Reversal of Fortune

These two beehives are the smallest in the beeyard this year.   They each have an interesting story.

The pink hive is a split from a larger hive [the blue and orange one in the back] that was bearding heavily and just decided to start building comb under the hive boxes.   Bearding is when you get a collection of bees hanging from the front entrance or sides during hot, humid days.  It's normal.

Bearding all night long, and then for days, and then weeks and building comb UNDER the boxes is not normal.   It meant a lot of pissy bees outside and a lot of extra pings for the beekeeper this season.

Eric and I decided enough was enough and we spent a miserable couple of hours removing the bees and their comb from under that hive and putting them in their own box to make themselves a new queen and new colony.    They did not come gently.

Every week for 4 weeks, I put a new comb of brood and eggs from another colony in there for them to make a new queen from.   They finally did.   And then that blasted queen refused to mate.   I checked on them week after week and finally 2 weeks ago decided to just write them off.   I couldn't find the new queen and was tired of stealing brood for them.

The green hive is a swarm we caught this year from our own hives.   It was small.   We put them in the box and they started doing what they do.  The queen was doing great, laying fine, drawing comb, etc.  Only thing was - they weren't storing any honey.   I figured they'd get the hang of it since they were increasing in size.  We are still in a flow.  There's time.

And then I walked out last week in time to see another swarm 30 feet up in a tree, very much out of reach.   Eric and I threw together a swarm trap and waiting.  The next day they came down to the trap but wouldn't go in.   They flew off again.   Then they flew back to it again.   I'd had enough watching and just put them in there.

They didn't act happy.   So I put in a frame of brood from another hive to anchor them until they got happy and then I noticed that that little green hive was awfully quiet.    Sure enough, this new swarm was that old swarm, which had absconded leaving three perfectly good frames of brood.

This is not good.   So I fed them a lot of sugar syrup and waited to see what they'd do.

Reversal of fortune.  I checked both hives today and wouldn't you know they've done a complete reversal.

The pink hive has a laying queen!   She's fat and beautiful and doing a great job.  Multiple frames of brood. They're storing plenty of honey and pollen.  This queen came from my favorite hive.  I'm hoping to see her build up and make it through the winter.

The green hive is languishing.   The queen is there, but laying multiple eggs in a cell, which the bees will take care of, but it's weird.   I put their old comb back in the hive so the could focus on laying and raising brood instead of building comb.   I'm still feeding them a lot of syrup.   I don't expect them to make it to fall, much less through the winter.

It's funny how things change.   In spite of my predictions, the bees will do what they will do.  They don't read the books or pay attention to the experts, or me.   They'll likely surprise me.

July Hives

Here's a view of my expanded bee yard.   We doubled the size so I could put in that extra row of hives.    I'd like to maintain eight to ten hives all the time to get four or five hives through the winter and enough honey for us for a year.   It's an experiment.

That's Clyde, the rusty vulture, guarding the bees.   He makes me laugh.

Bees Update - Late March, Early April

Five alive!   All four of my hives made it through the winter.

The one on the far right lost a queen after the buildup started and I swiped some frames of eggs and larvae from other hives to get them through so they can make their own queen.   The first time they failed to even try, so I did it again a couple of weeks ago and this time I see that they're bringing pollen in so I think they got a clue and are making a new queen.

The pink hive in the middle is a split from the duck hive, which was a nuc I bought from Bedford, Indiana last year.   It lazed all year not doing much, but survived the winter and built up super fast this spring.   Two whole boxes of brood by the end of March, so I split one off.   I'm hoping to get a couple more splits off this hive this year.  The original nuc came from a guy who depends on good breeding stock for treatment free bees.  Always a good thing.

Since I got the bees through the winter, I've realized that I have a whole new set of things to think about - like dealing with mite issues, watching for 2nd year diseases, managing for expansion or honey, treatment or not?, etc.    The treat or not treat issue is a hot topic on the forums.  I found [or rather it found me....] a forum specializing in treatment free bees.   Such a change in perspective!  A new way of thinking about management.  I'll be learning a lot this year.

Honey Harvest!

It's the time of year when I need to do one last big inspection on the bees so I can combine hives, treat, think, evaluate, etc. before the winter.

