A Very Overdue Update

Well, it has been quite a season, and I have been entirely neglectful in providing any updates since the start of this year.  So, here's a catch-up on everything so far.  It has very much been a tale of two cities (hives), as we shall see...

Hive Number 1

Sadly, queen Nettie and her colony didn't make it through the winter.  I'm not sure why, but when I finally got to open the hives at the end of April (after the long, cold spring weather) the bees were all dead.  So the first job of the year was to take off the supers (there was usable honey in the frames) clean out the dead bees, and burn the brood frames.

However, it wasn't all bad news.  Queen Eunice had made it through the winter, and her colony was in great shape.  In fact, the hive was really very full of bees, and I was a little nervous that they might use the fact that they were a strong, healthy colony to make a swarm.  As it happens, the need to head off that possibility actually created an opportunity to re-stock hive #1.  Therefore, in May I did a split, moving Eunice and half her bees and brood into the now vacant hive #1.  Ever since then, hive #1 has been a model of good behaviour under Eunice's leadership - no attempts to make queen cells or swarm, very well behaved, and busy.  Over the course of the year they have filled two supers with honey, and started to draw comb in a third.  Currently, they are in good shape going into winter, and the only things left for me to do are remove the queen excluder and add the mouse guards.  It has been a nice, easy season of beekeeping - and not even any stings.

However, things have been rather different, in what I shall now refer to as...

The Ballad of Hive Number 2

So, we start in mid-May with the aforementioned split.  This left a fairly strong colony with plenty of bees and four frames of brood, as well as a frame with some honey and six new frames ready to draw comb.  But no queen.  Long-standing readers may remember that if a colony suddenly loses its queen (e.g. she dies - or in this case because I've moved her to another hive) then the workers will spot this pretty quickly.  They'll then make several queen cells (usually at least half a dozen, but it can be more).  And indeed, the good workers of hive #2 did just that.  i spent the next couple of weeks removing surplus queen cells, until there was just one nice long one hanging down from the bottom of one of the frames.

At this point, everything was going to plan.  The queen hatched out, and mated, and started laying eggs.  And the bees were making plenty of comb for the new queen to lay in - as you can see here:

By the end of June, everything seemed to be on-track, and I was just about to pick a name for the new queen.

Then the bees killed her.

I don't really know why worker bees kill their queen.  There are various theories that it happens if she is damaged or deformed, or she is not laying properly, or that the workers somehow 'just know' that she's a wrong 'un.  I really don't know what their reason was, but whatever it was - they killed her.  At which point, the cycle of creating queen cells started again, I spent another fortnight thinning out queen cells again, and then the new queen hatched and mated (again).

By this point, it was the end of July and the hive had a laying queen, so I assumed the shenanigans were over.  It was past the end of swarm season, so there was no real danger that the bees would make any new queen cells.  I figured everything was pretty stable, and that I could leave them to just get on with things without any further intervention from me.  So in August, I went on holiday with my sister, and left the hives to their own devices.

By the time I checked hive #2 again, at the end of August, I was surprised to find that there was evidence of around 5 queen cells, all of which had hatched, and which the bees had started dismantling,  This could mean only one thing.

While I was away, the bees killed their queen.  Again.

I mentioned earlier that when bees make queen cells, I start removing them until there is only one left.  There is a simple reason for this - bee colonies have evolved to only have one queen at any one time.  If there is more than one queen cell, then that means more than one queen, and that's a problem.  The bees basically have two ways of resolving this.  If two queen cells hatch around the same time, and it is before the summer solstice, the first queen out will swarm with half the bees.  But if it's after the solstice, none of the queens leave the hive.  Instead, they fight - to the death - until there is only one left.

From the evidence of the 5 half-dismantled queen cells, I was able to roughly reconstruct events.  The queen had been killed shortly after I'd last seen her at the end of July.  The workers had then made 5 queen cells, and these queens all emerged in the middle of August while I was on holiday.  Then, they'd basically had a 5-way deathmatch, leaving only one last queen standing.

I did see the queen during the same inspection when I saw the remains of the queen cells.  She was a small wee thing, and didn't look at all like the hard-as-nails killer that took down her rivals to claim the hive.  Don't judge a book by its cover, I suppose.  Nor a queen by her abdomen.

