Bees!!! Part Two

The day has finally come - time to get my new fuzzy little friends.  I had to drive all the way almost to Wisconsin, to Stillwater to get them.  Seeing the familiar sign of Nature's Nectar always makes me smile, every year I have picked up bees this simple sign guides you in and tells you there is someone with a pretty good sense of humor running the show.

You can see in the shed there are stacks and stacks of crates of bees waiting to be picked up.  I figured it out one time - how many packages and then ultimately how many bees are on a truck, etc, but I have since forgotten this useless piece of information.  What I've always wondered is if all the bees flew in the air at the same time how much lighter the truck would become, but I'm going to leave that one to someone smarter than me.

So here are my two little packages, you can't really see from this picture, but in the center is a silver circle which is a can of syrup to feed the bees during their cross country voyage.  Also there is a little metal tab that holds a small wooden box with the queen inside.  All the bees huddle around her and the can of syrup to eat and keep her warm.  They constantly rotate around so they all get to eat and take turns being cold on the outside.  Before I put them in the hive I sprayed them with syrup and water to make them super mellow and happy - mainly so they don't fly all over the place.

This next picture is the two hives I am going to be putting the bees into.  I've taken 4 of the frames out to allow room to dump the bees and have everything all ready to go.  So when I'm ready I'll pry up the syrup can and then pound the cage on the ground so all of them fall down.  Then I slip out the queen...

Here is a picture of the queen in her little cage.  What happened next did not go according to the master plan.

What I was supposed to do was put this right in my pocket, dump the bees in the hive, pull her out of my pocket, put a little piece of marshmallow in place of the cork holding her in and the put her in the hive with the rest of her buddies.

What I did was put a piece of salt water taffy in place of the cork first (I forgot to buy marshmallows and didn't have time to go to the store).  Then put her in my pocket and then dump the bees in the box.  When I went to grab the cage - she was missing.  I said a few four letter words (like golf and Iowa) and looked around for her.  I gave up on that pretty quick and put the cover on and moved on to the other hive.

The other hive I did quite well and they seemed to be doing fine when I left for work.  I sent a few emails and after a call to one of my old pharmacy professors (who happens to keep bees and is a SD state bee inspector - yes there is such a thing).  He told me that I could simply take a frame with fresh eggs out of my strong hive from last year and put it into this new hive.  If there are eggs less than 3 days old they will feed the eggs royal jelly and raise a couple of queens which will then mate and presto-chango I have a hive with a queen in it again. The only difference between a queen and a worker is the food they are fed and the amount of time they take to hatch.  Workers actually take longer to hatch than queens - mainly because of the difference in the food they are fed.

The alternative to do nothing is not a good one though.  If I just let all those workers and drones in the hive go on with out some sort of intervention, a few of the workers (who are all female) will start laying eggs of their own.  This is not a good thing, since they have not mated all their eggs are unfertilized and they will only lay drones.  They will keep doing this until either all the bees die or they decide to move on.  If I let them do this and then try to give them a new queen later they will kill the new queen.

So I will hopefully be able to salvage a situation brought on by my own bonehead blunder.  If this works and they make a queen that goes out and mates I should be able to salvage the package and although it will not likely make any extra honey this year I will have saved them and they will hopefully be strong enough to make it through the winter.

So hopefully I can get my lazy butt out of bed in the morning and do some rearranging.  To be continued...

Bees!!!

I think I need to take a break from the political stuff and the healthcare problems that I have been dealing with lately.   This is supposed to be "Farmer" Dan's blog anyway so as we near the exciting time of spring I will change over to more agricultural related posts for a while.

Two weeks from now I am going to get some more bees!  I ended up losing one hive this winter - not from the dreaded CCD (colony collapse disorder) that has made headlines - but mainly because of a good old fashioned MN winter.  Both hives got buried two times in snowstorms and that didn't help matters.  So on April 21st I am going to Stillwater to pick up two packages of bees.  Above is what a package of bees looks like.  The bee supplier I use gets his bees from California.  All of this starts back in February when the Almond trees bloom in California.  This is such an intense and big bloom that the bees really increase in numbers.  After the bloom is over the beekeepers there begin to divide hives, this involves brushing extra worker bees into a large container and then they get dumped into a box like the above picture.

