honey bee ~ 06/10/11 ~ Pinnacles

wild honey bee nest

While Pinnacles has the highest known bee diversity in the world, I'm guessing these are typical European honey bees (Apis mellifera) that were introduced to North America close to 400 years ago. I took the pictures of the bees collecting water from the same standing spot as the nest, and I'm assuming the bees are from the nest. This is the second time I've seen comb on the outside of a tree trunk, as opposed to a swarm. I also found several online pictures of North American hives hanging from branches. However, I usually think of feral hives as being in cavities, like tree holes and chimneys. I wonder why honey bees pick different locations for their hives. Perhaps the nest is not an Apis mellifera feral hive? I had a difficult time finding any information about wild honey bee nests and their locations since most search results ended with beekeeping info. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations site and trusty Wikipedia discuss honey bee nest locations.

honey bee ~ 05/21/11 ~ J's place

Cordovan Italian honey bee
Apis mellifera ligustica

Pictured above is a top-bar hive a friend recently set-up in her garden. It's different than the typical box hives with frames as it allows the bees to make their own hanging wax comb. What I really liked was the observation window to see inside the hive - so totally cool! She ordered light-colored Cordovan queen and package bees specially bred for their gentleness and hygienic behavior from C F Koehnen & Sons here in CA. She's hoping mites won't be a problem with this hive as she's chosen not to treat her bees with chemicals. Her previous queens were Minnesota hygienic Italians and she's had great success with them.

My friend is quickly becoming the queen of bees herself. She started beekeeping for the first time last year at the beginning of May. I've been most impressed with the amount of research she's done on selecting traits in queens and types of equipment. I posted pictures of her 2 original hives on 07/01/10 and now she has several hives in 3 locations. Check out her pictures and a very loud video of the 2 swarms she had last year. Just a few days after the photos above were taken, another one of her hives swarmed on 05/25/11.

ps 06/21/11 - One of my favorite blogs I follow is Curbstone Valley Farm. Clare has recently redesigned her blog and I love it. To see her series of honey bee posts, click here.

St. Catherine's lace covered with honey bees
Eriogonum giganteum var. giganteum covered with Apis mellifera
Polygonaceae

I couldn't believe how big this buckwheat is. The fence post in the second picture is about as tall as I am. Thanks to the organic farm's native plant restoration lady, I have a positive ID. Goodness knows I'm not good at identifying buckwheats since there are so many in CA... 269 species & varieties of Eriogonum to be exact, all native to CA with many of them limited, rare, or endangered, including St. Catherine's lace.

Calflora doesn't show this plant as being native to Santa Cruz County, but Harkins Slough is only a couple miles from the Monterey County border. However, like many other buckwheats, I suspect this one was purposely planted outside of its native range. Simply based on recent CA blog posts, the red buckwheat (Eriogonum grande var. rubescens) seems to be very popular in gardens along the western, central to northern area of CA, yet its native range is mostly southerly Santa Barbara County and is a CNPS 1B.2 rare plant.

So, this got me asking a series of questions (as a caveat, I am not a gardener and plead ignorance)... 1) What exactly constitutes "native" in terms of gardens and nurseries? County borders? State borders? Stolen from the woods and fields nearby? 2) Where do the nurseries obtain their initial stock? 3) Like orchid collecting from the early 1900's, could the current "native garden" trendiness actually be depleting our regional, natural populations? 4) What are the long-term environmental impacts of introducing a non-regional, yet "native", plant to areas where it doesn't naturally occur? Are we inadvertently creating hybrids? Is that something we want? Is it "good" for nature? 5) How is a "native" plant planted in a garden hundreds of miles away from where it occurs naturally be somehow better and preferable than say planting something from South Africa with similar climate? Just asking.

Btw, Apis mellifera is not native to North America; I'm not sure how many people know this. Really, they're the insect version of cows, sheep, cats, and dogs. It makes me wonder how much we anthropomorphize the plight of the non-native honey bee.

honey bee ~ 07/01/10 ~ J's place

Cordovan Italian honey bee and/or Minnesota hygienic Italian honey bee
Apis mellifera ligustica

Finally, after a bit of delay (I'm posting 07/09/10), here are my friend's honey bee hives. Aren't they cool!?! She started with single boxes of frames with a sugar water tray on top of each at the beginning of May, after a couple beekeeping classes in San Jose. They seem to be doing really well as she's been checking them regularly and adding more boxes. She hopes to avoid a swarm since that would be quite a loss. Her only complaint is the bee poop is difficult to wash off her truck, which is parked on the other side of the fence on the north side.

With the pretty paint jobs, they look like something out of Martha Stewart or Home and Garden magazines. Apparently, she's not the only young, hip beekeeper out there - Myrmecos posted a fun collection of decorated hives. Check it out!

Additionally, you may have noticed my close-up shot doesn't look like your typical European honey bee. Most Italian honey bees have black bands towards the tapered end of the abdomen. There are different traits that can be bred into honey bees, such as light color (Cordovan) or hygienic behavior (Minnesota). She got 2 queens which had been open mated, so, interestingly, not all the workers are light in color. Apparently the lighter color is a recessive genetic trait, so I'm guessing you must have a queen with the Cordovan gene (expressed or not) to ever see the lighter color in the workers. I'm not sure what the other mixes would be. We started joking about who had the job to artificially inseminate queens for pure stocks. I think in beekeeping terminology this is called "instrumentally inseminated." Seriously, how would one do that?... and this is coming from someone who has performed surgery on male sabethine mosquitoes over cold tables.

For a completely related link, but not, check out this odd story of how bee hive declines are being blamed on cell phones. My personal belief is that there are not enough new beekeepers who know what they're doing and fewer sources of genetically variable stock bees available. No offense to my friend! Our neighbors had a bee hive last year and it died over the winter. Bless their hearts, they're trying again this year. I love peeking over their fence to see how their hive is faring.

ps 07/14/10 - I found this beekeeper's blog post incredibly fascinating from Fox Haven Journal.

ps 06/17/11 - My friend says she didn't purposely order Cordovan queens but rather Minnesota hygienic queens, so I've made slight corrections in the ID above and in the text. I found this Wikibooks article to be informative about the different races and traits. Since she had open mated Italian queens, her worker bees were of mixed traits and possibly mixed races.

honey bee swarm
Apis mellifera

07/09/10 - This was a fun find during our casual walk around the pond. I'm actually surprised at the number of swarms I've seen over the years on tree branches around town. My husband has run through an actively flying swarm out at Fort Ord, which he said was a bizarre experience because they seemed to follow him for a ways. Fortunately, from what I've heard, honey bees are fairly tame when they're swarming. However, I have yet to find a feral hive in CA. While I was in OH, I used to take a group of summer science camp kids every year to see an old feral hive on one of the museum's properties. We could always hear them before finding the tree cavity - I've been thinking of that experience lately as I've been watching the World Cup and hearing the background vuvuzelas. Another fairly local blog, Town Mouse and Country Mouse, had their own experience of a honey bee swarm this spring. Interesting.