a passive air draft to keep the fire lit when the smoker was not in use. In contrast, the Bingham design left a gap allowing a passive flow of air through the bellows.

On your modern smoker, that humble but decisive gap is still there - a silent testimony to Bingham's lasting innovation. It continues to make our beekeeping lives infinitely easier. In use for well over a century, who knows how many millions of stings we have been spared due to this simple and immensely effective idea.

But wait! The Bingham innovation story is still far from complete. Notice that with a hot smoker, having a simple cone-style funnel makes refueling it easy to burn one's fingers. So, in addition to stings, one can get nasty finger burns. Bingham wanted his smokers refueled without that danger. His 1892 patent announced the solution - a wire-handle. Although the smoker gets hot, the slender wire efficiently radiates heat and remains cool. The wire loops on the earlier funnels tended to be elaborate while the loops on the later funnels became simpler, apparently making them easier to mass-produce with less material (see Figure 3). Today it's hard to imagine how we could get along so easily without the coil wire handle on the top of our smoker, letting us refuel it quickly and burn-free.

Another of Bingham's smoker designs really baffled me for a few years, mainly because it did not stand the test of time. It started in earnest when I acquired a Bingham smoker in mint condition, still factory shiny inside, never touched by a fire's black soot. The smoker though was built in a weird way. The funnel fit on the inside of the cylindrical barrel forming the firebox (see Figure 4). Usually the funnel fits on the outside like the modern version. I thought perhaps this might be a defect, thus accounting for the lack of use. However, the cylindrical barrel was rolled with an inward projecting rim just below where the funnel fit into it. This internal rim stopped the funnel from going too deep where it could not be removed. So it seemed all this was done for some purpose, a reason buried in the past. Why?

The answer to my micro-mystery came in Bingham's 1903 patent, and is reminiscent of an annoying problem we still see today. With repeated use, soot and tar accumulate in a smoker. Black tar condenses in the funnel (because it's cooler) and runs downward. If the cap fits on the outside of the rim, the tar leaks out and runs down the outside of the smoker. These tar streaks are commonly seen on the outside of modern smokers. Bingham wanted a smoker without these tar streaks. Furthermore, he wanted to prevent the smoker from blowing bits of condensed tar and ash onto newly built white comb-honey sections, where its removal was exceedingly difficult. His solution: make the funnel fit on the inside of the rim, forcing the tar to run down the inside where it would be burned again. Hence advertisements sometimes called these smokers soot-burning or self-cleaning smokers.

This design was also supposed to keep the joint between the funnel and rim clear of tar deposits that harden when cooled. As those deposits accumulate, fitting the funnel to the outside rim becomes awkward when the smoker is closed. Again, my workhorse modern smoker would be a good example of this condition. Occasionally, I must scrape away those hard deposits so the smoker will close properly.

Along with this soot-burning feature, Bingham also claimed in the same patent a way of keeping the inside of the funnel so hot that burned materials would not condense within it. He lined the outside of the funnel with asbestos (which is a hazardous material), felt, or some other nonconductive material to insulate the heat. In addition this lining was to keep the funnel cool to the outside touch. However in all my years of collecting bee smokers, I have never seen any Bingham funnels lined in this manner. I wonder if this design was ever put into production, although I have been able to find soot-burning Bingham smokers in different sizes (see Figure 5).

The funnel on the original Bingham, like the Quinby before it, pointed straight up. To use either, the smoker must be inverted, pointing the funnel downward to direct the smoke on the bees. This position created an annoying problem. Burning embers could fall on the bees and get between the frames, a condition sometimes called "fire dropping" in the old bee literature. Bingham's simple solution was to deflect the smoke to the side with a small piece of metal attached around the opening of the funnel (see Figure 3 again). This improvement avoided having to redesign the shape of the funnel (like we see today). With the deflector, the smoker could be used upright, making it easier to handle. In later production, the smoke deflector was simplified to just a curved piece of metal, instead of the more elaborate folded piece used earlier.

Having innovative ideas is only part of surviving in the bee supply trade, beset with intense competition and copycats. To keep selling smokers through the years, one must be innovative at marketing too. Next time we will see how Bingham mastered the marketing game. As a mark of that success, the only thing that would drive him out of the bee smoker business was - old age.
Acknowledgments
The author thanks Suzanne Sumner for her comments on the manuscript.

Literature Cited
1Root, L. C. (1883). Quinby's new bee-keeping. The mysteries of beekeeping explained. Orange Judd Company. New York.

Honey Bee Biology - December 2009

Watching Winter Clusters

(excerpt)

by Dr. Wyatt A. Mangum
Mathematics Department; University of Mary Washington, 1301 College Avenue
Fredericksburg, Virginia 22401-5358
e-mail:  wmangum@umw.edu