Then the bees are put into a mini hive or nuc - at the same time larvae are put into incubators in queen cups and then placed into the nucs.  The bees see this and begin to raise this queen as their own.  The only difference between the queens and the workers is that the queens are kept in the cells for a shorter amount of time (you would think longer) and fed a richer food called royal jelly.  After the queens hatch they spend about one week in the hive and then fly out and mate with the drones of other hives.  They mate anywhere from 2-10 times and receive all the sperm they will need to lay thousands and thousands of more bees during these mating flights.  Tragically the drones die after mating, I'm just glad humans don't operate the same way although I have known of a few females who try to operate in the same way.

I don't have any of my own pictures of the above process, but imagine a large area with about 100 of these small mini hives all in rows and millions of bees flying around and you won't be that far off.

After the queens have been mated the beekeepers go back through the nucs, find the queens and put them into little tiny cages, pack them back into a box like above and then more bees are dumped back into the box with them.  They then have a can of sugar syrup put in the top and off they go!

When I get them they have been in the cages for 3 or more days and are pretty hungry so before I put them into their new home I will spray them with a mixture of corn syrup and water.  This also calms them down a little.  The next step is to pound the cage on the ground to knock all the bees down to the bottom of the box, then I will take the can of sugar and the queen box out.  Before the bees realize what has happened they can be essentially poured into their hive.  The queen still in her box gets wedged in between the frames for now.  After a few days I will go back and check on the hive to make sure they haven't gone looking for a new home and at that time I take out the cork keeping the queen in her little cage and change it for a marshmallow.  The bees will take this out in a few minutes and let her out and then she goes to work laying more eggs for the coming summer.

Just for those of you who may be wondering a pound of bees has about 5500 bees in it and when they get dumped into the box the box rests on a scale and for a few seconds before they start flying the boxes are weighed and will either contain 2 or 3 lbs of bees.  A fully functioning hive in the middle of a good nectar flow in the middle of summer can have up to 80,000 bees.

So now I hoped to explain how much work goes into just getting the bees that I keep here in MN.  There are a number of different breeds of the honeybee, what is interesting is that the main bee used in CA is the Italian bee, the bees that do the best in MN are called carnolian.  All of the bees that come in the package are Italian, but the queen is Carnolian so as she lays eggs the bees that she lays are of a different breed and will eventually outnumber the original Italian bees. 

It is just amazing how much effort and time goes into raising bees, I hope I made it somewhat more clear to someone who has little knowledge of bees to understand just how complicated one part of keeping bees is.  It makes me really appreciate my little fuzzy friends and to really cherish their sweet delicious product that they work so hard to make.

The Angry Pharmacist - Part II

I got interviewed by the assistant State Attorney today and also got a letter from the actual Attorney General which was very nice.  To sum up the whole process so far, not really too much is happening yet.  The man I spoke with today could not tell me whether or not there was an actual investigation ongoing from his office or another office, but he did mention several times that his office and several others were very interested in collecting information about CVS/Caremark and their activities.

He mentioned that the whole idea of what they are doing is HUGE, anti-trust Federal and State wise.  The attorney I talked to went to pharmacy school before he went to law school so he quite well understood what I was talking about.

I tried to be as objective as possible in my interview and where I didn't know information 1st hand I told him it was something someone had told me or speculation.  One thing that really interested him above everything else which he probably already knew from other complaints or from reading what news stories are out on the internet is that the main company, 3M, whose employees are currently having the most problems are afraid to file complaints about their medical plan.  It was explained to me by two people that squeaky wheels at 3M have a uncanny knack of getting fired.

The other issue that I brought up to him was that of patient safety, given our widely varying climate controlled temperatures of medicines - especially insulin - is critical to make sure that drugs do not loose potency.  This trust in medicine which is given to patients by pharmacists and doctors could be undermined if they are worried that their medicine got to hot or cold.

After a 45 minute talk with him he told me that I may be contacted by other authorities as he conducts his investigation.  The fact that this person who is not just some schmuck in the office took that much time with me and told me that others may also want to hear from me tells me that CVS/Caremark may have some explaining to do very soon.

It's all been a good experience for me too because I knew very little about the Attorney General office and now understand a little better what they are there for and what they are able to do.  I have some relief now of this issue and now I can relax and wait patiently to see if anything comes of it.