PURPLE MARTINVol. 19(4)

U •P•D•A•T•E

Purple Martins gather near Lake Erie before roosting for the night

Fall 2010

From the Editor’s Perch

The Purple Martin Conservation Association is a registered, tax-exempt charity headquartered in Pennsylvania. A copy of the official registration and financial information may be obtained from the Pennsylvania Department of State by call-

ing 1-800-732-0999 toll free within the state, or 1-717-783-1720 from elsewhere. Or write to: PA Department of State, Bureau of Charitable Organizations, 308 North Office Building, Harrisburg, PA 17120. Registration does not imply

endorsement.

The Quarterly Journal of the

Purple MartinConservation Association

Volume 19(4), Fall 2010

PURPLE MARTIN

The Purple Martin Conservation Association is an international, non-profit, tax-exempt

organization dedicated to the conservation of the Purple Martin (Progne subis) through

scientific research, state-of-the-art wildlife management techniques, and public

education. It is supported solely by membership contributions and product sales.

U•P•D•A•T•E

Board of Directors:

Membership & Editorial Information:The Purple Martin Update (ISSN 1077-4165) is published four times a year and

is sent free to members of the Purple Martin Conservation Association. Annual

membership is $20.00 for students, seniors and educators; $25.00 for basic

membership; and $30.00 for families. A Canadian membership is $25.00 in U.S.

funds. We welcome editorial, photographic, scientific, and artistic contribu-

tions. We especially welcome letters and photos from martin landlords sharing

their martin experiences.

Purple Martin Conservation AssociationTom Ridge Environmental Center

301 Peninsula Dr., Ste. 6Erie, PA 16505 U.S.A.

Phone (814-833-7656) Fax (814-833-2451)E-mail info@purplemartin.org

www.purplemartin.orgThe Purple Martin Conservation Association works in cooperation with the Edinboro University

of Pennsylvania, which provides logistical support. The Edinboro University of Pennsylvania is a

member of the State System of Higher Education.

© 2010 by Purple Martin Conservation Association. All rights reserved.

Kathy AranyosLouise ChambersJonathan D’Silva

Keith JonesCraig KernJames Rutkowski

Donald SnyderJohn Tautin

Dr. Erik J. Bitterbaum, West Virginia University Dr. Charles R. Brown, University of Tulsa Mr. J. Cam Finlay, Naturalist Community, Canada Mr. Dalgas Frisch, Brazilian Association for the Preservation of Wildlife Dr. John W. Hardy, Florida Museum of Natural History Mr. James R. Hill, III, Purple Martin Conservation Association Dr. Jerome A. Jackson, Florida Gulf Coast University Dr. Richard F. Johnston, University of Kansas Dr. Eugene S. Morton, Smithsonian Institution Dr. Brent Ortego, Texas Parks & Wildlife Dr. Bridget J. Stutchbury, York University, Canada Dr. Luiz D. Vizotto, Universidade Estadual Paulista, Brazil Dr. Richard H. Wagner, Konrad Lorenz Institute, Vienna, Austria Mr. Richard A. Wolinski, Nongame Biologist, Michigan

Founder & Executive Director Emeritus:James R. Hill, IIIExecutive Director: John TautinEditor: Louise ChambersAssociate Editor: Tara Dodge Business Manager: A. Paul AranyosWebmaster: Tara DodgeScientific Advisory Board:

The Update is produced on paper that contains recycled content and is printed with 100% green inks that do not contain solvents and are free of volatile or-ganic compounds (VOC).

Front Cover: A collection of martins at the Presque Isle roost staging area. Back Cover: Martins at the PMCA’s Rotary Pavilion site. Photos by Tara Dodge.

Table of ContentsLouise Chambers, Editor

News from the PMCA ..............................................1Purple Martins Out of Sight, but Not Out of Mind: Part 1 ..............................2Buckeye Martinfest 2010 .........................................5My First Year with Purple Martins .......................... 6The Doctor’s House Calls .......................................8Retaliatory Behavior by Honey Bees on Nestling Purple Martins .............................11Landlord Letters .....................................................14My Quest to Become a Landlord ...........................18Recruiting Purple Martin Caretakers .....................21A Robin’s Nest is Home for Purple Martins ...........22Modifying the Troyer Horizontal Gourd ...............26Feather Your Nest ...................................................29

The martin season has ended, gourds and houses are vacant, and the roosts have emptied as martins moved south. While we all eagerly anticipate their return, we hope you’ll find the articles and information in the Update helpful and entertaining.

PMCA’s executive director John Tautin reports on his recent trip to Brazil for the International Ornithological Congress, and about progress in making contact with wildlife biologists from Central and South America. Look for part 2 of his article in the winter 2011 issue.