A major event in the beekeeping season is the first spring inspection - and sadly counting up the colonies that did not survive the winter. What happens to them during the winter locked away from the beekeeper's watchful eye? I had wanted to study winter clusters in distress from pathogens and figured my bee house might be an acceptable place to begin.
 My bee house holds 30 single-comb observation hives. In the active season, these hives can be used for all sorts of experiments and observations. I have used them for studying queen introduction, comb construction, and swarming, just to name a few. I have even let some small colonies attempt to over winter in these single-comb hives. While our winters are generally mild in eastern Virginia, we do get bouts of near zero temperatures. Small clusters with already limited heat production and retention have difficulty surviving such cold. And there's another problem. The cluster is in contact with the glass panes. Glass is a poor insulator and drains their heat away. (Generally, those are the reasons why it's not worth over wintering observation hives. Even if the bees survive, for public showing, the hives would probably need to be disassembled and cleaned anyway, especially the glass. It would be easier and more attractive to start the hives over in the spring.)
 For another line of research, I want to observe large winter clusters under more realistic conditions. That would require a different observation hive design. Readers following my articles know that I keep my bees in top-bar hives not frame hives. Years ago I did build a multiple comb observation top-bar hive, which I could have used (see Figure 1). It was a terror to construct. The worst part - getting the angles of the sloping sides correct to be "close" to my other hives. And the glass! Each piece turned out to be a different size. I just took the hive to an "old time" hardware store, and a glasscutter custom fit each piece.
 The next multiple-comb observation hive needed a much simpler construction since I wanted to build ten of them. In addition, I wanted to open the hives quickly and with a minimum of vibration. That would be needed for removing fallen bees over time to check them for mites or various internal pathogens (viruses, Nosema, etc.). Figure 2 shows one of the two prototype hives I built and tested last winter. The hive holds up to 14 combs. Converting that comb area to a standard hive, it would be equivalent to a ten-frame deep super (brood chamber) and about half of a shallow super.
 To use this observation hive, the colony is installed in late summer. While the combs have a sloping shape from the top-bar hive, this observation hive has vertical glass walls. The bees may extend the combs somewhat towards the glass, but our marginal fall flow does not stimulate much comb construction. What little construction does occur results from fall feeding and is mainly from recycled brownish wax (not newly secreted white wax). The hive is not designed for a strong colony to stay in it all year because the combs could not be removed easily. Thus this hive design is specialized mostly for winter observations.
 

Acknowledgments
The author thanks Suzanne Sumner for her comments on the manuscript.

Literature Cited
1Seeley, T. D. (1985). Honey Bee Ecology. Princeton University Press. Princeton, New Jersey.

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Honey Bee Biology - November 2009

Trapping Bees: A Visual Demonstration From
Outside and Inside the Hive

(excerpt)

Long before varroa mites came to the United States, killing most of the feral bees, I used these bees to help build up my honey production operation while still in high school. I had about 125 hives (back then in frame hives), producing honey by the ton. For some of the bees, I trapped them out of houses - for free - just to get the bees! Hey, it was the 1970's. I was naïve and had a thermometer-popping case of bee fever. It was, nevertheless, exceptionally good practice to accumulate a wealth of bee removal experience. Each job called for a customized strategy, which like any battle plan, was subject to change at a moment's notice. One needed to be innovative, sometimes working quickly with limited materials right on the spot. Those were good beekeeping and life skills to develop when things did not go as planned.

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Honey Bee Biology - October 2009 

Catching Flying Queens Bare-Handed and a Teenaged-Girl:
How One Got a Second Chance From the Other

(excerpt)

Here's something not in a typical bee book - how to catch a flying queen out of the air - bare handed. It's a handy skill to have in that critical micro-second when your $20 queen has just escaped from her shipping cage. And there she goes flying off to oblivion.

When giving my queen introduction presentation, which is quite detailed, I include some advice on catching flying . They might get away when releasing the attendant bees from the shipping cage. This past April, I gave that talk at the meeting of the Virginia State Beekeepers Association. Many new members had recently joined and their President had wisely said it was time to present this important information again. When we got to removing the attendant bees, I explained a couple of "safe" options. Then, because I do not want my bee talks to be merely "play-it-again-reruns," I mentioned something I just seen for sale on the internet (not mind you, as any kind of product endorsement). It was a queen bee muff (Figure 1). As the name implies, it is shaped like a cylinder, made of screen with cloth-pleated ends. Though I have never used one (soon you will see why), here's my take on how to use it. Holding it like a hand muff with the cage inside, one can release the attendant bees. If the queen escapes the cage, she cannot fly away. With some patience and gentle handling, she can be caught and be returned to the cage.

Next came some real firepower. I believe people should know what is possible with handling bees, so I told the audience how I release attendant bees - standing right in the apiary (not in the bee truck) - the ultimate high-wire act with no net. Holding a standard three-hole shipping cage vertically with the candy end down, I pop the (upper) releasing cork. In the typical scenario, the safest plan is to keep the queen in the cage and let out the attendants. The procedure does work, but usually the last one or two workers are slow to come out. And if one needs to install a dozen , the down time really adds up.

Over the years, I have gotten to the point where I do not care which bee comes out of the cage first - queen or attendant. In fact if the queen comes out first, everything goes quickly. In the moment just before she takes flight, I gently catch her, remove the attendant bees by shaking the cage like a thermometer, and put the queen back in the cage. Being able to tell the face of a queen from a worker lets me know who's next out of the hole. How to distinguish their faces seems like a trivial bee fact - now turned into a critical piece of information.

If a queen (rarely) gets the jump on me and becomes airborne, I instantly drop everything and go to catch her. For that, two opposite ingredients are needed - speed and gentleness. I "aim" or in a sense imagine the palm of my hand intersecting her in space. ally catching her between the fingers is dangerous because she could be crushed, particularly her soft abdomen. (It's best to keep all fingers together.) When I catch an errant queen, it's an ecstatic feeling. Upon missing, which has happened, well it crushes the pleasure out of the rest of the day.

As I finished telling this rather exotic bit of bee handling skill to the Virginia beekeepers, there was a pause, I suppose, for everyone to absorb it. Then, with perfect comedic timing, a beekeeper in the back blurted out - "How much for that bee muff?" The whole crowd roared with laughter, including me. We do have a good time at these meetings.

If time permits in these talks, here are some other points I include. Sometimes in a few minutes a queen will return to the place from where she escaped, so keep a watch for her. I have heard other beekeepers say to put the cage at a conspicuous place close to where she left, and step back and wait. She might return and land on the cage.

Acknowledgments
The author thanks Suzanne Sumner for her comments on the manuscript.