The Bees Are Vanishing

[Paul_H]

I think you're right Tawm ;D

[Tom]

You're a pretty smart feller, you know.  There's millions of guys out there looking for an excuse not to mow the lawn.  :D :D

[Paul_H]

Save the Bumble Bees! smiley_beatnik

[logwalker]

Those are likely to be orchard mason bees. They are a good pollinator and can be encouraged to reproduce if you make them some nesting posts. They are a solitary bee and need a 5/16" hole about 6" long to lay there eggs in. You can buy them in the spring at garden centers. Look them up on the I-net and see if they look like yours. Joe

Here is a pdf. on cultivating them. We may all have to do this some day.

http://king.wsu.edu/foodandfarms/documents/MasonBee.pdf

[SwampDonkey]

Video link

http://www.cbc.ca/clips/mov/murphy-bees080630.mov

I always wondered why they need honey bees to pollinate blueberries. I used to pick 3 gallon pales full back in the 1980's of wild blueberries growing naturally in the forest on 3 year old cuts and burns. The berries were so thick and hanging like grapes. You just sat down on a nice stump or old log and raked them into the bucket. Some as big as concord grapes. You couldn't begin to pick them all.

[Part_Timer]

OK I have a dumb question.  All the stuff I read makes it sound like you need to mess with bee hives all the time.  Can you put up a hive or two and leave them alone only checking on them once a year or so?

[Tom]

Yes, but you won't have bees at the end of the year.

Bee's aren't farmed like livestock, but they are "kept".  Kept, in this sense, can be interpretted as "taken care of".   

Beekeepers check their hives regularly, at least once a month, some more often, to determine the health of the queen and the hive in general.  Medications are supplied and the bees are checked for mites, ants or other ailments.

The creation of Queen cells will denote an ailing queen or a hive getting ready to swarm.  Catching the formation of queen cells might have the Keeper destroy them all but one, or destroy them and kill the queen and requeen with a purchased one.  It also might be a time when he could split the hive and encrease his enventory of bees.  Nucs (a new small hive, nucleus) is kept at the ready around apiaries for just this purpose.

If you have never kept bees before, don't just get a hive. Read a bunch about keeping bees and even hang out around some beekeepers for a little while first.  You might have a bee keeper's organization (club) that meets in your town.  Join it.

Keeping bees is a lot of fun and not only provides a lot of honey for personal use, but can be project that can draw family together. 

When you decide to keep some bees, I would recommend starting with at least two hives.

Bee keeping supplies are usually purchased through the mail by everyone.  Some keepers make their own boxes, but they have to be made to spec so that commercial equipment will fit them.

Kelly and Dadant are two old and popular company's .

[farmerdoug]

Unfortunatly those bees from the accident were probably gassed.  It would take awhile to sort out the queens and the highway needs to be opened. :(

[Radar67]

I thought I heard them say they waited for nightfall for the bees to reenter the hives. I may be thinking about the article I read on it, instead of the video.

[Tom]

I imagine that the beekeeper tried as hard as he could to save anything salvageable.  Bee colonies take a bit of time to build up.   They will find their hive pretty quickly if it is close enough.

[moonhill]

We use bumblebees for wild blueberry pollination.  They come in a box of four units called a quad.  Its about 10" deep and 2' square.  There is some benefits to the bumblebees, They stay for the summer where the rented honey bees are removed after blossom season.  They work in the cooler days even fog or light rain.  They also will move out of the quad in late summer and find a new home, this increases the native bee population.  I was under the hood of an old car and noticed a bumblebee hive in the air cleaner, an old mouse nest, something they prefer.  Mostly you can see them coming and going from holes in the ground while the August berry harvest is taking place.  Since we started using them more signs of them have increased over the years.  They shed a skin, almost like a snake or maybe a lobster, and we see lots of bee shells on the field during harvest season.

We also keep honeybees, we are new to them only 3 years now lost some through the winters and we replace them with nukes in the spring, one strong hive from the original batch and 2 new ones this spring.  Vanishing bees has not reached our area to my knowledge.  Honeybees work in larger numbers than Bumblebees which is one of their +'s, they just need warmer days.  We try to keep both to cover the pollination needs for the crop.  You can almost double the yields with good pollination.  Tim B.

[farmerdoug]

Tom,  If they are moved more than 3 miles then they will never find their box again.  Most hives are miles from home and will land on the first thing they find.  I remember one truckload landing on an overpass after the truck flipped.  It will take days for the bees to find a new home and the Highway must be opened so they are usually terminated. :(

[Tom]

 If you separate the bees from the hive and move the hive, the bees left in the field will be lost.  More than likely they will not be accepted by another hive and will die.  The distance is given from 1 mile to 3 miles, depending on who you are talking to.