Anyway - I didn't see any eggs at the end of August, so the queen must have still been doing her mating flights.  When I checked yesterday, there was no brood, and it was very difficult to tell if there were any eggs in the hive.  I got the magnifier app out on my phone, and had a really good look, and the best I can say at the moment is I think there is around an 80% chance that what I was looking at yesterday was eggs.  I will know for sure when I check again next week.

So, that's things up-to-date as they stand at the moment.  If you're wondering about honey, there is a bit of an update on that, which I'll cover in the next update.

Introducing... Queen Eunice!

Every beehive has a single queen bee, and the queen in hive #2 is called Eunice. She is named after Eunice Newton Foote, who was a scientist, and who discovered that certain gases increases in temperature when exposed to sunlight - a phenomenon that we now refer to as the Greenhouse Effect.

Eunice was born Eunice Newton in Connecticut in 1819.  (Fun fact - her father's name was Isaac Newton, so of course she became a scientist...!)  She attended school at the Troy Female Seminary, which was a preparatory school founded by Emma Willard, an education activist and feminist.  She was encouraged to attend science courses at the nearby Rensselaer School, which covered both scientific theory and laboratory experimentation.

In 1841, Eunice married lawyer and mathematician Elisha Foote.  Elisha had undertaken his training under judge Daniel Cady, who was the father of women's rights activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton.  In 1848, Eunice and Elizabeth Cady Stanton joined several other women's rights campaigners at the Seneca Falls Convention, which was the first convention on women's rights.  Eunice was a member of the the convention's editorial committee, and was a signatory to the convention's Declaration of Sentiments, which demanded voting rights for women, as well as other legal and social rights.

Eunice conducted several experiments in which she investigated the effect of sunlight on different gases.  This involved exposing tubes of different gases to direct sunlight at different pressures, assessing moist and dry gases, and comparing with gases placed in the shade.  She made two important observations: firstly, the amount of moisture in the gas affected the temperature; and secondly, the tube filled with carbon dioxide became hotter than the others when placed in direct sunlight.  She also noted that the tube filled with carbon dioxide took far longer to cool down than the other tubes.

Eunice theorised that "An atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature; and if, as some suppose, at one period of its history, the air had mixed with it a larger proportion than at present, an increased temperature from its own action, as well as from increased weight, must have necessarily resulted."  In other words, she drew a direct link between an increased amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and global warming.

Eunice wrote up her findings in a paper titled Circumstances Affecting the Heat of the Sun's Rays, which was presented on her behalf by Joseph Henry (of the Smithsonian) to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1856.  It was published the same year in The American Journal of Science and Arts.

Eunice's later work involved experiments on static electricity in air, including the effects of temperature, pressure and water vapour on electrical charge.  She also worked on a number of inventions throughout her life, including a more efficient paper-making machine, and a thermostatically-controlled cooking stove.

As with many female scientists, Eunice's work was overlooked for many years, and her discovery attributed to a man - John Tyndall, in the case of the warming action of carbon dioxide and water vapour.  However, Tyndall published his findings three years after Eunice, and so credit for the discover properly belongs to her.

You can find out more about Eunice Newton Foote here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eunice_Newton_Foote

Here is a photograph of her namesake, queen Eunice:

Science bonus!

Regular readers will know how much we like an actual research paper at The Southdown Apiary.  So here's an HTML transcript of Eunice's original 1856 paper, published in The American Journal of Science and Arts:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/transcript-of-of-34890503

It's also available as a PDF scan:
https://ecology.iww.org/PDF/misc/foote_circumstances-affecting-heat-suns-rays_1856.pdf

And in a fancy web-reader:
https://archive.org/details/mobot31753002152491/page/382/mode/2up?view=theater

Introducing... Queen Nettie!

Every beehive has a single queen bee, and the queen in hive #1 is called Nettie. She is named after Nettie Stevens, who was a geneticist, and who first observed the Y chromosome and identified it as being the one responsible for male sex determination.

