My bees have been very active the last few days. It has been 50+ degrees in late November. Many have been coming in with huge bright orange pollen packets. What could they be getting so much pollen from this time of year in Pennsylvania?
I noticed my bees doing the same I cant imagine where they are getting it from. What part of Central Pa are you in. I am in Harrisburg. Just trying to find some other beekeepers near Harrisburg to network with. I tried to PM you but it would not go through for some reason.
Greg
I don't know about there, but the grass is still green here and it was 70 F on Thursday and Friday. Something must have bloomed. Dandelions would be a likely culprit.
I've seen a few Dandelions.. some ground cover w/ small blue/white flowers.. and some turnip type plants w/ yellow blooms. All the golden rod is toast.. the mornings go from 26-28 F to over 60 during the day. It's nice to see them flying about in late November.. I still have my tupperware feeders on all 3 hives in an empty Med. Super.. noticed on one hot day(70) that one had leaked some.
So nice to hear that you can still have warm days, although the nights are cold it sounds. For the next couple of months, our daytime temps probably would not get over 45 F, it stays pretty cool, night and day in our winter. Right now, it is extraordinary cold -12 C, no bees flying around here. great day. Cindi
my bees are also working like crazy, i think it was sunday..or saturday when i watched them, one hive is especially crazy, at least 70% bees that came back, had a FULL load of pollen. temperatures are rather extreme, 10 C in the morning, and up to 18 in the afternoon. but slowly, real slowly winter's coming. like they say, slowly but surelly.
Here is a pretty dependable site to find out what is flowing, it is more for allergies, but when plant and tree pollens are flowing, you'll usually find it here - I haven't seen it posted here yet, sorry if I missed it
http://www.pollen.com/
Good luck :) although I think this site will NOT help now because pollen allergies isn't an issue now in much of the country.
Quote from: beemaster on November 29, 2006, 01:11:59 PM
Here is a pretty dependable site to find out what is flowing, it is more for allergies, but when plant and tree pollens are flowing, you'll usually find it here - I haven't seen it posted here yet, sorry if I missed it
http://www.pollen.com/
Good luck :) although I think this site will NOT help now because pollen allergies isn't an issue now in much of the country.
Great, we have to think of next year, that is as important as now. Be prepared. We all went to scouts and girl guides, right? Well, I did. So many people have so many allergies to pollens, it really is a cryin' shame. I spend about 85% of my waking hours outside (if weather permits and does not permit), that if I was allergic to anything in the out of doors, I would be a very sad and unhappy woman. Oh for the summer time that we know is coming on, only a fleeting moment in time. Great day. Cindi
Hello All
I have been busy for awhile but i am back to say that my bees are bringing in very little pollen. I also did my last treatment for the fall and no more deformed wing bees seen. My girls have been enjoying the warm weather we have been having and i went in and took a look at them and boy to my surprise hive three has all but four frames fill with capped honey and two has about five frames full and the queen is laying and i even found a drone in two but they all seem to bee doing very well but now cold weather is coming so they will be going in for a while until febuary.
Tom :-D
Hi Tom.. good to see you back.. have you feeding? December 1st & 70 degree's.. it's bound to get cold sometime. Here at work(Hanover, PA) I noticed that the clover is blooming.
When on earth does winter begin, way down south??? we have not had clover blooming for a long time. Great day. Cindi
Thanks Beemaster
That was a great link for pollen and good for plant ID etc. etc. It's is bookmarked now and will be referenced lots .
Hello Kensfarm
I have done only a little feeding from what they have stored they don't need any more feeding. Yes it's warm here but tomarrow it will be cold as heck and they will be going into cluster. Hive three was the one i was worried about but then i did some research and found that carniolans don't need much to make it thru the winter. I have treated with apilife-var f4rom brushy mountian bee farm and boy does it work like a charm since my queens have stopped laying i have not seen anymore bees with deformed wings and no sign of mites but it does not mean they are gone. But hive #3 has six and a half frames full from top to bottom and two has five and a half frames full and one is still my best one.