I had 6 hives:

#1 The big Mother Hive - Russian x local queen
#2 Bedford nuc lg
#3 Bedford nuc sm - never took off.  Queen problems.
#4 1st swarm from Mother Hive
#5  split from Mother Hive to stop swarming.  [didn't work]
#6  after swarm from #5.   Stayed small [1/2 med box] but nice queen and good laying pattern.

I was delighted to find that #1 had filled me a whole super of honey.   First time for a real honey harvest.   #5 had filled a partial.  In all I had about 1 1/3 medium boxes of honey from the two hives.

We crush and strain by hand.   It took Claire and me about 1 1/2 hours to get it all done and cleaned up.   It's messy.   Seriously, seriously sticky and messy.

Even though the bees have been all over the goldenrod this year, we had plenty of rain and they were late filling the supers, I was amazed at how LIGHT the honey is.   It is sharp tasting like clover honey.   Since the bee yard has been smelling so good and like goldenrod, I expected darker, stronger goldenrod honey.   Huh.  We had a lot of asters, so maybe that was it.

At any rate, I'm very grateful.   I had wondered if I'd ever get a full super from any hive ever.   In all we got 10.75 pints of honey.  [That's 1 1/3 gallons.]

In other hive news:
#3 had gone completely queenless, no brood at all, but they had stored some honey.   I combined it with #6 by taking out the honey and putting it in #6, then putting #6 on top of #3 with newspaper between.   In a week, everyone should be up in #6 and we can pull #3 off the bottom and button them up for the winter.  

I took the extra boxes off everyone else to reduce defensible space.   The nights are chilly now and they're clustering well.  

Now I have 5 hives left.   They look good.   We'll put sugar bricks and quilt boxes over them in the next month or so and probably wrap them in tar paper, too.

Fall Bees

It was a busy fall around the bee yard the past couple of months.   Two of the hives decided to requeen in late August - one of the Russians and one of the nucs.   

The Russian hive produced 27 queen cells, which we tried to make nucs with and failed, but the cell we left in the hive produced a fabulous queen and that hive is doing very nicely now.   We're overwintering it in two boxes.  

The other Russian hive is doing fine and will winter in a single box.  

The nuc with the new queen never got very big and so I decided to combine it with what had been a much stronger hive.  Unfortunately, the combine was slow because you have to find one of the queens to take her out.   I had decided to keep the new queen and it took for freaking ever to find the other.   By the time I finished the combine, there was wholesale robbing.   By the time I got the robbing under control, there were not enough stores to warrant two boxes over the winter, so I reduced them down to a single box.   Which started more robbing, which I'll talk about in the next post. 

At any rate, I'm going into winter with 3 hives this year.   I am hopeful that the two Russian hives will do OK.   The other hive is very different in demeanor and I'd be thrilled if they made it through at all, but I confess I won't be surprised if they don't. 

Busy Bees

A quick look at our very busy beehives.    Blow the pic up for a better look at how many bees there were.   It's goldenrod flow time and the bee yard smells very strongly of goldenrod honey. 

Not much honey overall this year, but lots of bees.   Each colony needs lots of bees in the fall cluster to keep things warm until spring.  Every time I open a box and see it full of bees instead of just a few frames of bees, I am very, very happy. 

The hive with the yellow super seems to have quite a bit of honey in it.   Maybe the long hive with the orange super, too.  They get to keep their honey this year.    I'll take the empty supers off the hives next month and put candy on the hives..   That way everyone has plenty of feed for the winter.   Just in case.

Berry Patch Update

The berry patch I planted this spring is doing well.   Here's a pic of it with the berries all growing up.   I keep my beehives in the center.   The berries protect the hives and the bees keep berry loving critters from getting tooo close.  Like the dog. 

I got all the berries from Stark Bros on sale, because I'm cheap and because getting those combo packs is a great way to try out several varieties. 

There are a bunch of blackberries, red raspberries and golden raspberries in here.   Many have actually borne fruit this year in spite of being babies.    This gives me hope that next year I'll have enough fruit for lots of pies.   And tarts.   And jam.   And more pies.   And maybe some to freeze.  