Nettie Stevens was born in Vermont in 1861, and the family moved to Massachusetts when she was 2 years old.  She attended Westford Academy, Westfield Normal School (now Westfield State University) and Stanford University, where she studied for her BA and MA in biology.  She then began graduate work in physiology and histology.  Following this, Nettie enrolled in Bryn Mawr College to undertake a PhD in cytology.  Her doctoral studies encompassed a number of areas, including the development of sperm and eggs, and the germ cells of insects.

Nettie was awarded her PhD in 1903, and remained at Bryn Mawr first as a research fellow in biology, then a reader in experimental morphology.  In 1904-1905, she spent a year as a post-doctoral research assistant at the Carnegie Institute of Washington, where she received a grant to undertake research on heredity, including sex determination, based on Mendel's theories of inheritance.  Nettie began by studying the germ cells of aphids, to try to identify possible differences in male and female chromosomes.

In 1905 Nettie observed that the male chromosome set of Tenebrio molitor (the yellow mealworm beetle), consisting of 20 chromosomes (in 10 pairs), had one unusually small chromosome.  She correctly identified this as being the chromosome that determines sex, and published her results in a paper titled Studies in Spermatogenesis.  Nettie further noted that this small chromosome was always paired with a larger one, and that an egg fertilised by a sperm that carries the small chromosome becomes a male while an egg fertilised by a sperm with the larger chromosome becomes female.  She then studied other organisms, including aphids, mealworms, beetles, and flies, and found that they used the same large-large / large-small chromosome parings to determine sex.  We now refer to these pairings as XX and XY.

Nettie became ill with breast cancer at the age of 50.  She was offered the position of research professor at Bryn Mawr College, but was unable to accept the offer due to her ill health.  She died on May 4, 1912.  Despite her short life, she published around 40 research papers and made one of the great discoveries of modern biology.

You can find out more about Nettie Stevens here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nettie_Stevens

Here is a photograph of her namesake, queen Nettie:

Science bonus!

If you're a bit of a geek (and regular readers will know this is a pro-geek zone), you can read Nettie's original Studies in Spermatogenesis paper online.  Here's the screen-reader friendly version, courtesy of Project Gutenberg:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/31545.html.images

It's also available in other formats - here's a list:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/31545

And here, at the Internet Archive, is a scan of the original:
https://archive.org/details/studiesinspermat01stevrich/page/n8/mode/1up?view=theater

And Another One!

A couple of Fridays ago, I got a call from local bee enthusiast Gerry (who was involved in the previous post's shenanigans) letting me know about another swarm.  This time, it was a small-ish swarm, around shoulder height, in a small fir tree at the crazy golf course in Victoria Park:

This looked like a nice easy one - and since Gerry and I had just had practice with the previous swarm, we were feeling pretty confident.  Everything started well - the whole swarm dropped easily into Gerry's bucket when I shook the branch, and they all went into the nucleus in one go.

But, that was when it all started to get a bit more complicated.  As you can see from the photo above, there were quite a lot of bees on top of the nucleus, and airborne in front of it.  We watched for a few minutes, hoping they would settle down.  Instead, the opposite happened - and bees started walking out of the nucleus and gathering at the front:

This looked like a problem - when bees do this, it usually means they are about to re-swarm.  Gerry and I discussed what to do, but the reality is, when this starts to happen, there is almost nothing you can do to stop it.  Your only chance is to find the queen, and somehow keep her in the nucleus.  But, really, what are the chances of spotting a queen among a swarm of 10,000 bees?

And that's when I watched the queen walk right out of the front of the nucleus.

I had to act fast.  The next conversation went something like this:

"That's the queen Gerry - I can see her, right there on the front of the nuc.  What do I do?  Do I grab her?"

"Yeah, I think you need to pick her up."

"Yeah - I think you're right.  OK.  I'm doing it."

And with that, I reached towards the front of the nuc, aimed a finger and thumb at the queen... and missed.  You pick up a queen bee by her wings, and it's not the most difficult thing to do, but I'm a clumsy oaf.  The thing is, if you miss once, she'll usually wiggle about a bit, and you have to hope she stays pointing in roughly the right direction (if you're right-handed, it's easiest if she's facing up and to the left).  If you miss twice, she'll get spooked and start haring off and you'll never catch her.  So I basically had one more shot.  I leaned in, breathed in, hovered a finger and thumb over her...

And got her!