Tom
Tom, good to hear from you again and glad to hear that the bee's are doing well.
Tom, you said that you did some research on the Carniolan breed. I did the same thing in-depth, because our bee course instructor always orders this breed from Australia in the spring. He runs about 1,200 hives. I wondered why he chose this breed and wanted to find out why. I am sure that all breeds of bees are wonderful, bees are simply wonderful. Period. I know that we can't take everything that we read on the net as absolutely the full truth, it may be biased, but I really did read some interesting stuff about this breed and it all makes qutie a bit of sense. Probably this breed shares many of the great attributes of other breeds, but I will recap what I read. Overwintering population is smaller than that of other bee races, but during spring and summer, the population increases substantially to a comparable size to the other races. They build up very rapidly in spring (reason why they are referred to as ‘spring honey flow beesâ€). This characteristic allows the colonies to take full advantage of the EARLY honey flows, but they require careful handling, due to the propensity for swarming because of the fast spring build-up. Their tongue is longer (6.5 to 6.7 mm) which is well adapted for clover, a very high elbow joint and very short hair. Carniolan are gentle and non-aggressive, possess excellent sense of orientation, taking advantage of mountainous ranges (that is good for us here) and do not rob honey from other beehives (not so sure if that is really true though). Evidently the Carniolan forager bee lives 4 to 9 days longer than other races. Strongly resistant to nosema and dystentery, and can spend up to 150 days inside the hive in winter. This breed is a good wax producer and naturally clean (hence their advantage in comb honey production) and low tendency to propolise. Interesting information. I don’t know how true it all is, but my Carniolans are definitely sweet tempered. I can tell this immediately when I worked with new packages that I got last spring, compared to my other colonies that were overwintered, (which may have had a new mix in the breed due to queen supercedure or nuc/split activities). I think that I heard someone saying in the bee club that I attend though, that Australian packages have a tendency for supercedure of their queen, maybe they had an experience with this, I never really asked very much of it. I did have a swarm that I caught during my first summer of beekeeping. This was a horribly protective hive and man were they cranky, so I know about cranky and sweet bees for sure. I have a good comparison. Great day. Cindi
Quote from: Cindi on December 01, 2006, 11:50:51 AM
When on earth does winter begin, way down south??? we have not had clover blooming for a long time. Great day. Cindi
Well we just had a bit of winter hit here. Temps as low as 12F. Snow with winds as high as 40mph. We got about three inches, but the wind piled it up in places and cleaned the ground bare in other places. Then in a couple more days we should have temps back up in the 60Fs. This could be the only burst of winter we have. Last year we really didn't have winter at all. Most years the winter weather really hits in March. Go figure.
Winter? What´s that? My hives yesterday Dec 6.
(http://img297.imageshack.us/img297/3025/dsc08476lb5.jpg)
My wife wants cold, she enjoy the chimney, As I have to cut the wood I prefer the cold with moderation.
Abejaruco, you really do take some nice pictures. What a great closeup of the nectar/honey. That bee is so dark, it looks almost hairless. This is a funny thing about hairless looking bees. Where I live, if one is experiencing robbing in late summer, one of the noticeable attributes of the "robber" bee is that they are usually dark, with very little hair, having somewhat a shiny appearance. They say that this is because they do so much fighting that they lose their hair in the process. I don't know if this is bare fact or fiction, but I certainly have noticed myself during some robbing on my hives, that indeed the robbers did to have this darker appearance, and of course acted differently than the forager bees coming home. Hmm..Have a great day and keep posting pictures. Cindi
Sorry for butting in... That of shiny, hairless bees? Being so, cause of fighting, is all very likely a bunch of bunk...
If bees look darker and are not "shiny" there is a possibility that they are feral.
In most instances the different looking ones - shiny, hairless, leathery looking ones, are just old bees from one's own hives. . . . .
