Tales from Calgary

Hey Everyone,

As I promised a few weeks ago there was a second tale of Top bar beekeeping I had to tell. Again, I got bogged down in other things and have finally gotten around to rounding up all the pictures of my adventure.

It started in February when I went down to Red Deer to meet up with Eliese Watson. Eliese is the founder of Apiaries and Bees for Communities, A.B.C., down in Calgary. For the past couple of years she has been working non-stop to promote pollinators of all kinds but her hardest work has been growing the urban beekeeping scene in Calgary like nobody's business. I had learnt that she was planning a Co-op purchase of nucs from a local source, Bill Stagg, out of B.C. and I was thrilled at the idea of getting my hands on some locally raised bees and queens so I eagerly signed up.

During this time my father was showing quite a lot of interest in beekeeping. He grew up in the prairies on the farm so it wasn't anything unfamiliar to him. When I posed the question as to if he wanted to keep the Nuc I ordered down in Calgary in their backyard he was on it like white on rice. Due to his connections with friends that have wood working shops my Dad was able to build his entire top bar in a weekend, goes to show what having the right tools will do for you, it took Beatrice and I 2 weeks to build ours. As the pick-up date grew nearer though, my mother was growing more anxious about all the perceived issues and problems of backyard beekeeping. In the end, she would have nothing of it and I started my search for an alternative location within Calgary so that my Dad could continue on and enjoy the beekeeping experience. The help came from none other than my own Mother-in-law, she is an avid gardener and had no qualms with the bees...as long as she didn't receive too many complaints and only if my Dad did all the work.

Dad's hive, right next to the house.

The weekend of the Nuc pickup was quite the spectacle. Eliese, who had obviously been working like a bee, had around 100 people show up to pick up their bees and learn about how to hive them. Men, women and children of all ages were there in veils and bee suits, Calgary is definitely headed in the right direction. The weather however had different plans for that week. After we put the bees in the backyard it proceeded to rain and be miserable for a week. Eventually the sun broke through and my Dad was able to put the bees into the hive. Since then he and my mother-in-law have been avid beekeepers, doing their inspections and observing the hive. From all the emails and pictures they send it's quite obvious that the hive is doing very well. I am still a bit envious that I cannot have a top bar in my backyard without risking another call from my loony neighbour, but I think maybe after all our landscaping is done I might sneak one in next year and let the chips fall where they may.

Great looking comb.

Can you see the queen?

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY!

That's right folks, today marks 1 year of Edmonton's NewBees! It's been so much fun teaching and talking to all my friends about beekeeping here in Edmonton, and everyone is so supportive and inquisitive.

Things have been busy and things have been dormant, like bees during winter, but there always seems to be new things to share. Thanks for sticking it out during those long winter months without any posts. Here's hoping for another year of great beekeeping info.

In celebration of this milestone, I've gone out and picked up a new URL for the site. You can now access the site by using www.newbees.ca If they ever make beekeeping legal in Edmonton this will eventually be transformed into a urban beekeeping website so that everyone who needs info or courses can find that information!

Apologies and Top Bars

Hey Everyone,

I'd like to start off this post with a sincere apology to those readers who contacted me via newbees@telus.net. I honestly forgot about this account as I had only received a few emails from friends and a tonne of spam. While puttering around today I remembered to check it and had half a dozen emails from readers dating back to January. I will be more vigilant in checking in the future!

Now onto the good stuff. Top Bars! I know you are all thinking, "Finally! He's been muttering and carrying on about these for months." Yes, I have and now have the tale of 2 top bar hives.

The first tale is one you are already familiar with. My friend Beatrice and I have been building a set of top bar hives together starting back in April. I decided to spare everyone a giant photo montage of the building process as there are hundreds already out there on the web. I thought I'd focus more on the nuances and differences between Langstroth hives in future posts. As for the building process, it took Beatrice an I about a week and a half to build our hives. We didn't quite have a great woodworking shop and were using whatever tools we could find, we did eventually get the job done though. Beatrice's package arrived May 4th at Bee Maid, and we headed out with her hive and everything else we needed to hive the package. The bees came in a cardboard tube with plastic ventilation caps, which is different then the screened box you see in most YouTube videos. I do think this makes for a much easier installation process.
If you have children, be sure to save it. Its heavy duty construction would make it the Excalibur of any cardboard tube sword fight.

