Red Handed

In February I posted that I had signs of a skunk in the bee yard. In the same post I mentioned that the visitor could've been an opossum. At the risk of tooting my own horn, I was right. Twice. My hive camera shows I had a skunk and an opossum eating bees on several occasions in February.  They tried to do some damage, as I sometimes found entrance reducers pushed off the hives; but at the time it was probably too cold for them to lure out live bees. So they were mostly left scavenging dead bees on the ground. I'm cool with that. But if they make a habit of eating my live bees, I'll deploy carpet tack to gently persuade them to find food elsewhere.

Opossum (possum) at a honey bee hive

How Bees Fly in Cold Weather

Honey bees are not cold-weather flyers. Their muscles seize up if they get too cool. When this happens, the result is the stuff of nightmares--a bee may be alive and otherwise healthy while she lays on the cold ground unable to move herself to warmer climes. (Gen X'ers may recall Metallica's horrifying video for the song "One.") She'll ultimately succumb to the cold unless the weather quickly changes in her favor.

Beekeepers usually espouse 50° as the minimum temperature a bee will venture outside the hive, and that's not entirely untrue because 50° is the lowest temp in which a bee can fly for prolonged periods. But we've all seen bees flying on days when it wasn't 50° and wondered why they weren't following the rules we gave them.

Enter an article in the January 2018 American Bee Journal titled "Cold Flying Foragers: Honey Bees in Scotland Seek Water in Winter." It's the most interesting bee-related article I've read for months, and it explains how bees thermoregulate their thorax temperatures to make flight under 50° possible (but only for short distances). I've spent so much time thinking about this new information that I decided to make it part of a beekeeping display at an upcoming festival. The picture above is the visual aid I made to spawn discussion with festival attendees. Feel free to download a higher resolution bitmap here if you’d like to use this for your own presentation or display. I hope you find as insightful and fascinating as I do.

Survivor

This worker bee was one of thousands gladly taking the syrup I offered on a warm day last week. If you look closely at her thorax (the middle section of her body), you can see how worn her hairs are. Her tattered hair reveals that she's a winter bee who made it through the coldest months and is now working to usher in a new generation. And it hasn't been an easy winter. She didn't have the luxury of hibernating or hiding away in a pupal state. No, with every degree it dropped, she shivered more to generate the warmth needed to keep her sisters--and her mother--alive. And now, with temperatures barely warm enough to sustain flight, she forages for nectar and pollen to feed the brood that's quickly taking over the comb in her hive. She will die soon, and the progeny she's worked so hard for will carry on. And they'll only live for about 4-6 weeks. This girl, however, has been alive for 6 months. In human terms, this is like some people living to 320 while the rest of us die at 75. Despite these seemingly impossible odds, she has survived just long enough to ensure her family sees another winter. As long as I don't screw it up for them.

Bee Smart Feeder

It's been warm enough during the days for foragers to forage, but still too cold at night to confidently put syrup inside hives. The compromise is open feeding, and I'm doing the job with these Bee Smart "Ultimate Hive Feeders." I like the Bee Smart feeders better than a typical bucket feeder for this purpose because they can deliver far more food in a short time. Rather than having to take turns drinking from a dozen holes poked in the lid of an inverted bucket feeder, hundreds of bees line up around the rim and fill up as fast as new bees can arrive. Also, setting it out in the sun helps keep the syrup from chilling the bees, and there's no danger of wild temperature swings inducing uncontrolled leaks over the cluster.

Open feeding has its critics, who often claim it creates "lazy" bees (which is nuts) or that it induces robbing. On the contrary, by feeding this way I'm giving workers in my strong and weak colonies food to gather outside the bee yard. Without this productive distraction, I suspect stronger colonies would be much more fierce in their robbing efforts, and weaker colonies would be hard-pressed to build up fast enough to fend off the attackers.

2019 UPDATE: I’ve mostly stopped using the Bee Smart feeders at this point, because I’ve found that drilling some small holes near the lid of a plastic jug, filling it with syrup, and inverting it just works better. It’s easier to refill, costs nothing, and there’s no chance bees can crawl inside and die (as long as you keep the holes small enough). So save yourself some money and make your own feeders. I make mine from shake jugs—I used to toss these into the garbage. You too are probably throwing away plastic containers that you could quickly convert into effective feeders, so give it a try before you drop a nickle on fancy feeders.