Spring Bees

I did an inspection last week of all my hives.   They all survived the winter!   I'm a firm believer in the necessity for ventilated quilt boxes in this area.   It's the best way to mitigate the cold and the damp in the hives.  

Hive #1 - queenless.   Lots of drone brood and plenty of new bees, but no eggs or larvae and very little going on at the entrance, when all the other hives were bustling.  Dead giveaway that something was wrong.  That's why I decided to inspect when I did.

I gave this hive a frame of eggs from one hive and a frame of new larvae from a 3rd hive.   I kept this colony at only 1 box.  They're doing fine now and will raise their own queen.  I'll check again if I see something weird going on or in a month, when she should be out and laying.

Hive #2.  Booming!   Gorgeous striped queen.  A box already full of bees.  I put 2 supers on this one.

Hive #3.  Booming!   Gorgeous red queen.  7 frames of bees. 1 super.

Hive #4.  Booming!   Gorgeous blonde queen.  8 frames of bees. 2 supers.

I put the supers on now because we'll be in the spring flow before you know it.   I also gave everyone a jar of 1:1 syrup to get them through the bout of cold and rain we had last week.   When I went out today, they were bringing in tons of pollen and orienting like crazy.    I may actually get some honey this year.

Flying!

A beautiful day today and the bees were out flying!  *heaves sigh of relief*

My pink hive [the last remaining one from last year] is doing well enough.  I opened the top and the cluster is not very big, but it is very vigorous.  And kind of defensive.  They have plenty of sugar left and I put a pollen patty in to help get them geared up for the season.   I see buds on the silver maple.  It won't be too many weeks before the early spring flow starts.   

I over wintered this hive with a vented quilt box.   Here's how it went from top to bottom:

• telescoping cover
• inner cover with notch down and open to quilt box.
• 3 inch quilt box shim with screened bottom full of cedar shavings AND construction shim/wedges on top on one end for good ventilation between it and the inner cover.   That tilted the lids a bit, but no problem.
• 2 inch shim for winter sugar
• medium super with honey
• deep super with brood
• solid bottom board with lower entrance only

I wrapped the whole thing in some left over tar paper [we're using that for the floors in the house remodel] and then stacked some very large bags of leaves around the hive to block the wind.

The combination of things seems to have worked.   It was not a large hive in the fall, but they were interesting and hard working.   This is the hive that requeened with 27 emergency queen cells in August.   I tried to do splits but almost every split absconded back home with the honey stores, which they put back in the mother hive in a super I had set on the hive ABOVE an inner cover that completely separated it from the brood box below.   I had been trying to reduce the space for the remaining part of the colony left from the splits since we were in the thick of robbing season.   Apparently they didn't want things that way.   I recombined everyone and prayed a lot.  

I hope this bodes well for my beekeeping this year.  I have a good feeling about these girls.   I'm hoping to get a lot of honey out of them this year.  And a nuc with these behaviors would be awesome. 

In a few weeks, I'll reverse the boxes, putting the cluster and brood, which is now in the top box, on the bottom and I'll add a medium super above.   We're switching out to only mediums from now on.

Another Hive Down

I checked the hives on Wednesday when the sun was out and the temps near 50.  The pink hive was actively housecleaning and doing cleansing flights but the other was silent.    I waited a few hours because the smaller hive often takes a bit more coaxing to break cluster and come out, but never saw a single bee. 

So.   The next day I waited until it was warm again and lifted the lid on the quiet hive for a quick look and found a completely silent hive.   I lifted some of the candy I'd put in during the fall and found the dead cluster up high, tucked right under the food source, barely fist sized.   They didn't make it through the couple nights of 0 degrees early last week.  Just not enough bees.

It's very discouraging.    That's 3 out of 4 hives down this year. 

I put some tar paper around the pink hive, checked the quilt box for good ventilation and tucked another giant bag of leaves up next to the bottom of the hive on the east.   It has excellent wind block on the west and north, with sun exposure to the east and south.   Assuming the sun shines again, that will help.    However, it's going to get near 0 again for the next couple of days.   Let's hope these ladies are tough enough to make it.  

Winter Bees

No pic for you today because the bees are under a bit of snow, but we saw them flying earlier this week so fingers crossed they'll make it the rest of the winter.

Since hope springs eternal around here, Eric and I went to a class yesterday on Queen Rearing and Nuc* Overwintering in the Michael Palmer style.   It was really interesting.  We hope these bees make it through and we can grow the yard a bit this year for real.   I ordered 2 more nucs from the instructor, who raises local genetics and doesn't treat.   They're more expensive than ever this year [$175 each] but the local, disease resistant bees would be worth it if I can grow the yard.  

We took the class at Stuart Ratcliff's apiary in Bedford, Indiana.   He's on facebook:  Ratcliff Beekeeping.    He taught us all about grafting and raising queens and then overwintering the nucs.   Grafting doesn't interest me much, but there are graft free ways of making your own queens and I'll be trying some of those this year if we come out of the winter with live hives. 

In class, Stuart asked us what our goals for the yard are and I realized that I've been so focused on getting the bees through the winter that I hadn't really thought about anything beyond March.  So we've all been talking about it.  This will be our 5th year with bees.   If these hives make it, then we'll grow them for honey.  We'll be converting the long hive into nuc spaces - a quadruplex with a window in the back.   The screened bottom will have to be replaced with a solid bottom.  We'll have to make tiny inner covers for each section and tighten up the dividers between nucs.   It's likely we'll cut it down to a medium, but we can always put mediums in a deep and not the other way around.  

This is one of the problems with having to buy nucs [and typical starter kits that have those discounts on equipment].   Nucs are deeps and perpetuate the need for at least some deep boxes in the yard. Starter kits almost always have 2 deeps per hive.    We'd really like to go to all mediums.   I think we'll be able to do that eventually by only using deeps for the very bottom boxes, when we have to.  If we use mediums for all of the rest of the boxes, then in the spring when it's time to reverse the boxes, we'll have a medium on the bottom, can take the deep away [cut it down or save it] and can use mediums only on that hive from there on out.  

There are a lot of options for us.   We'll see what the rest of the winter brings.  

* For definitions of many bee terms, see my bee page tab above.

Garlic Shoots

The garlic I planted this fall is coming up!   It'll stay green unless it gets really, really cold or snows a bunch.

Hoop House Goodies

Here's a pic of the hoop house and the smaller cold frame all covered up for the winter. We're trying the cold frame without the straw surrounds this year - just to see what happens.   They say that it's the soil temp that matters, not the surround.   As long as the soil is covered and gets some sun, it'll stay warm enough to grow greens and things. 

I planted lots of greens in the hoop house in October, a few days before we put the cover on.   They will grow very slowly because we're not getting a lot of light this time of year, but by Christmas we should be able to start to harvest out of the hoop house. 

Here is a baby carrot.   It'll probably be early spring when they're ready.   Just after I planted the hoop house, we had 5 inches of rain one day.   It sort of scrambled the seed.    My carrots and radishes are no longer in rows in the hoop house.   I don't think they care, as long as they have enough elbow room. 

Elephant Garlic

It's time to plant garlic.   It overwinters beautifully and then shoots up lovely, tasty greens in the spring.   Even the scapes [flower stalks] from the hard neck varieties are delicious if you get them young.  I planted some last year that I took from the big bag o' garlic that we get from Sam's.  Nothing fancy.   They grew and I harvested small heads in May that I used for Honeyed Onion Garlic Jam.

OMG.  Fresh garlic - even the little heads that I got - is darn good! 

I decided to get some better garlic to plant this fall and was surprised to see how many varieties are out there.   I got mine from Urban Farmer.   I decided to go with the elephant garlic because the heads get big.   I figured that even if mine don't get as big as theirs, at least they'll get bigger than the little bitty ones that I grew this year.  

So, I ordered 8 oz., which I thought was going to be way too much, but which turned out to be only 6 gigantic cloves when they arrived.   Gigantic.  As big as a whole head of the other stuff.   Soooo.   I'll be planting that and some of the little stuff, too.  The soil in the garlic bed is pretty sandy and hasn't been amended much in the last couple of years, so I'm thinking maybe it's time to mix in some chicken dirt and boost it.