We arrived at the acreage, within the city limits, and got the top bar hive setup. Once we have everything arranged properly we unleashed the bees. This process was extremely simple. First, using a spray bottle filled with a 1:1 sugar syrup you give the bees a good spray down on the end of the tube you are going to open. This will limit the amount of bees that will fly once you pop the top. After they are sufficiently covered in sugar water, you remove the staples holding the plastic cap using a screw driver. You want to do this at the end that has the green mesh hanging out, because this is what the queen cage is attached to. Then, making sure you have a hold of the green mesh, you give the tube a sharp tap on the ground to get all the bees at the bottom, remove the cap and slowly pull out the queen cage. Once you have taken that out and have placed it on the hive, you can turn the tube upside down over the hive and give it a good shake. All of the bees will come out as a clump and then you can lay the tube with the open end facing the hive in front of the hive, any bees that are still inside will find their new home eventually. The last step is to remove the cork from the queen cage and hang it from the middle top bar. If there is no candy in the queen cage, you can easily make up a soft fondant using icing sugar and water, or if you don't want to do that you can come back 2-3 days later and release her manually.

Overall it was a super easy process and the bees loved their new home. Beatrice's most recent inspection last week has shown that the bees have already drawn out 6 full bars of comb and are still building. As a side note, you will always want to provide a feeder for bees coming out of a package. They don't have any food stores and if the weather is lousy or there is a lack of forage they will need it to start building some comb.
Such a nice colour!

The queen cage is suspended in the middle, the happy bees below are fanning pheromones letting the other bees know to come on in.

The second tale I have is about my nuc that I had ordered from Eliese down at ABC in Calgary, however there's a twist! Come back in the next few days and you'll hear about my adventures down in Calgary.

Queen of the Sun

In case you didn't know yesterday, May 29th, was the day of the honey bee. A nation wide lobby is pushing to get this day recognized in as many provinces and municipalities as possible, and so far they are doing a pretty good job. As part of the celebrations Metro Cinema, in partnership with Lola Canola Honey, brought the documentary "Queen of the Sun" to Edmonton. Yesterday was the first screening, but there are 4 more. 7pm and 9pm, on May 30th and 31st. I would highly recommend that anyone with any level of interest in honey bees, or the plight of the honey bee go see this movie.

As for my personal thoughts on the movie, it did a very good job of touching base on all the things a person, who knows nothing about bees, should know about honey bees. It interviews a wide range of people from all over the world who are directly, or indirectly, affected by Colony Collapse Disorder. Noting that I am not, or never will be, a film critic I did find some of the cinematography off. There were also a few sections and cuts that seemed to be a bit out of place or off topic, but generally the flow of the movie was OK. The only other criticism I would have, and this may differ depending on who you talk to, was that most of the people they had tended to skew more to the Hippie side of things, for lack of a better word. Yes, I acknowledge that because of how honey bees are so closely intertwined with the very essence of nature there will be more than a few hippies, tree huggers, and environmentalists preaching the virtues of the bees. However, with the exception of one bloke in London most of the urban beekeepers came off on the extreme end of the scale, and even he was a bit eccentric but then again you do have to be a bit eccentric to become a beekeeper.

I was hoping to see more about the average person who falls in love with the bees once they are exposed to a hive for the first time. A teacher, a lawyer, or a child; people who don't necessarily practice yoga and eat only whole grains and vegetables. A powerful message that screams out that bees aren't dangerous and if you just stopped for a minute, allowing your childhood fear to melt away into the peaceful humming of an busy apiary on warm summer's day, you too could fall in love with these insects.

SO GO! See for yourself and find that love! There are 4 more screenings. Check out these links for more info. It is being shown downtown at the Citadel Theaters in Ziedler Hall.

METRO CINEMA

LOLA CANOLA HONEY

The Andrenids are amoung us!

