Amorphophallus paeoniifolius

I know this blog is supposed to be about wood working and honey bees but I just had to share a photo of a plant that I have grown for years and never saw it in bloom.  Ordinarily my Amorphophallus just puts out a vegetative form that emerges from the ground then withers and dies.  But this year these large alien looking growths came up.  After a few weeks they began to open to reveal a most unusual flower.

This flower has the aroma of rotting flesh and is starting to attract flies and ants.  The central portion is about the size of a cabbage.  It appears to have yellow pollen on the interior portion of the stalk.

Here's a photo of all three stages of growth.  An unopened bud on the left, two flowers that have already opened, and the green vegetative growth starting to open up on the right.

Bee removal from a communication tower

I heard there were "hundreds" of bees flying around the base of the communication tower at Watson B. Duncan Middle School in Palm Beach Gardens Florida.

I went by to check it out during a downpour.  There wasn't a bee to be seen but the principal showed me the electrical box where the bees had been seen. I returned the next morning and verified they were honey bees and by the presence of pollen on the legs of the returning foragers I guessed that they had established themselves a hive inside the electrical box.  The principal had a preschool summer camp starting the following Monday in the vicinity where the bees were established and he wanted the bees removed.  The Districts pest control department is sympathetic to live bee removal but if there isn't time to get a beekeeper to remove the bees then pest control will spray the area and clean up the mess later.  I could see the only way to rescue the bees and appease the principal was to volunteer to come in on Saturday and remove the bees myself.
It was still pouring Saturday morning and into the afternoon; remnants of tropical storm Andrea.  After the rain stopped I loaded my equipment up and arrived at the site in the early afternoon.

The bees had established a hive inside an electrical junction box at the base of the radio antenna.









There were eight pieces of comb with almost all of it dedicated to brood production.  There was only a small portion of nectar at the top of the middle section of comb.



I applied a little bit of smoke to the hive prior to opening the box and a little bit more prior to beginning the removal of the bees.  My preferred method of removal is a homemade version of the Bushkill Bee Vac.  It uses the sucton from a shop vacuum to aspirate the bees directly into a hive box.  In the photo above the device is in the left hand corner of the fence enclosure and it is resting on its side.  The hose going out of the photo to the left is connected to a shop vacuum and the hose coiled on the ground is used to aspirate the bees into the bottom of a two story nucleus hive box.

After several minutes of aspirating bees the comb begins to become exposed revealing capped brood cells.

Once the majority of the bees that I can reach have been vacuumed into the hive box I begin cutting out the sections of comb and vacuuming the bees off the sides of comb I was unable to reach.  After all the comb has been removed I cut the comb into sections that will fit inside a medium Langstroth frame.  I was able to fill five frames with brood comb from this hive and still had a small portion of comb left over.

By luck I spotted the queen and a small cluster of her worker bee court hanging on the side of one of the conduit seen in the right of this photo.  I trapped her in a queen clip and wedged the clip between two frames for the trip home.







When I was finished the Electrical box was cleaned out of comb and bees except for a few returning foragers.





Once I got the bees home I disassembled the bee vacuum and placed the hive on a screened bottom board and added a telescoping lid.

The base of the bee vacuum on the left has several hundred dead bees. There are often casualties caused by aspirating the bees into a hive but I use it because it is most efficient in getting the bees under control quickly.  The screened lid on the right contains live bees that will move into the hive before nightfall.

The next morning I opened the hive to do some rearranging and to check on the queen.  She was no longer in the queen clip so somehow she squeezed her way out of the clip.  The bottom board had more dead adult bees as well as larvae and pupa that the workers had pulled out of the comb that were damaged while cutting the comb to fit the frames.

There are always gong to be casualties when doing bee removal but it beats losing all of them by spraying with a pesticide.

The hive has been joined to my other hives in a home apiary.  I gave them a box of empty frames with foundation and a bottle of sugar water to get them started in comb building.

