counting board debris

I'm not a fan of leaving the counting board beneath the screen.  However, for spring swarms I usually start with the board and remove it when entering warmer weather.

 

Budgeting time between my day job, gardening, dog walking, going to physical therapy, blah blah blah - Well, I left the board in place without inspection for too long - 77 days, what was I thinking?

 

I tugged on the corrugated plastic sheet without success.   I shared my why do I keep making my life difficult story with a friend, Michael Willis, who had a great idea - attach a strip of duct tape along the length of the plastic sheet for additional grip.  If one duct tape strip is good, I thought to myself, let's try two duct tape strips, let's include a handle.  No luck, the board would not move!   In desperation, I pushed an 18-inch metal ruler beneath the screen a few times and was able to move, then pull out the board in one piece.

 

The debris consists of:

• lots of beeswax and you guessed it, wax moth larvae
• pollen
• ants 
• small hive beetles

The last photo was taken after discarding the fine debris with a screen.  The wax scales/flakes look fabulous.

wax moth larvae cleanup

Lazy beekeeping has a few downsides. This summer, two tall stacks of boxes with drawn comb and no bees attracted wax moths.  Next, the wax moth larvae ate the drawn comb...all the comb.    Larvae chewed the wood too, compromising some frames and boxes.  What was I thinking - to busy with other things, to hot to wear the beekeeping hoodie.   The not so lazy cleanup went on and on.  I'm a philosophical contradiction.

The chickens enjoyed live snacks and a few wasps helped with the crushed larvae.  I'm grateful that the problem was not small hive beetles. 

powdered sugar & bee cozy

On a 40°F November morning, I opened the hive top and applied/dusted one cup of powdered sugar onto the hive by tapping a flour sifter with a hive tool.  The rarely used bee brush found a purpose - this time to brush off powdered sugar resting on the top bar of the frames.  I left the boxes stacked as one unit and carefully let the powdered sugar fall straight downwards onto adult bees and not into cells.  After five hours I inspected the debris on the counting board - it's mostly powdered sugar with a trace of tiny light colored phoretic varroa mites and a dozen or so small hive beetles (SHB).   This is the first year that powdered sugar dusting knocked down SHB.  Past years knocked down many larger dark colored phoretic varroa mites .

I added the bee cozy and made bungee cord adjustments to keep the top vent and bottom entrance open. The cozy fits best on my eight frame hives when stacking one deep box and two medium supers.  Hives with two deep boxes requires that I curl over the top of the bee cozy to make things fit.  Like last year, I am going into winter with a screened bottom board and no counting board.

chickens eat wax moth larva

The dark debris on the counting board was puzzling and unlike the debris found at the other hives.  On my back and looking up, I discovered a thick layer of wax moth webbing clinging to the screened bottom board.  The chickens ate the wax moth larva too quickly for a still image.  So, here is my first video for this blog.

powdered sugar

My powdered sugar goals:

• use a soft (natural) varroa mite treatment in conjunction with the screened bottom board
• dislodge phoretic varroa mites when brood rearing is low
• limit powdered sugar entering open cells
• treat the bees when most of the workers are in the hive

By design, I waited for cooler temperatures to try powdered sugar dusting as a varroa mite treatment.  John Jones agreed to provide a third hand, act as the voice of reason and take pictures too.  As the weather was just 50°F, the two deep hive bodies were treated as one (not separate) unit.   One cup of powdered sugar was placed in a flour sifter.  A uniform straight-down dusting of the bees was achieved by tapping the sifter with the hive tool.  In the end, the bee brush was used to clear the bars of powdered sugar. After one hour, many phoretic mites were dislodged.  The mites on the counting board appeared to be dead and lying on their backs.   In hindsight, I could have sifted through the counting board debris to see whether a significant number of mites are buried in the deep pile of powdered sugar. I'm puzzled why the mites are not found along bee space lines (gaps between frames). Next, the counting board was cleaned, sprayed with oil and returned.  After 24 hours a few more mites were dislodged.

You can see from the slides the bees fanning on top of the inner cover.  The insulated outer cover and bee cozy seem to keep these bees warm.

IPM counting board debris map

Each week I removed the IPM counting board and drew the outlines of the counting board debris into my journal.  The debris consists of wax, pollen, propolis and other items like the occasional small hive beetle.  After cleaning off the debris, the counting board is returned to the hive.  I transferred  my journal debris maps into a spreadsheet grid where I (one or zero) scored the presence or absence of debris.  The debris mostly lands along blurry east-west lines which relate to the bee space between frames.  Probably most of the blurring of the debris is attributed to:

• debris falling off the bees as they bounce in and out of the hive entrances above the screen 
• debris bouncing or rolling on the screen
• debris moved by ants or wax moth larva beneath the screen on the counting board

To sharpen the debris map blurring, I used a moving 3 week sum which creates a debris map with three intensities.  All of my work is done twice, as I follow two side-by-side hives that were started this year. So, what story might describe these gnuplot contoured debris maps?

• In the beginning, the debris tends to be concentrated near the hive entrances which face west.
• Over may weeks the debris concentration moves east away from the hive entrances and also north.   The two hives consume syrup at different rates, have different flight activity and have different weekly debris maps.  However, both hives show the same overall shift of debris concentration when measured over many weeks. 

Where will I find the debris concentrated this fall?  What about this winter?  What about next spring?

1gal pail feeder

I'm using one gallon pail feeders and Honey B Healthy purchased from P.N. Williams.  It's seems easier to make large batches of syrup and have two pail feeders per hive.

• bees take a few minutes to clear the pail feeder and if a pail feeder is left completely empty, then propolis may cover the pail feeder screen
• electrical tape helps line-up the pail feeder screen and inner cover hole
• inverting the pail feeder over a bucket helps control ant attracting spills

These bee packages have been fed continuously since May.  According to my counting board results, this has been my best year for controlling small hive beetles and varroa mites--this is also the first year with Lula Georgia bee packages and continuous feeding with Honey B Healthy. 

According to the official climate summary, this is a record setting warm summer which followed a prolonged winter--as always it seems difficult to apply the conventional rules of a normal beekeeping year when no two years have the same weather.  As I heard Malcolm T. Sanford says, "all bee keeping is local," meaning that continuous feeding may not work in your apiary.

IPM counting board debris

I'm interested in whether the debris on the IPM counting board correlates with the winter cluster location.  I'm using "debris" to describe everything that falls through the screened bottom board--not just varroa mites.  Is there a correlation between the winter cluster location and the debris--how can I use this information? 

In the image above, counting board debris marks the bee space between frames and the absence of debris marks the location of the eight frames.  As the IPM grids does not line-up with the frames, I'll flip-over my counting board so that the white un-marked side faces up. I'm tired of ignoring the counting board grid lines and using my finger to count the frames.

In the image above, the bees on the frames mark the top of the winter cluster (3D sphere)in the first deep hive body.   The counting board debris and winter cluster locations seems to line-up.  To make the debris more obvious, I'm scraping and washing the counting board surface clean after every inspection.

During spring swarm control, a quick look at the counting board debris may help plan which honey frames to remove for "checkboarding" in the second deep hive body or which frames get starter strips to "open the brood nest" in the first deep hive body.