The Calls of a Queen Bee

* Watch one of the HD versions if you have a fast connection. The HD quality is much better even though in this case you’re really listening to the sounds rather than the picture.

Hello there! I have watched this video about 15 times now and really wanted to share it with you all. The other day Mark observed some queen behavior he had not witnessed before and he even managed to capture it on video. I am so happy! As I watched it over and over and listened to the sounds, Mark pulled out some books and read up on the sounds and behaviors.

The first sound you hear is the roaming queen “piping” a challenge to another queen. In this instance, the other queen is a young one still in the queen cup you see on the frame later in the video. In response, the young queen in the cup will make what is called a “quacking” call. See if you can differentiate the different calls. Hope you enjoy this as much as we did. The bees are constantly fascinating us and we love it!

This just in: It’s bonus day at the Bee Ranch! We just received an email from a Texas A&M student that Mark first met at the Pearl Farmers Market. Alison shot a video there of her interview with Mark and then she joined us at the Bee Ranch when we had the advance class (How to Build Up Your Hives for Spring) for folks who were picking up their nucs. It covered more than just transferring the nuc frames to their permanent homes and we are seriously thinking that if we continue to sell nucs in future, we may require this class – it hurts when nucs end up dying (for different reasons) on those folks who chose not to take a class (especially newbie beekeepers). Requiring the class may also cut down on the amount of emails and phones we get from worried parents wondering all sorts of things about their nucs. Anyway, that’s a different post really so here’s one of the videos Alison recorded when she visited us. This one is about the importance of the Queen Bee to the hive. I love that she came to do this on a day when I could not observe the class since we had nuc customers to tend to at the same time class was held. Thanks, Alison! We enjoyed your visit.

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The Only Good Mite…

Yes, these are dead mites, killed by our application of a natural miticide called HopGuard. The mites are the oval shapes, about the size of a pin-head. (The fuzzy stuff is the cardboard used with the HopGuard product. The bees chew it literally to bits and remove it from the hive.) Twenty-four hours after the HopGuard application I checked these white boards, which catch the dead mites as they fall to the bottom of the hive. I was surprised to find between 100 and 200 dead mites fallen from the hives at Elm Creek. The hives at the Farm only had about 20 dead mites on their white boards. The Elm Creek hives either had a serious infestation of mites, or the HopGuard is very effective at killing them. I’ll do mite counts again soon to see how they are doing.

I treated the hives at the Pizza Yard with HopGuard on Friday. The weather was cool and windy with some sprinkles. The bees did not appreciate being disturbed in those conditions, and for this hive the HopGuard application was the final straw. At least they appear to be big and strong!

Today we had a knock on the door from a Turkish beekeeper and his family! The parents are visiting from Turkey and found us through a beekeeping association and our website. It was so great to meet them and to share our backyard bees and honey house with them. If only there had been time to take them to a bee yard. Maybe next year when they visit again. The father has about one hundred hives in northern Turkey, near Russia, and we have a standing invitation to visit them. This made our day for sure. Meeting wonderful people like this family is one of our favorite things about keeping bees and running GBR. You just never know who’s going to knock on the door or walk through the gate. And it is awesome.

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Monday News – Groupon & Global Visits

Happy Monday morning, everyone. Just a quick note to share some interesting news with you. First of all, we are featured on Groupon again! Nevermind that it says Round Rock Honey and that they didn’t use the correct text in the body. 🙂 The main correction to note is that the class is in Seguin with me and Mark. And our bees don’t hum Boyz II Men. Maybe classic jazz and pop from time to time.

Second bit of interesting news – so far today, we had visitors from Brunei (Malaysia) and Tulbagh (South Africa)! We love to see where people are from and especially when they keep coming back. Very nice to have folks visit from so far away. Thanks!

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Bee Dog

I was checking on the country bees this afternoon when this pretty red dog wandered up. Not sure who he belongs to but he was friendly and very comfortable among the bees. Maybe he heard me tell Thien last night that I sometimes get lonely when I work by myself. During the past two weeks I’ve re-queened three weak hives (stressed from the summer drought, I think) and created two new hives from one strong one. I hope they have time to build up enough to survive the winter. Thanks to everyone who purchased honey. We hope to have more next year, if the weather and my beekeeping skills both improve.

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