This was great - now all I needed was something to put her in.  A matchbox would have been ideal.  Or my queen cage, which I'd foolishly left locked in the car.  Gerry had a quick chat with the chaps who ran the crazy golf, who went to have a rummage in their shed.  it felt like I was standing there for ever, holding onto this little insect who desperately wanted to wriggle free.  And trying not to hold on too tight, for fear of damaging her wings.  And then they came back, with an empty box that they used to keep their allen keys in.  It was good enough - I flipped open the flap, popped her inside, closed it up and put some gaffer tape on to make sure she couldn't escape.

The next problem was making sure all the other bees knew where she was.  They keep track of the queen via pheromones, which were of course now all circulating inside the box.  So, back to the shed to get a large screw, which I used to make some holes in the box.  And then I carefully placed the queen-in-a-box into the nucleus, and hoped the bees would be able to pick up the scent of her pheromones.

In case you are wondering, none of this is by-the-book swarm collection.  It was pretty much a combination of amateur hour, and making it up as we went along.  But, amazingly, it worked.  The bees picked up the scent, calmed down, and started heading back into the nucleus.  All was looking fine.  Until Gerry asked the obvious question:

"How are you going to get her out at the other end?"

Yeah.  I hadn't thought of that.  This was when my queen cage (now retrieved from the car) was going to come in useful.  It's basically a cylinder with a plunger, that looks like this:

If we could transfer the queen into the cage, and put that into the nucleus, then releasing the queen at the other end would be as easy as pulling the plunger.  But first we had to get the queen out of the box and into the cage.

Gerry devised a plan where we would cut the top of the box on three sides, peel back the flap and then put the cage over the queen.  So, back to the shed for a razor blade, and then we took the box out of the nucleus and I knelt down next to Gerry while he started cutting.  I was hoping he wouldn't slice through the queen...

Gerry told me he was ready, pulled back the flap (and got a sting for his efforts) and... no queen.  Well, not that we could see - the problem was, lots of bees had followed the pheromone trail, so the area where we'd been cutting the box now looked like this:

I felt I had no choice - I was going to have to put the open box back into the nucleus, and hope for the best.  I was just about to place it back, when the queen walked out and stood herself right in the middle of the bottom of the box.  This time there was no need to pick her up - I still had the queen cage in my other hand, so I carefully placed it over her, made sure she was at the far end of the cylinder and pushed the plunger half an inch in.  Now that she was secure, I put the queen cage into the nucleus, put the roof on, and waited.  After about half an hour, things were much more calm.

That was the hard part over, and after another half an hour I closed up the entrance, took the bees back to the apiary and put them in the hive.  Not a textbook swarm collection by any means, but at least I now have two full beehives again, which I'm really pleased about.  Neither of the queens have names yet, but that will probably be the subject of the next post.

Out With The Old... In With The New

April was cold, wet and just not good for beekeeping.  So I had to wait through most of the month before I could actually check my hives for the first time.  On the last Saturday, the weather was finally warm and dry enough to open up, so I headed over to the apiary, feeling cautiously excited to see what lay in store.  Unfortunately, it was pretty bad news.  Both hives and the nucleus looked like this:

That is, sadly, a cluster of dead bees.  So, all three colonies have perished.  What killed them?  I can't say for sure - maybe it was a virus, maybe the cold and damp weather, perhaps a combination of the two, or something else entirely.  Whatever the reason, this is sadly the end for queens Christina, Philippa and Henrietta.  Unfortunately, there is only one thing to be done - all the brood frames have to be burned.

There is some honey in the hives.  Some of it has started to ferment, and so won't be consumable.  But some I think is still sealed and could well be extracted and put into jars.  I'm going to have a look tomorrow and see what I can rescue.  As for the honey that has started to ferment... I'm wondering if this is the year when I finally have a go at making mead?  At least it will be something to cheer myself up after losing all my bees.

However... all is not lost.  On Wednesday, I got a call from fellow local beekeeper Gerry, who saw this hanging from a tree opposite his house:

That is a swarm - a big one, too!  Gerry already has his apiary fully stocked, so he was kind enough to offer me first dibs on the bees - and I of course jumped at the chance!  Luckily, the swarm was on a nice flexible branch at head height, so Gerry held a large bucket underneath while I gave the the branch a quick shake, and the whole swarm dropped into the bucket.  It was a textbook swarm collection.  Gerry had a spare nucleus, so he tipped the bees in and put the roof on, and then we waited for them to settle.