Landlords from IN, WI, and LA share the stories of how they became landlords. They all have unique events to re-count and we hope their experiences will encourage oth-ers to keep trying until they, too, host martins.

Martins and honey bees, modifying a gourd entrance, and nest materials used by native cavity nesters are dis-cussed in this issue, too. Regular features Landlord Letters, Doctor’s House Calls, and PMCA news complete this issue, along with a call to think about the future of martins from a NC landlord.

Thanks for your continued support, and for your ef-forts to care for Purple Martins.

Page 11 Continued on page 12

Like numerous other members of the Purple Martin Conservation Association, my family keeps honey bees as well as Purple Martins. My

adventures with honey bees have been fantastic, and I usually can hardly wait to conduct my weekly hive checks and manipulations. Peering into the normally unseen world of the honey bee hive, beekeepers keep tabs on the health of the colony and the queen, the distribution of eggs and brood and, of course, how our honey stores are coming along. However, as a Purple Martin landlord my admiration for the honey bee was challenged in June 2010, when the disposition of one of my hives went haywire, and the bees angrily took out their aggression on the occupants of a nearby martin house. Herein, I document this incident and offer some lessons learned for those that host both Purple Martins and honey bees.

2009 was our first year with honey bees, and we have hosted Purple Martins since we purchased and built our home on this 1.5-acre lot in 2005 (see My first successful year with Purple Martins [Texas Panhandle], 2006, Purple Martin Update 15(1):14-15). We have kept 3-5 bee hives behind our house, and this summer, set up five hives a few miles away on the edge of a canyon that feeds into the Texas Panhandle’s famous Palo Duro Canyon (Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red River). Our Purple Martin colony reached 100% occupancy this year with 42 pairs in 42 cavities, distributed in a 10-room wooden house, two 6-room aluminum houses, eight horizontal plastic gourds, and twelve SuperGourds.

Most of our martin houses are located in front of our home, whereas our bee hives are out back. However, one aluminum martin house was back there, and was approximately 27 feet from the nearest bee hive. In mid-June 2010, it became apparent that an earlier attempt to requeen this hive had not worked successfully. The hive’s workforce should have been converted to the beautiful yellow-color of a new Cordovan Italian queen I had installed earlier in the spring. Instead, she was absent and the workers had raised a queen of their own from the previous queen’s larvae. I was not impressed with the amount of eggs and brood in the nest, and the original queen’s hive had previously shown more aggressiveness than I could tolerate.

I had purchased a new Cordovan queen and on June 29 my son and I began to go through the hive to remove the old queen if she was present. As we broke down the hive it became apparent that the bees were very “hot”. They boiled out of the hive, despite the ample amount of cool smoke that we were blowing in to calm them down. We worked on, but soon decided that we weren’t going to find the old queen in all this chaos. Meanwhile, six pairs of Purple Martins were feeding young in the house a few feet away from us. We abandoned our intrusion, situated the boxes of the hive, and walked away.

For the next few hours we had bees in front and back that bumped and dived at us and our dog when we stepped outside. We limited our activity outdoors and just hoped that none bothered our neighbors. But it was the back martin house that the bees targeted. The house swayed in the wind and may have looked like a living target to them. Additionally, the parent martins continued to try to come in to feed their nestlings, possibly further agitating the bees. Dozens of bees at a time bombarded the house from the downwind side for the next 4-5 hours until it got dark. From within a protective bee jacket, I tried to spray water from a garden hose at the bees, but that did not

James D. RayCanyon, TX

Retaliatory Behavior By Honey

Bees on Nestling Purple Martins

(Texas Panhandle)

Page 12

Continued from page 11

inhibit them at all. A few were even bothering the martins out in the front yard. I just hoped that the bees were not entering the cavities, and all the while, was confident that the retaliation would end as night approached, and all would be back to normal the next day.

On June 30, while getting ready for work I noticed that the parent Purple Martins on the west side of the back house were hesitant to land in front of their cavities. I went on to work, and came home shortly after noon to haul the aggressive hive out to the place in the country. First, I lowered the martin house. As expected, the bees had calmed and there were none bothering me at all. My heart sank as I opened the cavities. Sixteen nestlings that my family and students from West Texas A&M University had banded just hours prior to the incident were dead. There was one survivor on the west side of the house, and the young were dead in one nest on the east side. Stings were evident around the eyes and bills, and one nestling had a dead bee tucked in the featherless area between a leg and the body.

History of The Aggressive Hive

This particular bee hive has always shown a tendency to be “grumpier” than my others. On a couple of occasions it showed aggressiveness, which I define as having one or more angry bees bumping or trying to sting me or anyone else, except such nest defense can be expected within 20 feet from the hive on the day of my manipulation of a hive. Considering that I live in a subdivision, it just is not acceptable to have aggressive bees in my hives.

