Journal Entries W8

6/27/16-Experiment-Today I officially started my experiment! I went to the UMass apiary and took out about 125 bees from hive six. I chose a strong hive that has a good nectar flow to make sure that my results weren’t skewed from certain diseases or other factors that may be unaccountable. I had built three containers each one containing a sea sponge dipped in sugar syrup. The first container contains fifty five bees and I am feeding the bees a 1:1 ratio of sugar water; one pound of water to one pound of sugar. The next container contains a 1:1 ratio of sugar to water however the water is infused with two types of mushrooms the Red Belted Polypore and the Red Reishi mushrooms. The third container Is all a 1:1 ratio of sugar to water infused with the two mushrooms as well as another sea sponge that is soaked in salt water. I will be testing out to see whether the bees are able to live longer in certain types of foods.

6/28/16-Internship-today we did a bee kill pesticide test on the hives. Sometimes MDAR receives a call from people that all their bees died unexpectedly, we ask the beekeeper various questions and if we come to a conclusion that it may be pesticides that killed the bees we check pollen and honey to see the concentration of pesticides in the hive. Many times a bee kill occurs when a local farmer sprays pesticides and it moves to the bees it can cause mass death of the bees. Kim and I checked weak hives, what we wanted to see was how the queen was doing. This gives us an idea of how the bees will do over wintering. It is important to always consider the fact that we do live in New England and winters get cold. So making sure a hive is strong enough to make it through the winter is very important. Because these hives may be weak we want to give them about a month to recover and get stronger before we combine two hives together. Kim and I went to Dan Conlans Apiary to pick up a Italian Queen, we were planning on re-queening hive ten because we did not see any signs that she was laying in the hive. When we got to the hive and looked in the frames we were astonished to see that she was laying! Sometimes it takes the Queen a week before she starts laying because she is getting accustomed to the new location. What we did instead was we re-queened hive I, the week before we had taken the queen out of hive I and put it in hive ten. The bees had started to create emergency queen cells to requeen the hive, Kim and I took out all these queen cells and introduced a queen. The bees welcomed her and started feeding her immediately; when they feed her the queen through the cage it means they accepted her. Kim and I then went through the hives to make sure that the bees would not get honey bound.

6/29/16-Internship-Today I went to my top bar hive to see how the hive was doing as. What I noticed was that the queen was laying however, it was a drone laying worker. Sometimes when a hive is queen-less for long enough and have no way of creating a queen a worker bee steps up and starts laying eggs. However, many times she lays more than one egg into each cell this is a big telling that the queen is a worker laying bee. Unfortunately there is nothing I can do about this hive and it will die out. Once it dies out I can probably put bees in it to create a new hive. I also put wax foundations on the bars this will help the bees with creating wax and comb on the bars. I melted down wax and used this wax to glue the foundation to the bar.

6/30/16-Working at Warm colors Apiary-Today I worked with Dan Conlan at his apiary. It was interesting to work with a professional beekeeper. We first put together hives. The hive come in lego pieces we fit them together and then nail it boards together. It deffinetly showed me a different perspective of what beekeepers do. Being a beekeeper is more than working with bees but it’s also responsibility of building the hives and moving the hives from one location to the next. Dan Conlan joked the beekeeping is just moving things from one location to another then bringing it back. After building supers we went through Nucs that Dan was selling to people and we checked the Nucs for queen. A Nuc is a starting hive that is just becoming assimilated. Dan talked to me about his breeding and how to breed the queens correctly you need 4-5 Drone hives to fertilize 50 queens. This means that to get the genetics that we desire in a queen we put out certain hives that have adult Drone bees to fertilize the queens. The drones are 100% replica of the queen so by choosing a hive with a strong queen it means that drones will be strong too.

6/31/16-Internship-Today Kim and I met at the apiary to check out how the new queen was doing in hive I. It seemed that the queen took and the hive will hopefully flourish. I also went through Hive one, five and eight; What I noticed was that these bee hives were so strong that they needed more room before they became honey bound. To help prevent swarming I took the outermost frames from the hive and put them in the center. This causes the bees to “find” more space so that now they will build the comb up which will help the queen lay more eggs. This is only a temporary solution however. What I will have to do is either buy a new super or remove some honey frames and replace them after I extract the honey.