Another Queenless Hive

After dealing with the pink hive being queenless, [see the last post], I had a feeling I ought to go in and check on the bowtie hive and sure enought, I found it full of bees, but no brood, no nectar, no honey.  Probably no queen.  They needed help fast. This is what those laying nucs are good backups for.   So, even though I failed to raise backup nucs this year, I now really see what a great idea they are.   Next year, I'm going to do one or two for sure. 

I got into my strongest hive and pulled a full frame of brood out and an additional frame they had just started drawing, but which had eggs already in it.    I put those in the bowtie hive.   I also fed every hive 2:1 sugar/water.    If they have a lazy queen, then the brood and the feed should knock her back into action.   If they had no queen, then they now have the resources to make one.   Easy fix as long as I'm patient.   In a month they should be going and if I feed like crazy, then they should be built up enough to get through the winter. 

Queenless

On a routine inspection of one of my packages from this year, I found a few queen cells like these.   26 cells to be exact.  That is a lot.  These guys were serious about requeening.   Chances are the old queen died suddenly and they panicked, putting queen cells wherever there were eggs the right age, which turned out to be everywhere.   She was a good layer.  Too bad they lost her.  Also she was a Russian queen I had spent extra money on when I bought the package.   So, bummer. 

I posted this pic to Beemaster and was advised that the abundance of queen cells was a good opportunity to try making laying nucs - tiny hives to raise queens and brood for sale or for backup. 

So, I split the hive into 6, with a frame of honey and a frame or so of brood with a queen cell or more in each nuc.  One of the 6 was left in the original hive, but reduced down to 1/2 a deep.  

Long story short, 4 of the nucs absconded back home.   The last one stayed put, but failed to raise the new queen, so I combined it back on the mother hive, who had managed to raise a fabulous new queen and as of last week had brood from stem to stern. 

All the hives were contracting and even though the blasted bees haven't touched the bucket feeder I put out a few weeks ago, it's obvious that the flow is over.   I put 2:1 sugar/water on every hive.

Bearding Bees

When it gets hot, as it has been here lately,  the bees hang out on the sides of the hive.  They like the shadier places - under the tops, on the sides, in the handles, and at the edge of the bottoms.   They hang in clusters that look like beards, which is why it's called 'bearding'.

They do this to free up space on the inside of the hive for more efficient cooling.   Bees at both entrances fan air in or out and bees on the interior walls fan the air in one direction to circulate air efficiently.    This is how they can control the inside temps so well so that the brood temps stay stable.

The number of bees on the outsides of the hives can give a clue to the strength of the hive.   These are all first season colonies. You can see that the tallest hive has quite a few bees.  It was started from a nuc.   The long hive on the left has even more bees, but the design of the long hive gives a lot more interior space for them to be, so instead of bearding, they hang out in the far left end of the hive, where there is some extra space.

The beeyard smells like honey right now.   The catalpas have been blooming and we have some just close enough that the bees are busy busy busy.

Bees in a Row

I got all four hives settled with their bees.  The flow has been good so far this year and I'm hoping that each colony will fill 2 boxes with brood.

We're going with solid bottom boards this year and that seems to have made an immediate difference in how well the bees build up.   Who knew??

We decided to put the long hive in the row with the others.   Our strongest nuc happened to go in there and I'm glad of it because that colony might just be strong enough to make it through the winter in that box.   We'll see....

Fall Hive Inspection

Here are the hives all happy in their new site.   The bees took the move in stride and are busy as ever.   We did a full fall inspection early in the month and discovered some interesting things.

The 24 hour mite board check turned up 3 mites from each hive.   Also, some dysentery in the Hello Sweetie hive [probably from some fermented sugar water.]  The mite load is small enough that I don't have to treat this year. 

Both hives had tons of brood - the bottom brood box was pretty much packed full of brood. 

But no honey. 

Both hives had just barely started building any comb in the top box.   Each one had only a partial frame and no honey in it. 

No. Honey.   In Sep-freaking-tember.

I've been feeding all summer, the way they tell you to the first year of a hive.   And this is the most brood I've ever had, so that's great - but no honey is not great.   What do they think they're going to eat all winter?? 

