BEE Advice to Help You BEE Good When You Are Working With Bees

 

1.  When you come up to an Apiary.  Don’t go investigate it.  Don’t walk around the boxes or hives of bees with out a bee suit.  In fact, when you arrive at an Apiary don’t be a nice person and start cutting up strips of burlap (We use burlap in the smoker to burn) and not put on your bee suit while your husband suits up.  Then all of sudden you become aware that your husband says “Them bees are nasty today.”  Then you have to run down the Tapo Canyon hill with your bee suit 1/2 on while a swarm of bees chase you because you were a nice person.  Noooooo you need to respect the nasty bees and wear your bee suit at all times when the bees are being nasty.
2. Always keep your bee suit on when you are in the cab until the windows have been rolled down and you have gone 1/2 a mile away from the apiary because there are always little assasin bees waiting to sting you in the cab of the truck.  They come and sting you immediately when you take off your bee suit.  This is because you are not a good person in other places of your life and you are being punished for your sins.  They know it.  Of course, they don’t care that you are tired, dirty, and just want to go home.  They just want to die stinging you, and they are determined to do it.  So they do it immediately when you take your bee suit off in the cab.
3. Never, never bring the boxes of honey in your house unless you inspect the boxes for the little 1000s of bees that want to eat that honey.  Because if you don’t do this then you get 1000s of bees in your house.  Or in our case about 100.  It was enough to make my daughter, Ana to go on strike.  She refused to come out of her bedroom.  I spent about an hour an half encouraging all the bees to go our the porch sliding glass door, and I got stung.
4. When you have a hive of bees fly into your back yard don’t play with them. They are probably Africanized. I know you are fascinated by the cute little cluster hanging from your orange tree, but remember bees are not play toys. They should not bee sprayed with a hose. You should not mow around a hive. Never stand in front of the hive. Bees have ninja guard bees that always are in the front of the hive if they see you and raise up their little rear stingers up and then fly up towards you, run!!! Obviously don’t have your kids play in front of the hive. Bee good and stay away from the hive!!! Don’t tell your beekeeper that you are allergic to bees and then go up to the beehive and closely examine the bees! The bees are dangerous, even if they are probably going to move on sooner or later and appear to be in passive mode. Don’t pick them up, and don’t help your beekeeper move the bees. If you are allergic to the bees, then don’t put yourself at risk!

Why You Should Not Play Around With Africanized Bees

I am thinking a lot lately about a friend who wants to start bee keeping with a feral hive that is probably Hybrid Africanized.   Hybrid Africanized bees are the strain of bees that we have in this area.  They are a mix of the Africanized bees and European bees.  However, for the rest of the article I will refer to them as “Africanized” because that is how most beekeepers refer to feral bees around here.   Let me tell you all why that is a bad idea.  Africanized bees are extremely aggressive.  They don’t re Queen very well.   Re Queening is when you buy a new queen from a reputable beekeeper.  You stick the new queen in it’s little box into the hive.  It has a little sugar cube that blocks it exit.  The hives’ bees will lick the sugar cube to get at the queen.  They will either accept the queen or kill her.  You either have a great investment and celebrate the fact that you have paid $35 for a new queen, and your hive will no longer have the Africanized bees (or the other kind of bees you want to get rid of) or you will have a nice dead queen because they will kill her.  Then you are devastated because you have wasted $35.  One time my friend Jeremy accidentally left a queen in her little box on top of a hive box.  He wasted $35 too, because he was not able to recover that queen either.  I learned at the LA beekeeper’s meeting from the mentor beekeeper who was answering everyone’s questions (sorry I forgot his name) that it’s about 7 out 10 times you will be able to requeen a hive, and not have the hive kill your queen.  Then, I learned you run into problems splitting Africanized Hives t into nukes, because Africanized hives don’t split up very well.  They are just problem hives.  Don’t mess with them.

So if my friend, let us call him, John gets a hive box like he wants from my husband, and manages to get his Africanized Hive into the hive box.  He then can call himself a bee keeper.  Except, well John has a huge problem.  There are many ways he will run into a life threatening/hazardous situation with Africanized bees that is different that is different from regular bees.  First of all, Africanized bees like to guard their territory.  They have little ninja bees that will set up a perimeter around the hive that will surprise him, and sting him if he is too cheap to buy a suit.  They are more aggressive than regular bees, and will chase him away from their territory, especially if he stands accidentally in front of their hive entrance.   Second, Africanized bees are especially agitated by sounds.  If someone in his neighborhood starts to mow their lawn or cuts a tree down that sound might agitate the whole hive enough to go out and be aggressive and start attacking  the neighbors.  I know about this one from a very painful experience where we had to pull out of an apiary from some tree cutters who were chopping up wood.  They agitated our bees, and our bees started to chase the workers.  They were very aggressive, and I believe some of them were Africanized, even though Matt had carefully re Queened most our bees in our apiary.    Finally,  Africanized bees are not gentle bees when you “work” the bees.  They get agitated easily, they are not fun to work with, and they make beekeeping miserable.  My husband generally turns down calls to go out and do hive removal because he does not want to work with these hybridized African bees that we have in Ventura County.