The origin of this hive was a wild hive that a fellow beekeeper and I transferred into one of my hive boxes in early March of 2009. The hive never showed any aggression during the capture, nor has it ever at my place even to this day.

On June 14, 2009, that queen swarmed with half of her workers, landing in a Mimosa tree in my backyard. I captured the swarm without incident and placed the new hive to the north in closer proximity to the martin house.

As this new “swarm hive” grew, I noticed that rarely would a Purple Martin come and land on the martin house without two or three bees in pursuit. This was almost comical to observe. I would point this out to observers and jokingly exclaim that my bees bothered my Purple Martins, not the other way around. The martins would just ignore the bees, and the bees would continue on their way.

On August 14, 2009, I started into the hive with intentions of replacing the queen with a new queen with genetics known to have resistance to problems facing honey

bees. This was a very intrusive hive manipulation. The bees boiled out of the hive in anger, bombarded us, and even stung us through our blue jeans. We abandoned our chore, and I went back out later to finish situating the hive, further agitating the angry bees. A neighbor even posted on Facebook that angry bees were in her yard (I later took her a jar of honey). They were a menace to us for the next 24 hours and when I medicated them later that fall.

2010 started without any incidents, although the neighbor mentioned above claims that a couple of bees bothered her mother while she was smoking on their back porch (February). When a fellow beekeeper and I tried to requeen the hive with the yellow Cordovan Italian Queen, mentioned earlier, the bees gave us some problems, but we were able to remove the old queen and introduce the new. The new Cordovan Italian Queen was from a source that is reputed to be extremely docile, but unfortunately it appears that she was not accepted by the hive.

Were These Bees Africanized?

Africanized honey bees made their way into the continental United States by the way of Texas in 1990. By 2004, they were detected in test traps in the High Plains of the Panhandle, affecting four counties by 2006. The affected counties are located at the northern extent of their North American distribution. Although beekeeping is not a huge business or hobby in the Panhandle, problems with Africanized bees in existing hives have not been a problem.

Africanized honey bees cannot be discerned from their European counterparts based on casual observation. Identification requires measurements, and use of specialized equipment and computer programs in a laboratory setting. Africanized bees mate with European stock or other European-African hybrids, passing on tendencies of increased aggressiveness and greater difficulty with manageability for beekeepers. These bees may become more easily agitated than European stock, have a higher

Opposite: The 2009 swarm that I caught in my backyard and placed in a new hive near the martin house.Left: Dead nestlings removed from the martin house after the bee attack.

Page 13

percentage of guard bees, have a larger alarm zone around the hive, attack in greater numbers, and pursue for greater distances than their European counterparts.

In my case, I submitted samples of bees for testing on three occasions to Texas A&M University from this particular hive/stock: 1) upon the transfer of the original wild hive to my boxes and residence, 2) upon experiencing the bad attitude, on two occasions, while trying to requeen the new hive created from its 2009 swarm, and 3) following this incident that resulted in the death of 16 of my nestling Purple Martins. In all cases, tests results indicated a probability of zero for Africanized genetics. These bees were clearly European.

Final Fate of the Hive

A day after the incident, we broke this hive into two parts, sealed them up, and hauled them to my country location. I left a hive box in the original location to catch the bees that were out the hive, and these were soon sealed in at night. Interestingly, no bees were observed in this box when I opened it a few days later.

At the new location I was able to find and remove the queen and her brood, and have replaced her with a yellow Cordovan Italian Queen mentioned earlier.

Jim Ray is a Wildlife Biologist/Scientist IV with Babcock and Wilcox Technical Services Pantex, LLC, a Certified Wildlife Biologist (The Wildlife Society) and was recently appointed

Adjunct Faculty and Adjunct Graduate Faculty, West

Texas A&M University.

Lessons LearnedHere, I offer lessons-learned for martin landlords that also care for honey bees:

1. Don’t place bee hives in close proximity to martin houses (where the activity of martins can catch the attention of agitated honey bees). I’m going with a minimum of approxi-

mately 40 feet at my place.

2. Don’t conduct intrusive hive manipulations during the brood-rearing period of Purple Martins, par-ticularly if your honey bees have displayed aggression or chase your martins on a regular basis.

3. Re-queen aggressive hives, or move them to an isolated location away from your martin houses. I had attempted re-queening twice, but could have addressed this quicker by closely monitoring for

the survival of my new queens, or hauling this hive to another location.

In the south, where Africanized genes can be present, it is not a bad idea to re-queen any hive or swarm that comes from any source other than purchased from a

reputable breeder of queens. Wild caught or worker-produced queens have unknown genetics, as would their one-time mate.

The martin house out back, where the agitated bees attacked and killed nestling martins.