Regards,
Trot
Quote from: Trot on December 07, 2006, 11:19:26 AM
Sorry for butting in... That of shiny, hairless bees? Being so, cause of fighting, is all very likely a bunch of bunk...
If bees look darker and are not "shiny" there is a possibility that they are feral.
In most instances the different looking ones - shiny, hairless, leathery looking ones, are just old bees from one's own hives. . . . .
Regards,
Trot
Frank, honestly, do not ever think that you are butting in. Your input is more than welcomed!!!!! When I asked someone how to tell if my hive (in the very beginning of my beekeeping experience) was being robbed, they told me to watch for hairless, shiny black bees. I did. I did see that description of bees. But now that you say that Frank, I believe that this is probably more to the truth. Bunk, what a wonderful word, it really is a good one for sure. When I first experienced "robbing" with one of my hives, I was so new to beekeeping that I thought that they were just playing. Imagine that. that is really kind of a dumb when you think about it, but that is what I saw, bees tumbling around, looking like they were playing. Oh woe is me.!!! It was OK though, if this situation comes across my path this year, I have the means to deter them in so many ways. This is thanks to all the input I listen to from people that have had experience and of course, reading articles in books and on the internet. Watch out anything that is going to try and bug my bees this year, I am armed, and DANGEROUS!!! LOL. With all the things that have happened to me and my bees since my beginning, I would not change a thing. Learning is nothing more than bettering oneself, we learn by our mistakes and hopefully we will not make the same mistakes again, or at least try to not make them as deeply in the wrong way. I live to learn...great day. Cindi
Alice, my bees here in CA are also bringing back loads of pollen. Mostly the normal yellow color, but noticed some with BRIGHT orange pollen today. The bees bringing it back really stood out! I'm in the 'burbs' so am thinking it comes from someones late blooming flowers as it's still sunny here. Maybe Lily's, there are lots of types and some have orange stamens and pollen.
Jeff
Hello
Nice looking picture i must say so myself and good looking honey as for the hairless bee i have seen in my NWC's that half of my workers are all black and some are brown and black. And i have also seen in my first hive that some of my girls are black at the head and the very end and the middle are a light blonde color but they are all good girls and now they are in thier winter cluster it is 20 degrees here and sunday they are calling for 60's and 70's. So it is in the breeding that you may get different color it is said by the older beekeepers that the queen mates with several drones on her mating flight so their are different daddies so they come out from which sperm cell the drones gave up.
Tom
I hade carniolan 10 years but then i returned to italians again and my yield jumped 80%. The reason is only tendency of swarming.
Quote from: Cindi on December 02, 2006, 01:12:13 PM
Overwintering population is smaller than that of other bee races, but during spring and summer, the population increases substantially to a comparable size to the other races. They build up very rapidly in spring (reason why they are referred to as ‘spring honey flow beesâ€). This characteristic allows the colonies to take full advantage of the EARLY honey flows,
I feeded bees with pollen in spring and I found that Italians' spring build up is as fast as carniolans' is they get pollen. Carniolan gahther bigger pollen store ovet winter and italians eate their stores before winter and rasie bigger winter ball.
When you try to get early yild, it means early raise up and big hive and swarming. Some Italian stock are slow to swarm and they are very easy to handle.
Finsky, that was interesting what you say. I think that this year I am not going to focus on any specific breed. I thought that I would like to stick to Carniolan, but I think that I will just plain and simply get any that I can and be happy that I can. I know the Italian do consume more winter food because they raise brood early, so what though? Just make sure that they are fed enough for extra winter stores, if they consume so much. I want to get more into some more wax production this year, and I hear that the Carniolan have cleaner wax. Now I don't know that it makes a difference to me anyways, I don't really care what colour the wax is, in my eyes, wax is wax. So, I have to wonder about people's experience if there is a specific breed that is prone to making higher wax production or do they all make about the same amount? Strange question, but I would love an answer. Great day. Cindi