I got on the forum and one of the more experienced beeks took some time to answer my questions and make suggestions.   He noted that I may have a 'benign predator problem' with wasps and hornets and maybe some birds.   'Benign' as in not a bear or teenage boy knocking the hives over and destroying everything, but rather something stealthy making regular small raids and keeping the bees busy doing the wrong stuff.

Which would totally explain why I've never had much brood until this year.   This whole year I kept only one small entrance open at the landing board because late summer robbing is an obvious problem here.  I turned the top entrance up [the one you see opens into the top box which holds the feeder, which the bees use through a screen, so predators can get into the top box, but can't get into the brood boxes.]   I have screened bottom boards for summer ventilation.     The one small entrance is all they have.   Both hives are trying to enlarge it.  We'll put a hardware cloth mouse guard over it soon for the winter.

Since we have a lot of birds, too, I put up some poles with those heavy tinfoil disposable cupcake tins tied to them.  [See pic in previous post.]  They make some noise and the reflection is supposed to scare birds away.  They've helped in the garden, so I put two near the bees, just in case.

The goldenrod flow is still on and a good hive can draw a whole super in a week, so I'm letting them try and feeding them heavy syrup [Michael Bush's 5:3] in hopes that they'll get busy and store some.  It should be warm enough for the next couple of weeks.  If they don't, I'll pull the top box and put on mega candy boards for the winter and keep a close eye on them.   We'll push them together, insulate and wrap the sides up tight with black geo textile for the winter and wrap the bottoms [with slider boards in] to reduce draft.

I'm hoping that the new location will deter the predators and help get them through the winter.    If so, then maybe next year I'll have big hives and a decent honey harvest.  These queens are Indiana queens, so I'm hopeful.  It'll be my fourth year.   I'm ready for big honey.

If the hives don't make it this winter, I'm going to try one more time, with Russian bees that I can get from Kelley Bee Supply in Kentucky.   I hear they're good stock for surviving Indiana winters.   

Battening down the hives

We've battened down the hives for the winter.

This is a rare photo of both Eric and me working the hives.   Lily is in charge of the camera during bee inspections, which is great because it keeps the honey off the camera and we get these great pics, too.

We had small hives this year.  We started with only one - our winter survivor, which we split in the spring.  Then we added a small hive from a cut out in the summer.  So, we've got three small hives going into winter.  

Even though we haven't had any frosts yet this season, there were no drones in the hives.   These girls are getting ready for winter.   Both of the lang hives had chimneyed their honey.   They had brood in the five southern frames below and honey in the five southern frames in the box above.  All the rest of the frames were empty.  I took all of the empty frames out and packed all their honey in the lower box.   The lower box is now packed full of stores, but each of those hives is going into the winter with only one box.  That's actually all the honey that the surviving hive went through last winter anyway, but I don't think that's enough, so in a few weeks, I'll put an empty super on each hive and put a whole lot of bee candy in it for the winter.   It will insulate things a bit and provide enough extra feed to get them through the winter. 


The cutout hive is in the horizontal hive, which is the hive that died over the winter.   My problem last year with that hive was that I hadn't tucked them in enough last fall.  They had too much space to heat. This year I took every empty frame away and left them only the seven frames they had brood or stores in.  Eric cut me a very thick piece of foam insulation and I pushed it in close - turning that part of the horizontal hive into a quasi-nuc.  I also put a bottom board in to close up the bottom.   I'll pack a good section of the top with bee candy in a couple of weeks.
  

The bees were busy propolizing everything they could to seal it up.   Here they are closing up the ventilation hole in the inner cover.  We had to put screens over the holes this year because the mice kept finding their way in. 

We've reduced all the entrances to the smallest hole to keep the mice from coming in the bottoms, too. 

I scraped a bunch of propolis off the frames I took off the hives and gave it back to the bees, who seemed thrilled to get it.   This distracted them while I was reducing their entrance. 

Since our winter weather is notoriously variable and often can vary by 60 degrees or more within a week, I'll be tucking some skirting of some sort [probably plastic sheeting] around the bottoms of the hives and putting some insulation around the sides facing the breeze.  If it gets really, really cold, I'll drape the hives with a blanket on three sides, but that always encourages mildew so I'm hesitant to keep them on very long.

