Ice Plant is Blooming and the Bees are Out

Today is a lovely day. The sun is shining and the temperature is in the upper sixties. Just two weeks ago the temperature was minus 10, so I was surprised to see anything growing, never mind blooming. But there are at least three varieties of ice plant blooming and the bees have found them.

The Bees are Out and About!

Today was a glorious warm sunny day - one of the best we've had so far this year. The sun was out, the temperature was warm and the wind was fairly calm. The sun shown on the fronts of the bee hives, warming them up and letting light into the tiny little front doors. The bees, who have been clustered inside keeping warm most of the time this winter, came out for some flying time and to relieve themselves. There are now lots of little brown spots all over the area near the hives. There was also the chore of carrying out the dead. Bess don't live very long and some die in the hive during the winter and these corpses need to be carried out of the hive and dumped. Normally the dead bee is carried off a distance from the hive, but when it's quite chilly out, the body will get dumped just off the hive landing.
The bees were also flying about looking for anything tasty, so I put out some broken up honey comb I had stored. After finding the sticky sweet wax, some bees went back to the hive to report their find by doing the happy waggle bee dance on the front of the hive. The excited bee would dance around in a figure eight while waggling its butt. Through out the day, the bees worked hard to clean the honey off the wax. Once they've gotten all the honey out of this wax that they can, I'll use it for making beeswax candles.


Today I also saw my very first flower of the year - iris reticulata.


I'm surprised a bee wasn't on it. It's the only flower I saw anywhere today. Yet some bees found enough pollen from somewhere to fill their little pollen baskets and bring it back to the hive. Look at the bulges on the hind leg of one of the bees entering the hive in this picture.

Bee Town USA: An Educational Tiny Town of Beehives

Honeybee - Apis melifera   photo by C. Netter

Greg, the beekeeper has started a Kickstarter project to fund Bee Town USA. This will be a project to promote bee conservation through art by creating a curiosity that attracts the community to visit. Read all about it here. Greg is the person who educated me about bees - both honeybees and our Colorado native bees. Beetown's purpose is to educate the public about these bees in a fun way.

Happy Honeybee Day

Today is National Honey bee Day

http://www.nationalhoneybeeday.com/

Thirsty Bees

Honey bees need a good source of water. They need this for more than just hydration of themselves as individuals, they also use water for cooling the hive and for thinning honey to feed brood. The temperature inside the hive has to be constant or the brood will die, so bees have their own form of "swamp cooler". When the hive gets hot, they bring in water and cool the hive through evaporation by fanning their wings.

Fortunately for the bees in the back of my yard, I have several water gardens. The bees can stand on the edge of water lily pads to suck up water. There is also the  "bird bath" I put out years ago, which has become a major watering hole for bees. On hot days there is quite a line up all along the edge. I put rocks in it to help bees get out if they fall in. Bees are very poor swimmers and drown rather quickly if they can't get a hold of something to pull themselves out.

This watering hole is a great place to see the variety of  honey bees from the hives out back and from other places in the surrounding area. Some are the typical golden honey bee with tan fur and some are quite dark with grey fur like the one below. The bee on the left above is almost entirely black.

What a Sticky Mess

Apparently pollen from Rose of Sharon (Hibiscus syriacus) is particularly sticky. This poor bee is covered in it and had some trouble flying because of it.

It kept trying to wipe the pollen off its back and eyes. I hope its hive mates were able to get it all off.

I had seen bees elsewhere in the yard with some of this pollen on them and I was wondering where it came from. I'd heard that bees only go to one type of flower per trip from the hive, but this bee looks like its been to the Rose of Sharon before coming to this rudbeckia. The pollen in its pollen baskets on its legs is a much deeper orange color than the white pollen of the rose of sharon stuck on its face.

And this bee on the mint has Rose of Sharon pollen on it as well.

Peponapis pruinosa Probably Pollinated the Pilgrim's Pie Pumpkins Perfectly

I'd always heard that honey bees were necessary for pollination for many of the plants we eat. That is quite true, but there are some plants that are pollinated quite well by our native pollinators.
This is especially true for New World plants - plants that originated in our hemisphere. Pumpkins are native to North America, so they have been pollinated by North American pollinators for a very long time. One such pollinator, and probably the most important pumpkin pollinator is the squash bee.
The pumpkin bloom is a short live bloom that doesn't even last an entire day, the squash bee rises early in the morning, before the honey bee, to visit the pumpkin flowers and the blooms of other cucurbits. In my garden, the pumpkins and squash blooms are full of the squash bee Peponapis pruinosa from early in the morning until the blooms close up. Sometimes I see a honey bee try to get into the flower but she often gives up when she sees it already full of these other, honey bee sized, long horned bees.
Peponapis pruinosa is a solitary bee that nests in the ground. They dig holes for their nests near the pumpkins and squash that they pollinate. This may explain some of the holes I see in the ground near the garden.
The most common view I have of them is of their butts sticking up out of the flowers.

Bees Dancing on the Front Porch

For almost a week the bees of hive 6 have been washboarding. Washboarding is the term used for bees rhythmically rocking back and forth in a large group. While it sort of looks like they could be scrubbing the hive, nobody really knows why they do it. Studies have shown that it is going on inside the hive as well as outside at the entrance. Here is a closer view.

