water foraging during June 2024 heatwave

In Atlanta, June 2024 was both hot and dry.  The daily temperatures were warmer than normal, touching the record high for a few days.  We accumulated 1.74 inches (4.4 cm) of rain compared to a normal June rainfall of 4.54 inches (11.5 cm).  

I rolled out the garden hose and watered daily.  The bees responded by drinking from the birdbath and packing around the edge of the ant moat that hangs above the hummingbird feeder.  

Next, I set out decorative bee-watering items with a dash of kosher salt.  How much salt is enough?  Follow this link to Salt preferences of honey bee water foragers and read that minimal salt is required to attract bees.  The unrelenting heat and the bees' keen memory of their new water source required that I top up the water several times a day.  I added a large chicken waterer 9/10 gal (3.3 liter) with a dash of kosher salt that kept up with the bees and evaporation at the waterer.  In my opinion, the key to attracting water foragers is to provide a permanent and dependable location for water.

NOAA's headline, June marked by record-setting U.S. heat waves, severe weather, highlighted tornados and flash flooding in Florida.   In Atlanta, the June 2024 experience was hot and dry.

Honey Bee Swarm Seasonality

Using David Marshall's (MABA’s swarm commander) 2022-2023 Atlanta swarm records I created a histogram graph with eight bins. The raw data has many of days with no swarms and combining two years in a simple graph does not completely patch days with no swarms days or sufficiently smooth the data. The histogram peaks on March 28 ± 10.5 days, and then there is a long tail into the summer months. 

I discovered a paper, Seasonal Cycle of Swarming in Honeybees, that combined six years of Ithaca, NY swarm emergence dates - I digitized the paper’s Figure 1A.  I created a histogram plot with nine bins. Figure 1A and the resulting histogram graph show a bimodal seasonal pattern – peaking on June 9 ± 7.5 days with a smaller peak in the summer months. 

 

 

I exchanged emails with one of the authors, Thomas Seeley, and shared how spring frost and fall frost climate data might reconcile these Atlanta and Ithaca swarm peaks. 

• The Ithaca x-axis contains fewer days than the Atlanta y-axis and is consistent with Ithaca's shorter growing season.
• In Atlanta and Ithaca, the peak swarm (orange circle) appeared before the local last spring frost.

I’ll leave it to the readers why honey bees in Atlanta don’t have a smaller summer peak like Ithaca – I don’t know. Having a pattern bias has sometimes served me well in making quick decisions, detecting missing data, or spotting corrupted data - what the typical swarm season pattern should look like is still up for grabs!

 

Swarm Trap - May 5th 2024

Swarm summary: It was an unusual swarm trap season.🤣 My neighbors helped me see a swarm select a sycamore tree cavity, and 43 days later this bee nest swarms and selected my swarm trap 7 houses away. Flight vigor at the bee nest has since increased - the bee nest is a gift that keeps giving!

 

I was hoping for something else! 

• 9th March - I installed 4 swarm traps in my neighborhood
• active scouting began at two 40-liter swarm traps hanging from crepe myrtle limbs. Each swarm trap contained:
• 5x deep frames with plastic starter strips
• UV-reactive blue swarm trap entrance
• synthetically produced Nasonov pheromone
• 23rd March in the early afternoon - my traps are passed over as the bees selected a cavity in the sycamore tree trunk using a cut-off limb entrance and active scouting of swarm traps subsided
  
• 29th April - sycamore bee nest entrance was obscured by a huge bee beard - see the 2nd photo.
  

In a roundabout way, the moment I've been waiting for!   

• active scouting restarted at the two 40-liter swarm traps
• 5th May at 5:30PM - bees selected my backyard 40-liter swarm trap and the sycamore bee nest entrance is no longer obscured by a huge bee beard - a flight journey of 290 feet (88 meters) - see the 1st photo.
  
• over the next 6 days after dark, I moved the occupied swarm trap in 5 steps towards my empty backyard hive stand.  The after-dark move was made easier by leveling the next location during daylight hours.
  
• 13th May - I transferred 5 deep swarm trap frames to 8-frame equipment and moved the swarm lure to the 8-frame landing board. No smoking or brushing of bees was required. - see the 5th photo.

tulip poplar windfall, other spring flowers and phenology '24

Click on the image and notice that ants have discovered the tulip poplar flower. These ants are not thought of as pollinators just clever at finding sweets.