We didn't get any honey for us this fall at all, but if we can get all three of these hives through the winter, then we should get loads of honey next year.  Fingers crossed. 

Early Autumn Beehives

I like the look of the beehives surrounded by some of our goldenrod.  You can't tell from the pic, but there's a nicely mowed clearing where the hives sit.   I was tickled to see this view from a distance away and down the hill from the hives - off on a side that I usually don't see the hives from.

The hives smell terrific this time of year.   Goldenrod honey - fall honey - has a strong, distinctive odor that you can smell several feet away from the hives.   I love that smell.   

Deadout

One of my hives died this winter.   It was my strongest hive going into the winter, so I was very sad and also pretty surprised.

Here is a very bad pic of the dead bees in the bottom of the hive when I opened it up.     That's a lot of dead bees. 

To find out what caused it, I opened the hives and I examined the frames.

You can see the cluster in this pic.   All of the bees in the circle are dead.  The cluster was just a bit bigger than a softball.  It extended three frames wide.   That's pretty small to get through the winter and keep everybody warm and fed.

Here's a pic of what I found when I knocked the dead bees off the surface of the frames.

Blow it up to see all the bee butts sticking out of the cells.   This is a sure sign of starvation.

The problem is that there was a lot of honey still in the hive.   A lot.    They shouldn't have starved.

So the next  question is:  Why didn't they move to the stores?

Notice the rough spots at the tops of the open cells near the capped cells.   Those are chew marks from the bees opening the stores.   This is right next to where the cluster is, so I have to wonder why they starved.   They were so close!

Could be they were too sick or too cold because the temps here vary so greatly and the cluster was too small.  

One of the things a beekeeper must ask is whether the mite load was heavy and caused too much stress on the bees during our wild and crazy winter, thus weakening the hive and causing the deadout.

To check the mite load, I pulled the bottom board out from under where the cluster was [and all those dead bees].   The bottom board closes things up way down under the bottom screen of the hive.   The screen keeps the bees in, but allows for good ventilation - essential here where it's so humid.   The bottom board slides in under the screen and helps close things up to keep them warm for the winter.

When I pulled the bottom board I found a lot of tiny wax pieces.   Those are the wax cappings that they've chewed off to get to their stores.

With a magnifying glass I counted mites.   The dark oval in the pic is a varroa mite.  That's a bee leg next to it.  The mite is tiny - the size of a chigger.   But on a bee, it's big.   To a bee, one of these is the equivalent of a mite the size of your fist on you.    Eew.  

I counted only 5 mites.   Not bad at all.

All bees in this part of the country have mites, just like all forests in this part of the country have ticks.   It's a fact of life.  There are things you can do if they get bad, but generally you encourage good hygiene and small cell size and the bees manage.

I showed these pics to the experts at Beemaster  and they agreed that the cluster died because it was too small.   There's no way to determine why the cluster was too small - could have been the robbing in the fall, and the robbing might have resulted in them going queenless.   The bees had dysentery, but folks seem to think that it wasn't bad enough to kill the cluster, just further weaken it.

If I had been on the ball and known what I was looking at in January, I would have recognized the small cluster size right away and then  reduced the inside space of the hive with a follower board, which would have been less space for them to heat.   That might have given them a chance. 

Also, from now on I'll be checking the hives in late November to see what the cluster size is so that I can reduce the hive size earlier if need be.   In the horizontal hives, you can see the cluster size easily when you lift the lid and you can see right where the cluster is.    All you have to do is put a follower board where you want it to close up [narrow up] the hive space inside.  

Next year, we're going to set the hives right next to each other with just enough space for insulation board between them.   That'll help keep things warmer, too.

The last question is what to do with the dead hive full of honey.    I asked the folks at Beemaster and they suggested just leaving it for the other hive to clean out for me.   The day I opened it up for these pics, the other hive was pretty busy checking things out.    If you blow up the pic you might be able to see the hundreds of bees on this hive trying to harvest it.   

January Hive Inspection

After the Big Snow, it got warm here.   Warm!   Last Saturday it was 60 degrees.  

