Today I went to remove a hive from Mechelle’s property in Long Beach. They were ensconced in an electrical box in her backyard.

She said bees had been living in this box off and on for at least a year and had cast off multiple swarms. As it happened, there was also a small swarm in her backyard today on a stalk of bamboo. It was not clear whether the swarm was from the hive or not, but it seemed safe to assume that it was.

Inside the electrical box there was lots of well formed comb, but the thing which caught my eye was the large number of queen cells. That was evidence that this hive likes to raise new queens and send out swarms.

There was plenty of brood but what seemed strange was that all the brood seemed to be at the same stage. Usually a hive will have young from the egg stage through the newly-emerging-as-adult stage, but this hive seemed to only have the newly-emerging-as-adult brood.

My guess is that it’s because the old queen swarmed and the new queen didn’t start laying yet, so there is a break in the brood cycle. The only problem is, if for some reason the new queen died during the cut-out rescue, that makes the hive’s ability to survive almost zero.

Time will tell.

There has been a lot of bee activity over the last two days. My next door neighbors got a swarm in their chimney yesterday. They immediately lit a fire in their fireplace and then called an exterminator. Today those bees are all dead.

Since it is high swarm season, I know there will be many more swarms over the next few weeks so I put out a few “swarm traps” today. A swarm trap is any kind of box, wood or cardboard or other material with, at minimum, some wax inside, and perhaps also some queen pheromone, lemongrass (whose smell approximates queen pheromone), or honey.

Within a few hours one of the traps had a lot of bee activity. From the outside it looks like a swarm moved in, but it’s also possible that, given its proximity to the chimney that got burned and poisoned yesterday and today, that these are survivor bees from that colony.

I’ll probably let it sit a few days and then see what’s going on.

But either way, it was a relieving contrast to the death and destruction of my neighbors.

Many people are surprised to hear that, according to official reports, almost all wild honeybees are wiped out in the United States. I tell them it’s mainly because of habitat loss, and this was a fine example. Here was one survivor colony of bees that just got wiped out because they chose the wrong spot to rest. How many times a year does that happen? How many colonies are destroyed because people are scared of them, unjustly so?

**UPDATE**
The next day I checked the trap and a swarm didn’t move in. The bees must have been scouts, so I anticipate a swarm will move in within a week or two iyH.

There is now evidence that honeybee colonies whose queen mated with many male bees show a more diverse beneficial microbial population. Mating with many males is what queens do in nature–it is only through human-controlled artificial insemination or other breeding programs that queens are not able to mate with many genetically diverse males.

Needless to say, none of The Chassidic Beekeeper queens were mated in controlled breeding programs. Rather, they were born and bred naturally and that is one of the many reasons these bees are more naturally robust and do not require human interference in the form of miticides, medicines, or artificial feeding.

Here is a summary of the article from Futurity.org summarizing the recent study published in PLoS ONE:

The research identified, for the first time, important food-processing genera in honey bee colonies: Succinivibrio and Oenococcus were the dominant genera found in the study and there was 40 percent greater activity of the probiotic genera Bifidobacterium and Paralactobacillus in colonies that were genetically diverse compared to those that were genetically uniform.

Genetic diversity is created in a colony when a queen mates with many male bees, an act that is known to improve colony health and productivity.
[...]
“What we observed in our work was that there was less likelihood of potentially pathogenic bacteria showing up in genetically diverse honey bee colonies compared to genetically uniform colonies.”
[...]
“What we found was that genetically diverse colonies have a more diverse, healthful, active bacterial community—a greater number and diversity of bacterial sequences affiliated with beneficial genera were found in genetically diverse colonies,” Newton says.

“Conversely, genetically uniform colonies had a higher activity of potential plant and animal pathogens in their digestive tract—127 percent higher than workers from genetically diverse colonies.”

The Mother Nature Network published an article yesterday titled “The 11 healthiest foods in the world” based on the thinking of J.I. Rodale, the father of organic gardening in the United States.

Honey makes it on their list, and with good reason. As the article reports, “Honey is rich in antioxidants and is often used as an antiseptic treatment on wounds. As Rodale said, it also contains phytoestrogens, and studies on Greek honey have found that those phytoestrogens can blunt the growth of breast, prostate and endometrial cancers. Honey also has a low glycemic index, so using it to sweeten tea or coffee won’t lead to energy-busting blood sugar drops later in the day.”

Yesterday was also Purim, a day on which much refined sugar, flour, and oils are shared and consumed (which all increase disease). Not sure what to think about that.