Based on my Atlanta backyard observations and record keeping, I found this year's first Tulip Popular flower windfall right on time (day 97) - see my table below.  I'm curious how my first tulip poplar windfall observations correlate with other spring surrogates?  The National Phenology Network leaf out model is another way to determine if spring is early, on time, or late.

Spring Leaf Index Anomaly Map uses the first leaf out of cloned lilac and honeysuckle cultivars as these woody plants are among the first to leaf out or bloom and are common across much of the country.  The model also uses temperature and weather events beginning January 1 of each year.  The current spring is compared with a 1991-2020 average. The map shows that the 2024 Georgia Piedmont region's first leaf out day of the year is similar to the 19-year average - spring is on time in the Georgia Piedmont region and surrounding regions show that spring is a few days early.

Other Atlanta nectar sources at this time (not shown):

• Chinese Wysteria (invasive)
  
• White Clover
• Spiderwort
• Amur Honeysuckle (invasive)
• Dandelion
  

1st Windfall	day of year
April 10, 2011	100
March 27, 2012	87
April 19, 2013	109
April 12, 2015	102
April 15, 2017	105
April 5, 2018	95
April 11, 2019	101
April 7, 2021	97
April 6, 2022	96
March 24, 2023	83
April 6, 2024	97
median	97

Made with HTML Tables

MABA swarm hotline

For me, collecting swarms or attracting swarms to bait hives is the most exciting part of my beekeeping.  Possibly making spring my favorite beekeeping season.  

 

Sunday at 1PM I received a text from the MABA "swarm commander" - a homeowner has called the swarm hotline about a swarm in their yard.   The best part of the text details...the swarm address is 3 miles away and the swarm is just a foot or two above the ground.  I'm all in and arrive in the next half hour.

 

I strongly relate to E.O. Wilson's connection to nature as not outgrowing his childhood bug phase. Knowing everyone does not share this view, I consciously met the homeowner's insect concerns with lots of listening about the swarm of bees. The re-framing education moment comes next - I say "that huge ball hanging from the tree canopy is a wasp nest, these bees likely have their nest in a cavity, like a tree."   

A few weeks ago, I patched up and painted my old wood nucleus box.  Wow, I'm ready for the swarm call-out, or so I thought.  Good - my bee toolbox has a bag of gloves. Bad - the gloves are too small, too old - they split and I quickly gave up wearing gloves.   The bees don't like the brushing or the hand attached to the yellow brush - my poor hand!

I added a swarm lure to the nucleus box entrance, brush, brush, brush again...and I'm nearly there.    I leave the nucleus box for collection just before dusk, 7:30PM.   So proud of myself to discover no bees returned to the trunk of the shrub.

mason bee sex

I sent these backyard photos to a few computer vision tools with results ranging from wrong to interesting.  I also asked questions using a conversational search engine about the size of male mason bees.
 

iPhone Visual Look Up is for identifying all objects (food, objects and living things too) in photos and videos on the iPhone.  For these photos Visual Look Up produced wrong or slightly wrong answers - Western Honey Bee and Osmia Rufa.

iNaturalist is for recording observations of individual living things, particularly things that can be tied to a species name.  iNat uses photos with a date, location, and crowdsourced identification. iNat's response to the last photo was Genus Osmia (139 native species of mason bee in North America). 

Perplexity AI is a conversational search engine that answers queries using natural language predictive text.  Perplexity's response to, "Are male mason bees smaller or larger than female mason bees?"  Click on the small numbers that link the response to a reference.

Male mason bees are smaller than female mason bees. Females are larger than males, with shorter, thicker antennae. Mason bees are generally much smaller than honey bees or bumblebees, measuring only about 1/4 inch long1

This size difference is a notable characteristic of mason bees, with males being noticeably smaller than females, typically around 7-15 millimeters long in most North American species3

winter-flowering ornamental cherry tree 2024

Year after year, this tree has produced great bee photos foraging on winter-flowering cherry tree.   The time was 2 PM, the temperature was 57°F (13.9°C), blue sky, sunshine, and a loud buzz of bees on this quiet street.

What's next?  Crabapple trees (thanks to Trees Atlanta) are beginning to leaf-out and those flowers will be here soon and attracting honey bees too.