Our horizontal hive had a lot of action as it got warmer - plenty of bees coming and going and hanging around outside.    From the back window, I could see that the cluster was not too far away from where they started in the fall.   I figured that meant they had plenty of stores left as they moved through the hive. 

The lang was almost silent, so I was a bit worried about them.   So, I put my ear against the hive and gave it a good knock, knock.   Instant hum.   There were bees in there - in the top box.    Since they started in the bottom box, that meant that they might be moving through their stores pretty fast. 

A note here:   An experienced beek can lift the hive and know by weight how much honey is left.   I am not an experienced beek.  For the record, I did lift, and they were heavy - because I'm a girl and I have no upper body strength.    I need to lift them in the fall to get used to how heavy they are full.  Eric lifted and said they did feel lighter. 

Since we have a couple more months before the maples start blooming here, I decided to open the hives to make sure they had enough stores.     I prepped some candy for the lang since I figured they'd need food for sure.  I figured the horizontal was just fine.

Oh, how wrong I was. 

The Lang

We started with the lang, in suits and with smoke.    We opened the top and found a few bees atop the frames.   They were calm.  

I pulled a few frames from the other side and they were completely empty.   The lang was on its last stores.  They would have probably starved within a very short time without intervention.

I piled the broken sugar bricks right on top of the frames. 





 



The bees went to them right away.  

We put an empty super to surround it, then laid some paper along the side and poured in some extra dry sugar, too.  

We left the screened bottom board open.  We put the inner cover on and put short pencils in the corners to keep the top lid up enough for air to circulate and dry up any condensation in the hive.

[Let me just insert here that short pencils are the bane of my existence.  Not that I'm exaggerating or anything.  I never exaggerate.   Short pencils hide in the pencil jar and are too short to reach, but make it hard to stuff other pencils in there.  Also, when all the real pencils are mysteriously gone from the jar, and I have to fish out and use one of the stubby ones, invariably they have No Eraser.  Or it's totally dried up and hard and leaves dark marks on the paper.   I hate that.    But now I have a reason to save short pencils.   They are perfect, perfect! for the corners of the hive in winter when I want to keep the top up just a bit.]

Then we put the telescoping lid back on and crossed our fingers that they'd last till late February when the maples bloom.    If we get a few more warm days between now and then [and we will] we can pop the top and add more sugar if we need to. 



The Horizontal Hive

When we opened the horizontal hive, we saw a tiny cluster and a lot of bee poop.   The tops of the frames were very messy and in stark contrast to how clean the lang had been.    

We have some sick bees in the horizontal hive. 

All that action I had been seeing was probably bees leaving for cleansing flights - running to the toilet, as it were.  

I pulled the end frames where I expected the cluster to head next and they were already empty.   The cluster was moving the opposite direction from where I thought they'd started.   Now they were moving back toward the brood frames they'd used last year.   

I pulled a couple of frames from that end and they all looked like this:  The dark brown is old brood space, empty.  Just above that is stored pollen [dark orange-red] and above that and across the top of the frame is capped honey.    If you click on the pic you might be able to get it big enough to see the pollen.

At any rate a few frames like that is not enough stores to get them through the winter.    

We replaced the inner covers and put supers on top.   This time I put a couple of layers of paper over the holes in the inner cover, then poured a lot of dry sugar on top.  I sprayed the paper and the sugar with water to help it clump together so the bees would know it was candy and not try to clean it out of their hives.   Not that these bees are going to do much house cleaning if they're sick.   

In this pic, the super to the left has empty frames in it.   The bees won't bother them and it was a handy place to store them for the winter. 

I put pencils in the corners and the telescoping lid right on top of the new supers. 

Then I posted this pic to the forum to see what the experts think and it looks like bad news for this hive.    If you can truly judge by the number of bees on top, then the cluster is too small and too sick to survive the winter.   

If I had known what I was doing that day, I should have put a divider in the hive to reduce the size of the chamber, thus reducing the size of the space they needed to heat.   It would have turned the hive body into a nuc sized hive.    That might have given them a better chance.   

When the temps rise again, we'll go inspect again and make sure that the lang has enough sugar and if the horizontal hive is still alive, I'll reduce the chamber size.  

The Hives in Winter

All tucked in for the duration.  The center hive really isn't a hive, but a stack of spare supers there to freeze for the season.   The freezing kills things like wax moth larvae. 

We have screened bottom boards in both hives. In the Tardis [in the front] we put solid inserts for the winter because it's a horizontal hive, but in the flower lang [in the back of the photo], we left the screen open for the winter.   In addition, I put pencil ends in each corner of their telescoping [top] lids to keep the lids propped up a bit so that air can move across the inner covers and evaporate the moisture that builds up inside. 

Moisture is bad.  The inside of the hives will stay warmer than the outside, so the moisture from bee breath and honey will condense.  Then if it really gets cold, that condensation will freeze everywhere in the hive and kill a lot of them.   The object of the winter game for beekeepers is to keep them dry.  They'll handle the cold on their own.

This pic was taken after the first little snow.  We've had another 16 inches since.   You'll see that their front porches are covered in snow.   After the pic, I cleaned the snow from in front of their lower entrances and made sure the top lids were pushed [and therefore open] to the front.  That allows air in and out. 

Hive Repair - Tardis

Our Tardis hive is a horizontal hive body.    It looks like this.

The frames run the same direction as the bricks on top do.   21 frames fit into this box.   There is a center support on the bottom board and one on the inside of the cover.   The bottom support kept the frame that was in that position a bit high.

Turns out those supports were cramping the bees' style.   They weren't traveling freely through the whole box, just half of it.

And when we opened the hive at the last inspection, we found a lot of burr comb on top of that one side. 

What you see in the pic is only half of the comb.  The rest was attached to the lid.  They were unhappy when we took it away. 

Only honey comb was on the 'wrong side' of the hive.   No brood comb at all.   And the brood frames were getting smaller because they were getting filled with honey instead of brood.

It's a miracle we didn't find a swarm cell started up.   These bees were quickly getting honey bound.

So, we did some remodeling.    We popped the center bar out of the lid so they'd have easy access across the tops.

And Eric chiseled the bottom support waaaay down so they'd have bee space across the bottoms.  We also opened up another entrance right next to the old one that opens toward the 'wrong side'.

We also checkerboarded the 7 empty frames that they just wouldn't fill up by putting an empty after every two full frames.  That spread out the brood into the 'wrong side' and will hopefully get them moving through the whole box where they'll decide to expand the brood.

We love the horizontal hive bodies - so much easier to work than the langs.   Eric built this one and now we know how to tweak the design for the next ones.

Flower Lang Update

You might remember that we had a bit of trouble with the queen in our Flower Lang hive and we had to replace her.  

We checked on things again on July 1st and were very pleased to see this frame of capped brood.  

The brood is the stuff under the tan caps.  This is larvae that has been sealed up to metamorphose from a grub into an adult.   You can also see capped honey around the top edge of the frame.    The laying pattern of the capped brood shows a great laying pattern.  This queen is a good queen.    [We never did see her during the inspection.  Perhaps she hides as well as she lays.]

We also found this frame of honey.

The whitish stuff in the middle is capped honey.   Honey has a lower water content than the air, so the bees cap it off to prevent it from pulling moisture out of the air.   Honey's low water content is one of the things that makes it antibiotic and keeps it from spoiling.   Cool, huh!

The two rubber bands on the frame on the right side were used to keep some broken comb in the frame.  The bees built the broken stuff back into the frame and added on.   When they're tired of the rubber bands, they'll chew them off.

This honey probably has a lot of our sugar water in it.   This hive doesn't take nearly as much sugar water as the other one does, only a quart every 6-7 days, but it's still pretty likely that a lot of this honey came from the feeder and not the local flora.    It's a small hive.

Hives - Day 19 Check

Blow these pics up for great details

Confession:    I was really tempted just to give you a couple of nice pics, brag that we found both queens and loads of capped brood and leave it at that.  

The truth is, I did just about everything wrong this time that I could.  Yep.  Pretty much I demonstrated that I have no bee finesse yet at all. 

At All. 

I felt like a bull in china shop.  Plus we were fighting the camera with veils and gloves.  Nothing went right.  Geez.   I should rename this part of the blog:  Rurification: We make stupid bee mistakes so you don't have to!