After about an hour they had all settled down, and the remaining airborne bees had all made their way into the nucleus.  So I placed them (carefully!) into the car, and drove the short distance up to the apiary, where I had some spare frames ready to pop inside.  This was the point I realised just what a big swarm it was - it took some time to carefully slide the new frames in between the thousands of bees:

So that is where we are so far - all my old bees are gone, but I'm in a great position to get back started again this year.  I'm planning to go to the apiary tomorrow, rescue what harvestable honey I can, and then move the bees into one of the hives.  Once that's done, the new beekeeping year should be properly under way.

Market Day

Saturday was a first for The Southdown Apiary, as I got to set up my very own stall as part of the Bear Flat Community Market & Café.  Mrs Beekeeper and I headed down early doors to carry in the stock and get set up:

It was a really fun morning, as I got to meet some new people in the community, talk about my bees and honey, and sell a few jars.  Huge thanks to the Bear Flat Association and Helen, Judith and Joy for booking me a table, and for all the work they do in organising the market every month.

The good news is there are still some jars left, and I'm hoping to have a table at the next one on 21st January (9.30am – 12.30pm).  So if you're a Bath resident (or visiting), please do pop in and say hello!

Introducing... Queen Henrietta!

Science warning: this post contains actual science. You have been warned...

Every beehive has a single queen bee, and the queen in hive #1 is called Henrietta. She is named after Henrietta Swan Leavitt, who was an astronomer who changed the way we measure the size of the universe.

Henrietta Swan Leavitt was born in Massachusetts, and attended college in Ohio before transferring to Massachusetts' Society for the Collegiate Instruction of Women (later Radcliffe College).  In her fourth year, she studied astronomy, as well as working as a 'computer' at the Harvard College Observatory where she measured and catalogued the brightness of stars from photographic plates.

After finishing college, Henrietta spent some time travelling in Europe before returning to the Harvard College Observatory in 1903.  Working under director Edward Charles Pickering, Henrietta began studying variable stars (stars which oscillate between brighter and dimmer luminosity - also known as 'Cepheid variables') in the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds.  She published her analysis of 1,777 variable stars in 1908, and found that brighter variables had a longer period - in other words, if the variable star is brighter, the length of time between maximum and minimum luminosity is longer.

Building on her earlier work, in 1912 Henrietta published a new paper based on a sample of 25 variable stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud.  In this new paper, Henrietta established that there was a direct relationship between a variable star's brightness and period.  If you look at figure 2 on page 3 of the 1912 paper, there's a really nice graph showing the linear relationship between the magnitude and (logarithm of the) period of the stars, with the upper line showing the maximum brightness, and the lower line the minimum brightness.

Henrietta reasoned that, because all 25 stars in her sample were in the same galaxy, they were all roughly the same distance from Earth.  This meant that the logarithm of the period was related to the intrinsic brightness of the star.  Which further meant that, if you had two variable starts with the same period, but one appeared dimmer than the other from Earth, then the dimmer one must be further away, and the difference in distance would be directly related to the difference in brightness.  There was only one problem - at the time, there was no method to determine the distance to the Small Magellanic Cloud, and therefore no way to calibrate absolute distance based on Henrietta's 25 stars.

Fortunately, a year later, Danish astronomer Ejnar Hertzsprung measured some much closer cepheid variables using the parallax method (basically a fancy version of Pythagoras's theorem, based on the earth's orbit).  He was then able to use Henrietta's work to calculate the distance to the Small Magellanic Cloud.  (Oddly, his initial calculations had the Small Magellanic Cloud 10 times closer than it actually is, but the error was soon corrected).

Before Henrietta's work, the parallax method was the best available technique for measuring distance in the universe, but was only accurate up to a few hundred light years.  Henrietta's ground-breaking analysis expanded the accurate measurement of astronomical distances up to about 20 million light years.  She quite literally expanded the frontier of human understanding of the universe.

You can find out more about Henrietta Swan Leavitt here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrietta_Swan_Leavitt

Here is a photograph of her namesake, queen Henrietta: