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.  

Bee installation, or - What not to feed your bees

Our bees are here and successfully installed.    Now, I just hope they like their new homes and stick around.

This is how it went.

First, we did a lot of reading.   A lot of talking.   A lot of studying.

A lot, I tell you.

We painted and placed the hives in full sun on a little hill in front of a big hill.   They should be happy here. 

We watched a lot of videos of bees.

We watched this vid of Beemaster installing bees and we decided to do it that way.

So, Eric went and picked up the bees at Graham's because I was at work in town that day.   And when we all got home around 6:30, we gathered everything up and went to the hives.

When we got it all together, Eric and I looked at each other and said, "I don't want to wear the suit.  If the guys in the vids can deal with gentle bees with no gloves and veils, then we can, too."

And we did.   We installed two packages of bees into our hives, placed the queens, fed them, covered them, etc - barehanded and with no veils.

It was amazing.   Here are the pics.   [Note:  Lily took the pics.  With bees swirling all around.  Fearless.  In a skirt.   With no protective clothing on either.  Wow.]

Our packages, the way they came from Graham's

All the lovely buzzing.  They sounded like an air conditioner.  

These two bees traveled for heaven knows how long on the outside of this package.   Eric noticed them when he put them in the car.  They were still there when we installed them.

First a little smoke to make sure everyone is calm.   Probably not necessary, but since we were not in suits and veils, we thought we'd make extra sure they were calm.

Just a few puffs.

Then Eric took the wood off the sides and bottom of one of the screened sides. 

And the bees started coming out as soon as they could squeeze through.   Which we weren't really prepared for.   

Then they were swirling through the air around us. And we weren't quite ready to dump.   And we missed that little staple in the middle.    But finally we got it and dumped them into the hive.

This is the doublewide hive.  It has a Tardis on the front and a window in the back.   It was designed for top bars, but they weren't ready yet, so we used regular deep frames.   I'll checkerboard them out and add top bars as we add more supers. 

Here are the bees in the Tardis hive.   We only put them in half.

One thing we hadn't thought of well enough was how to keep the bees completely out of the other half.   A couple of girls got in there, so I left a reduced entrance so they could get out of that side and in with the queen.   I hope they do.

And here is the queen!   She has some attendants in with her.  On the right side of the box is a compartment filled with candy.   We opened that up to the other bees, so they could eat her free.   Then she'll lay and lay and lay.

I put her box on the bottom of the hive, under the frames.

Look at the empty box the bees came in.  See that can?   It's still 2/3 full of syrup that they put in for the bees to eat in transit.   We can use that to feed them with once they're in.

In the meantime, the bees were getting diluted honey to eat.   These are regular jar feeders.  I did a 1:1 solution of honey and water. 

That turned out to be a BIG MISTAKE. 

I found out today that honey might carry the spores for American Foul Brood.   Don't feed your bees honey unless you know exactly which hive it came from at that it is free of American Foul Brood.  Unfortunately, I found out too late.  If we do get AFB, we'll have to burn everything. 

In all of the reading and studying and researching and talking to people, no one ever mentioned that 'strange' honey might kill your bees...until I mentioned on a forum that I was feeding honey, but by then it was too late.  Fingers crossed that we'll dodge that bullet.

I put them on sugar water now.   [They're not actually eating much - good nectar flow now.]   UPDATE BELOW!

Here I am installing the second package.   We had a better idea of what to do this time and it went a bit smoother.   [Yet another reason to do more than one when you start out!]

Once the bees were in and the queen was in, it was time to close up the hive.

First I put in the frames we had taken out to make room for the bees.    Since the bees are everywhere, I put the frame in gently and slowly and let the pressure of it tell the bees to scoot.   It took a bit for some of the bees to get the message, but they did.   Then I pushed all the frames together so there's not too much space between them where the bees can go crazy with burr comb.   We don't want burr comb.  Then I put the tops on.

Here are the fronts, with the bees in, tops and feeders on.  You can see a lot of bees in the air.  They soon gathered on the hive and feeders.  The bees love the honey water. 

Lots of bees still on the front of the flower lang.  That's the one we did last.

While Lily was taking pics, some bees decided to check her out.   She took this pic of her own hand, herself.  

These bees are very very gentle!  

When we got done, we watched the Beemaster's vid again to see what we could have done better.   Turns out we did better than we thought we did.  His bees started escaping, too.   It's normal.

We checked on the bees the next morning and despite the damp, they were orienting and moving around. 

Already the hives have different personalities.

UPDATE:  We forgot to completely sterilize the whole feeder units.   So we brought the entire units in - bases and all - and took everything apart to bleach it.   The syrup is a waste, and I'm sorry for that, but we've got a ticking time bomb unless we're careful.     

I put the bases and all the lids - including the extra ones - in a gallon bucket.  Then I filled it with hot water and a good glug of bleach - 1/3 cup or more, then some antibacterial dish soap and let them sit for a bit.   I rinsed each jar out and set it in/filled it with the bleach water to soak for a bit, then washed it out thoroughly and rinsed it again.   All 4 jars that way.   Then washed the lids and bases and rinsed them well.    Now we're putting in 1:1 sugar water solution.    The bees will be a bit confused, but maybe an apian smorgasbord is a good thing?   

This is very stressful, but hopefully a good learning experience for us and anyone who reads the blog.   I don't want anyone to have to go through this if they don't have to.

The good news is that one of the less extreme treatments for AFB is to put the bees in a new box with foundationless frames [burn all the old wood equipment] and have them draw all new comb - which is exactly what we're doing in the first place.  Apparently there's a chance that they'll metabolize the bad spores while they're drawing comb and render the spores harmless. 

Fingers crossed!