Two weeks ago my wife and I were outside getting our vegetable garden prepped and seeded. While I was puttering around I noticed what I thought to be a few honey bees buzzing around. However, their behavior was very odd. They were slowly flying around the ground, occasionally landing to walk around a bit before taking off again. I began watching intently as my curiosity peaked. Laying on my stomach I followed the progress of one of these insects, as I landed in front of me I noticed that it was very close in appearance to a honey bee. The differences were subtle, while the head looked like a honey bee and it still had a fuzzy thorax, the hair was reddish yellow in colour, the abdomen was shiny jet black and smooth much like a fly. Another thing I noticed was that they were almost silent during flight, many times flying over my head without a sound. After a few minutes of observation, I noticed that one of the bees had permanently landed and was starting digging a hole into the dirt. Most curious. I ran inside to get my google on.

My instincts were right! It was a solitary species of bee native to Alberta. The Andrenid Bee, also known as "mining bees". These bees will dig a nest so they can lay an egg. They will then forage for pollen which they can stock up around the egg. Once there is enough food for the egg, the female will seal up the entrance and leave. While considered a solitary species, usually there will be many nests in close proximity giving the appearance of a colony.

This leaves me in a bit of a dilemma because the bees have setup home in the clay I placed around my house last year to grade. I had planned on compacting it and laying some topsoil and sod...can I do that now? Decisions, decisions.

Here are some pictures of the nests and bees. They took me a while to get and I bet my neighbours thought I was a bit nuts crawling around my front yard military style with camera in hand.


One of many burrows.


Bee inside a burrow, if you look closely you can see her face.


Posing for her close up.

Lazy Days

Hey Folks,

Just a quick update to let everyone know that I will be posting a few posts in the coming days. I've been a bit lazy in getting pictures off my camera and have lots to show everyone.

Everything from the new Top Bar hives that my friend and I have built and more recently installed a package of bees into, to my new local friends the Andrenid bees.

Be sure to check back soon.

Spring has arrived!

Hey everyone,

I've been meaning to post on how my installation of the candy board went last week, but I got busy with preparations for my Top bar hive building adventure. I'll squeeze it in with today's post.

So spring has finally arrived here in Edmonton. We've had almost 2 weeks of above zero highs and the majority of snow has melted away leaving brown/green spots of grass. Before that happened though, I went out to the bee yard to put my candy board on the hive so the girls have something to eat until local plants start to bloom. Everything went well, but I was surprised by the size of the cluster. I was expecting only a small corner or a quarter of the top to be bees, when I opened the cover they covered half of the frames. This created a bit of an issue because I now had to herd the bees around in order to place the candy board on top of the frames. I solved this by breaking the board up into smaller pieces. Next year, I will just forgo this issue by pouring the candy directly into a spare cover that way I can just replace the covers and be done.

Herding bees as I add pieces of candy board.

I headed out today to ensure that my hive wasn't bogged down in a lagoon of melting snow. Mario had expressed some concerns about his hives, but I think mine will do fine because I have them on cinder blocks. As expected, Mario's acreage was very soupy and I might actually have to purchase a pair of rubber boots for my next visit. A balmy 14°C meant a flurry of activity at the entrances of the hives, and the past 2 weeks of warm weather had melted all of the snow from around my hive providing easy access. With the easy access, I decided to unwrap the hives and do a little spring cleaning. Mario had an extra pollen patty as well, so I quickly popped the cover off to put it on top of the frames. The pollen patty will help the colony to start raising brood until they can start gathering larger quantities from blooming flowers. I was happy to see that the bees had been feasting on the candy I had added a week or so before.

Pollen patty, right side, and remnants of the candy board.

Once the hive was unwrapped I removed the entrance reducer and with a hooked piece of metal began fishing around the lower entrance. I was surprised by the amount of debris and dead bees that kept coming out with each swipe. I took a solid 15 minutes of scraping until the hook came out clean. The giant pile of corpses was quite a depressing sight, however it highlights the stark reality that beehives face during winter. So many bees give up their lives so the colony can survive and continue their genetic line.

Mounds of dead bees form a mass grave in front of the hive.

With my spring cleaning done, its back to playing the waiting game. When the weather gets even warmer I will be able to do a proper inspection to ensure everything is peachy keen. Until then, I sit and cheer on the dandelions....and maybe build a top bar hive or two.

BEFORE.

AFTER.