 

The Insanity of Beekeeping

 

It’s probably in the top ten most insane jobs in agriculture. Up there with raising bulls for bull fighting or rodeos. Why put on a bee suit and go play with bees? Why do it? The crazy bees regularly find a way to sting you through your gloves and buzz in your ears? Are all bee keepers crazy? Yes they are, and most us of all love we do! Talk to any beekeeper he will have a great bee story; just like a fisherman has a great fish tale.  There is something about opening up a beehive that nurtures one primeval soul.  It satisfies ones thirst to become one with natures call. The humming of bees as they dance and buzz around your ears, and you marvel at their magnificent art displayed in wax.  Then there is the art of beekeeping.  There is an intricate complexity to it  that even intrigues a local Physicist, and it keeps him happy.  You are insane when you are a beekeeper, and very happy.

via Why Beecome a Beekeeper? — SIMI VALLEY BEES

Bees Matter

I keep on running into the slogan, “save the bees.”  I tried for three hours to protect my supers stacked in my bee yard from a bunch of robber bees who were after some moldy honey and moldy pollen in some frames we had.  They were angry, and I should of left them alone.  Instead I removed hazardous mold and honey from the frames, and I trashed most of it. The bees were dive bombing me.  They chased me around.  I ran away from them several times.  It took me about three hours.  I was in the mood after that to not save these bees.  They were not so nice to me.  In fact I was very scared for my safety, but I continued on as crazy and out of control the situation was.  The bees needed to leave my back yard now!  To make matters worse Matt was not answering the phone to tell me what to do. He’s the head bee keeper I’m just the assistant.  I was afraid for them messing around the yard, and disturbing my  pregnant tenant, who might be not so happy to have bees around her apartment.  I was scared for my neighbor who is very allergic to bees.  So I tried to seal up the boxes and remove the obvious “bait” the yucky moldy frames.  I knew they would eventually leave once everything was sealed up, and their food source was removed, but oh boy did I suffer their wrath!  They were not happy with me.

I learned a great life lesson given to me by the bees yesterday.  How about a new slogan: “Save the bees a lot of grief!”   Leave them alone when they are riled up, and do what what Matt did.  He just went and bought some big plastic bags and covered up the offending frames at night When the crazy bees (Africanized hybrid swarm) were not around.  So lets apply this to life.  When crazy people are around you leave them alone.  “Wide circle them” as Matt would say.  Then if they do need to be apprehended put them in jail or some safe place where they can’t bother you.  The “nice big black plastic bag” approach works for me.  I hate drama.  I don’t like people that make drama, and I don’t know why I created all that bee drama for myself yesterday.  Lesson learned the hard way, but lesson definitely learned.

Bees Don’t Follow The Rules

Last night I tried to get the bees to follow one simple rule:  Stay off my bee suit.   I did everything in my power to get them to listen to me and stay off my bee suit while I sat in the dirt (literally it was the only way to do it), and I taped up these little boxes so the queens were going to be blocked for a while from coming out of there sugar cube.  Matt got a little particular, which was difficult because he expected me to make the tape have “wings” on them.  The only problem was I was telling the bees to stay off of me, and shooing them off of me with me glove.  The were furiously trying to climb onto me, and flying around me.  Then I was trying to use duct tape with my gloves, a tremendously difficult feat because you don’t have you finger nails to get the ends up to rip the duct tape and get it going.  However,  I did manage to get all seventeen little queen boxes some with cute little annoying flaps done; just like Matt told me, and some of the bee cooperated with my “rules” and stopped crawling on me like I told them.   We then proceeded to clean up all of the equipment and wearily head for home.  We had been at this since about 3:00 p.m., and it was about 11:00 p.m..  It was dark in the nursery, and when I was trying to get rid of all the bad bees who refused to  listen to my rules; I about killed myself as I ran around in the dark with a single flashlight in a zig pattern around the avocado tree.   I about broke a leg when I fell in a hole.  Fortunately, I caught myself from falling.  Bees have a hard time following you around obstacles, and so if you ever want to see a funny sight watch Matt and I run around the orchards trying to get rid of pesky bees!   I got back to the truck after I got everything cleaned up, and I sat in the passenger side of the truck in the dark, and I watched a single light dart around at the end of the long road in the nursery.  It was my husband, Matt doing final feedings for his bees so we wouldn’t have to go back on Monday.  We had sealed up every single hive, and he was putting a sugar patty in each hive so they wouldn’t starve.

Requeening hives in one day is not really an ideal plan.   Matt explained it to me on the way home that you are supposed to do it in a two day process using the queen excluder, a wire frame that keeps the queen from coming up into a higher box.  You put a box with a bunch of frames with brood frames or baby bees in it, and the other bees will come attend to them.  this usually takes a day or so, and you don’t do it in one day.   Matt did a shake and dump method where he took the bees off the frame, and he dumped them into the new hive.  This made the bees mad, and Matt got stung about 100 times.

Then I was really tired of sitting in my dirty, stinky bee suit.  I reached up and started to unzip my suit. when I got to the back of my neck I felt the wonderful sensation of being stung.  I was upset that I didn’t wait for Matt to inspect my suit for bees.  Note to self.  Don’t do this one again.  Bees don’t follow your rules Linda.  They crawled all over you.  When Matt got back and inspected my suit he found about five more bees on me.  So while I sat in the truck all relaxed I had about five bees crawling on me.  I was so tired I didn’t even notice.  It gives me the heebie jeebies just thinking about it.   Matt didn’t suffer any after effects from all of his bee stings.  He was stung a lot from ants when he was a kid.  He’s an ideal candidate to be a bee keeper.  My hand is all swollen up.  I made sure I moaned and whined about it a lot.  He said most of his bee stings were in his hand, and “it’s tender.”   I love Benadryl!  It’s my best friend . 🙂