I believe it is more in the 3 mile range.

The hives on the trucks are the bee's home.  If the truck turns over and the seals on the hive boxes comes loose or the the hive comes apart, the bees can still find their home.   Government hasn't much time for stuff like that.  The beekeepers may want to move the hives to the fields on the side of the road to get the bees back in their boxes, but I can see unknowledgeable authorities or citizens who would oppose that effort.  Pheremones in the hive will help to attract some of them back.  When you say Bees, most people think of Hornets, yellow jackets and wasps, before they think of Honey bees, never considering that there is a difference.

[SwampDonkey]

It has to be over a mile because I had honey bees in the garden and on apple blossoms. No one in my community has had honey bees for 15 years since my cousin had them. They must be coming in from someone over in Blaine, Maine. It's been awhile since I drove around that back road and I usually don't go spotting for bees. I go in the fall to view the foliage on the mountain.  ;D

We get bumble bees here on fall asters into the end of October. On cold mornings with frost they are clinging to the blooms frozen in time and as soon as the sun rises and warms the earth they are on the go again. So they must work in the dark some, because they never returned to the hive to be froze to the flower like that. ;D

[Tom]

Swamp Donkey,
Bees range for miles around their hive but have to orient themselves to the country to find their way back.  They take orientation flights as soon as the hive is moved to be able to find their way back and to be able to tell the other bees where the flowers are located.  Foraging distances are estimated at 3 miles, but there are records of foraging as far as 10 miles.   

Almost all of the bees wll return to the hive at dusk, but there are some that will overnight in the field. They are usually not many.   Moving the hive usually takes place after dark for this reason.  Those bees overnighting in the field will be lost.

[geohayes7]

Albert Einstein once said: "If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live. No more bees, no more pollination ... no more men!" He wasn't an entomologist, but entomologists around today agree that the sudden and mysterious disappearance of bees from their hives poses serious problems!

[Sprucegum]

Two beekeepers South of Calgary had mysterious disappearances - their hives were STOLEN ! 
I believe it was about 50 hives, someone had to be well equiped and experienced with bees to do that. Not the kind of thing that will show up at the local pawnshop either so they don't expect much luck catching the culprits.

[Tom]

That's strange too.  BeeKeepers are generally a friendly and respectful lot.  It's not the thing that I would imagine for one of them to steal from another. 

Hives are identified with names and numbers down here and the sale of stolen hives would have to take place hundreds of miles away.  The families that keep bees are a close knit bunch.

I haven't any respect for a thief regardless of what he steals.

[TexasTimbers]

I found all the missing bees. If I can get the data out of my destroyed camera i will post some pics and video when I get time to do the video editing.

You know, those bees have no sense of humor at all when you slice right throught their hive with a big chainsaw bar. they don't even count to ten to give you a fair shake. :D

[OneWithWood]

Funny you should mention that, TT.  I have been hearing a steady loud drone in the woods just south of the barn for over a month now.  I don't think it is aliens so it is probably a huge gathering of winged stinging things.  My years of experience and remembrances of sudden pain lead me to think I should wait until late fall to check it out.

[TexasTimbers]

That drone is quite unmistakeable ain't it? Specially when it is right in your ear!

[SwampDonkey]

The thistles are being worked today. I don't know if they are wild or from over in Maine. No one has bees around my area in a distance that would allow them access to these thistles. They were quite docile, you could almost pet them. ;D

[TexasTimbers]

That top shot turned out great. That thistle is beautiful, and the bee too of course. Just look at the months of weekly geometry and math lessons you could glean off that thistle for high schoolers.   

[TexasTimbers]

The nonprofit "Natural Resources Defense Council filed a lawsuit Monday in federal court in Washington DC to force the federal government to disclose studies on the effect of a new pesticide on honey bees. "

The Apiary Inspectors of America published a survey in May that says "...losses of honey bees nationwide topped 36 percent of managed hives between September 2007 and March 2008, compared to a 31 percent loss during the same period a year earlier."

It's hard for me to believe 1/3 of the honey bees have died. Maybe many of them just got tired of working for nothing and struck out on their own.


Mysterious Honey Bee Disorder Buzzes into Court

[SwampDonkey]

That thistle is beautiful, and the bee too of course. Just look at the months of weekly geometry and math lessons you could glean off that thistle for high schoolers.   

Mom has tried transplanting them without success. I told here she needs this nice soft, rich Royalton soil to grow anything, not that hard pan down in Woodstock.  :D :D