The Ecumenical Sunday Sunflower Service for Bees

This past Sunday I was out taking pictures of the sunflowers and noticed four different species of bee on this particular blossom. All bees seemed to be getting along fine. Several of them are species I hadn't noticed before.

In the upper left was a Long Horned bee, Melissodes  Subgenus Eumelissodes. It was a fat bee about the size of a honeybee, with legs covered in yellow pollen.

In the upper right, there was a little green sweat bee. I've seen them before.

 In the lower right was a little bee that is new to me, Pseudopanurgus.

 And closer to the center was the familiar honeybee.

The Anythink Library Bee Cam

Greg, the Beekeeper, just sent me a link to the Anythink Library Bee Cam. He has two hives at the Commerce City, Colorado location and the library put a video camera on these hives.
http://beecam.anythinklibraries.org/view/index.shtml
Not only can you view the hives in real time, you can control the camera by zooming in, tilting it up and down as well as panning right to left. You can watch the bees as they enter and leave the hives. Very bee geeky.

Billions of Buzzing Bees

It's probably only thousands of bees, but it looks like a lot to me. I just put out a fresh pan of honey comb for the bees to clean up.  This time I smashed it up really well before putting it out so the bees could do a good job of getting the honey out. Once they are done with it, I'll melt the comb down, filter it, and use it for candles.

More Colorado Native Bees

Continuing from the previous post...

I used to think that honey bees did the vast majority of pollination in my yard here in Jefferson County, Colorado. The more I look, the more I notice just how many other insects are in my flowers and many of them are native Colorado bees.

This little green sweat bee, Augochlorella aurata, is often seen in the flowers of my sedum or dill weed. It is a very tiny bee with such a beautiful metallic sheen.

We also seem to have quite a variety of leaf cutter bees and their relatives. Besides this fellow from the last post, Lithurgus apicalis,

we also have other bees in the Megachilidae family such as this tiny white faced bee:

this little bee:

this little green eyed Anthidium oblongatum on sedum:

and this honeybee sized Megachile perihirta with the incredible orange butt:

And there are the bumble bees. Here's one in my Salvia transylvanica:

Here is the cute little orange striped bumble bee, Bombus huntii in Penstemon Red Rocks:

The Beekeeper Inspects His Hives

Today the beekeeper came over to see how the hives are doing. I stood back and took lots of pictures which can be seen in this slide view:

Some of the comb is held in the frames by chicken wire.  This comb came from the original hive that was removed from somebody's house and the chicken wire holds it in place until the bees have glued it into the frames with more wax. When the comb is sufficiently fixed into the frames by the bees, the beekeeper removes the chicken wire.

Some of these hives came from swarms and some from hive removals from buildings. So far, they all are making brood, which is a good sign.

The Solar Beeswax Melter

Recently, the beekeeper who has hives in my yard brought over some comb for the bees to clean up. The bees eagerly went to work cleaning the honey off this sticky wax.

After they were done with it, I put some of this wax in my solar wax melter to melt and filter the comb and hopefully end up with nice clean beeswax.  I had all the parts to make this solar wax melter so it cost me nothing. It's made from a large Styrofoam box that my medicine comes in, a piece of plexiglass that was laying around, some nylon door screen that was also laying around, a piece of paper towel to filter the wax and a bungee to hold the plexiglass on.

First, some water was put into the Styrofoam box, after which the door screen was put across the top of the box and held in place with sewing pins. After that, I laid a paper towel on the screen and put the messy comb on that.  Finally, the plexiglass was placed on top and held in place with the bungee cord. The box was placed in full sun and allowed to sit there all day. When the wax melted through the paper towel, it dripped through and fell into the water, where it hardened. The wax floated to the top and any honey still in the comb  sunk to the bottom. Later the next morning, when it had all cooled down, I scooped the wax out using a little fine mess strainer. 

Here is the fresh, unmelted comb:

Here is what's left, a day later. All brown stuff is junk I don't want in the beeswax. But I saved this dirty waxy paper towel to use as a fire starter for when we want a fire in the back porch fire pit.

And here is the nice clean wax that I will use to make candles with:

Bee Hives in the Yard

Back in late May a local beekeeper advertised on Denver's Craigslist that he was looking for places to put his hives in exchange for some of the honey. I've wanted some hives in my yard for some time now so I jumped at the chance and contacted him. Greg, of  Dakota Bees (Dakotabees.com) came out to check out the yard and found lots of flowering plants, plus water gardens that would provide water for the bees so he said he would be happy to put some hives here.  He removes wild hives from people's homes and also captures swarms and puts them into hives.
The following week on May 26 the little yellow hive in the front of the picture above show up with a newly captured swarm inside. He showed us how to make sugar water for the bees to give them a start until they have made comb inside the hive. We took a video of them their first morning:
Hive video
On June 3, two more hives showed up. The first one contained bees from a wild hive removal from a home and the second one contained a very large swarm. June 4, another hive showed up with a medium sized swarm in it. June 8, the fifth hive showed up with another wild hive removal from a home.
I hope the bees do well in their new home.