One thing - this time Eric started the smoker with a torch.   It totally worked!  Thanks, you guys at Beemaster!   A bunch of you said to fill it, torch it, pump the bellows like crazy, get a good flame, then put something on top [I used a skein of scrap yarn].   We had a charcoal briquet, some sumac berries, a bit of toilet paper and toilet paper roll, and some cardboard it in from previous attempts to light the blasted thing when Eric torched it this time.   We had plenty of great cool smoke for the whole inspection.   Woo-hoo!    Now I just have to learn how to use the torch all by myself.  

Anyway.   Here's the awful truth about how things went today.  

We opened the Tardis hive first, and the first thing I saw was burr comb.  Drat!  And this had been the hive that had great comb with no problems last time.   




We investigated and long story short,  when we put splines in the top bars, where the foundation is supposed to go, we put them in too low and the bees built off to one side instead of straight down the middle.  

LESSON:  If you use splines, leave only 1/16 inch or less showing.    We moved all the rest of the splines up so that they barely showed in the empty frames and on any that we had to do repairs on.




The bees were unhappy when I started messing with the frames and I really wanted to see how our repairs from last time worked before I did the same thing on the Tardis, so we closed that hive up and went to look at how the Flower Lang was doing with the repairs we had done on it. 

Remember that little comb on the frame with the double comb?   We repaired it by putting it in a frame with rubber bands.  It had come out anyway and was lying in the bottom of the hive.   And those rotten bees had built another little comb on the frame where we had taken the first one off.   Erg.  And they had built up the place on the other side that I had carved down. 

Really, what was I thinking?  I was nuts to think that they wouldn't.  

LESSON:   Cut out those burr comb bumps, don't carve them down and expect them to not come back.   This means I might have to wait until the comb is attached well enough to support it even if it's missing a bit of the center section.  Next time I'm going to carve it down a bit further for a few weeks until there's a lot more comb attached to the sides.   I'll keep moving the new [soft] comb to the center.  Then I'll cut out the bump out completely.

The next stupid thing I did was tilt a frame over on its side when the comb wasn't fully attached.  It was full of honey and brood and broke right off.   Dumb, dumb, dumb.

LESSON:  Don't tilt the frame until it's fully attached at all sides.  Better yet, don't tilt the comb at all.

It took a while to repair, and the temp was only in the 50s, so there's a good chance some of the brood got chilled.   Chilling the brood could kill it or cause deformities.   Another dumb mistake.  I wish I had realized that before I got done with the inspection.

LESSON:  Don't mess with the bees on chilly days.   Don't take out the frames.  Stay inside and read about bees and stupid beekeeper mistakes instead.

In all, in that hive, we had to repair 5 frames of comb.   I tried to leave the bees on the comb while I worked, but that wasn't always optimal for my concentration or their safety. 

When we got to the last frame, next to the wall that they had put burr comb on before,  we found that they had attached this comb it to the wall again with just a couple of inches of burr, but no extra comb on the wall this time.  And they had done a very interesting patch around to the comb in the frame.   It had sagged a bit in the center, so I centered it.  I have no clue whether it will work or not.




The good news about this hive is that we found lots of capped brood and a bit of capped honey.  And we found the queen.   We knew she was there, but it was nice to be able to spot her.    She's large and gorgeous.

When we were done, we scooted the frames together and closed it all up and moved back to the Tardis.   Lily came out and took over the camera while we were looking at this hive.   She took these last pics.

The Tardis had some comb on 8 of the frames, nowhere near full frames, but still lots of comb.   And plenty of capped brood!    We didn't see any capped honey in this hive.  

We did find the queen in this hive, too.   This makes me really, really happy, because I want to be a good queenspotter. 

And also, truth be told,  I felt like spotting the queen was the only right thing I did in this whole inspection. 

This hive had that one frame with a bit of burr comb on it.   I decided to just cut that section out completely and adjust the soft outer edge to the center.   We put rubber bands around it to support it just in case something happened after we closed things up.    I hope it works.

If some of you experienced beeks are so disgusted that you want to take my bees away, I wouldn't blame you.   So far, I've been a pretty pathetic beekeeper.