Queenless hive from a cutout

In the 2004 hurricane season a tall palm in a residential back yard located in southern Martin county succumbed to the tortuous winds.  Over the years following the storms the telephone like tree stump was visited by insects that bored into it's surface and then birds that foraged on the insects.  Eventually there were large enough holes in the tree that accommodated the nesting of a family of wood ducks.  Following the wood ducks a swarm of honey bees moved into the tree.  On September 24th the bees swarmed and alighted in a nearby tree temporarily until eventually flying off in search of a new home.  The following day the standing stump that was once a majestic palm tree fell splitting open and spilling comb and the remaining portion of the honey bee colony on to the ground.  I received a call from the home owner asking if it would be possible to move the bees into a hive box and manage them.  I agreed to check out the situation and make an evaluation.  It was obvious at first glance that the colony would not survive for long in its present state.  I pulled out my equipment and proceeded to collect the bees using a homemade version of Robo's World Bushkill Bee Vac.  I collected most of the bees after over an hour of vacuuming then proceeded to cut the remaining comb out of the split tree.  I like to salvage any comb with brood if possible to give the bees something to do in their new home but in this case the infestation of small hive beetles made it impossible to salvage very much comb.
The chance of collecting the queen in a cutout such as this, is very hit or miss.  I usually set the bees up in a hive box and then leave them alone for two to three weeks.  When I checked the hive after this waiting period I knew something was wrong when I only saw drone brood.

Upon closer inspecton I noticed what I had only read about; multiple eggs in many of the cells.  This is an indication of a laying worker bee.  In an attempt to salvage the hive a worker will take over the duties of the missing queen by laying eggs.  Unfortunately the worker was never mated so all the eggs that hatch and mature into an adult will be drones.

 It's interesting to see in some of the cells that had multiple eggs more than one larvae hatched.  Two or more larvae developing in the same cell quickly consume all the royal jelly and bee bread placed in the cell by the nurse bees.  It's unlikely that two pupae would develope from a single cell.

The only recourse I had was to combine the bees from this cut out hive with another existing hive in my apiary.

Bee removal from a cable junction box.

I recently worked on removing bees from a cable television junction box.  I checked out the site ahead of the actual removal and it didn't appear to be that big of a hive.

Cover over a cable television junction box.

I removed the cover and found the inside filled with comb and bees.

I worked for three hours cutting out five frames of brood comb, scooping up handfuls of bees and vacuuming the remaining bees into the two nucleus boxes using my BushKill Farms design bee vacuum.

I set the hive up in my apiary and by the next morning the bees were swarming and had covered the outside of the hive box.  I scooped them up and poured them into a set of two eight frame medium boxes that contained new foundation and a frame of uncapped brood from one of my other hives.  I placed a queen excluder just above the bottom board to keep the queen in, if there is one, and I stuffed grass in the opening to keep the rest of the bees in the hive until they get used to their new home.  I also gave them some sugar water in a Boardman entrance feeder to further entice them to stay put.

Re-queening

I have had two hives that have been very crabby for the last few months and two hives that were either cut-outs or swarms.  These four hives were do for queen replacement.  I picked up four mated queens from a local commercial queen breeder on Saturday morning, May 21st then proceeded to re-queen the hives on Saturday late after noon.

A new queen packed in a small cage is visited by bees from my apiary.

The first step to re-queening is to locate the existing queen and crush her leaving her either on the bottom board or the entrance to the hive so her hive mates know they are queenless.  The lack of queen pheromone in the hive alerts the workers that their queen is missing.

Workers examine the remains of their queen on the entrance to their hive.

This queen had fallen to the ground and is surrounded by her daughters.

The caged queen has a candy plug that the workers must chew through in order to release the new queen form her cage.  A small hole is made in the candy to shorten the time needed for the workers to chew through the candy.  The cage is then wedged between two frames and the hive closed up.  In one to two days the workers will have released the queen.  Check back on the hive in three days to ensure they did release her.  If they accept their new queen she should be laying eggs before a week has passed.  Checking for larvae on the frames will let you know whether she has commenced laying or not.

I was only able to find two of the four queens before light started to fail so I had to re-queen the remaining two hives the following morning.

Searching each of the boxes in one of my hives trying to locate the queen so she can be removed before re-queening.