Beehive and smoker

© Robin Edmundson, 'Beehive, smoker',  18 x 22 inches framed. 

I use a smoker when working the bees.  It keeps them calmer.   This colony has four boxes.  The brood nest is in the bottom 2 boxes and they put the honey in the top boxes.   During a good flow, a colony can fill 4 or 5 of these boxes in a season.   We pull off the extra and harvest it.

I've had so much fun painting these hives!  I think this might be my favorite.   22 x 18 inches, framed.  $350.  All of these original watercolors will be hung and available for purchase at my upcoming show.

August 4-September 29, 2017

The Vault at Gallery Mortgage

121 E 6th St.  Bloomington, Indiana

Opening:  August 4, 2017   5:00 - 8:00 pm.

More Hive Art

© Robin Edmundson, 'Beehives #2', 18 x 22 inches framed.

Once I got started painting the hives, I couldn't stop.  There's more coming!   Here's a different view of my apiary.   I used softer greens and did a ton of editing as I worked it up.   [Always an adventure!]

I learn something every time I put brush to paper.


Framed, 18 x 22 inches.  $350.  Come see it in person at the show.

Hives, Plein Air - redux

© Robin Edmundson, 'Beehives - Plein Air', 18 x 22 inches framed.  

Getting feedback is a powerful thing.   I was showing this piece to my plein air group and someone who was there during the actual painting of the thing mentioned that I hadn't put in the handles on the boxes [See that version in this post].   I had left them out because the piece was so busy anyway, but I thought about her comment a lot and asked the family for more opinions and the feedback was that they'd be better understood as hives if I put in the handles.

So I did.

I like this better.  Do you?


Framed, 18 x 22 inches.  $350.  Come see it in person at the show.

Beehives

© Robin Edmundson, 'Beehives #1', watercolor on paper,  10 x 14 inches.

As you know I am a beekeeper.   Most beekeepers paint their boxes white, but we decided we wanted something a little brighter.   So I went to the store and bought paint in magenta, cyan and yellow, with some white to lighten things if I wanted.   Every time we get a new box, I mix things up and paint it a different color.  Though I didn't depict it here, many of the boxes also have a design on them as well.   Strong graphics help the bees orient to their own hives.

My favorite color is the bright green and I use a lot of it to help unify the crazy stack of colors in the beeyard.   All in all it's a beautiful little area and a fun subject for a painting or two or three.  More of these are in the works.

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.

Supers on the Hives

I put the supers on the hives.   All those colors make me absurdly happy.  I have jars of sugar water tucked in the top boxes.   They won't encourage robbing there and the bees can feed at will.  This is especially important when it rains a lot and the bees can't get out to forage.

In a few weeks, I'll check the middle boxes to see how full they are.

Supers

I have a stack of medium supers waiting behind my hives to use as tall shims for when the flow abates and I need to feed the bees.   Eric built these for me.  He built a great jig for the handles.  Handles are good. 

I put a jar of 1:1 sugar syrup upside down over the screened opening in the center of my inner covers and then one of these supers around it.   It protects the jar, the bees can't build comb in it and when the bees are ready to start making me lots of honey, I can put frames in them and use them for honey supers.     I can put extra frames in them for storage if I need to - the jars are about 3 frames width, so I can still store 6-7 frames in each box if I needed to. 

New Berry Patch

Last fall we moved the hives from our west hill to an area not far from the veg garden.   Over the winter, we built a berry patch around the new site. 

I decided to orient the hives to the south.   They're already in full sun so it's a bit of overkill during the summer, but hopefully this will help keep them warmer during the winter.  

I also put them close enough together so that I can stuff insulation between them and they can borrow a bit of heat and shelter from each other.  Packing them closer together gives me enough room for 4 hives in the row.   I'm getting two packages at the end of this month and two nucs in May. 

If I'm lucky and a swarm moves into one of the empty hives before that, then we'll use the horizontal hive, too.   You can just see it on the far side of the picnic table.   It has a window on the back and we'll keep that hive on the table for a while so it's easy to see into. 

That picnic table is extra tall. It makes a nice boundary for the bees and a great place to stand behind to watch the fronts of the hives.   The bees fly up and over it and don't bother observers at all.  

The berry beds are in a U shape.  I have 2 blueberry bushes, and a whole lot of blackberries and raspberries [red and gold ones].   I'm really looking forward to these berries so close to the house.   We have a few acres of wild ones, but they're not very big or very sweet.   These should be much better berries.    Some will bear this year, some we'll have to wait for. 

If the deer bother them, The patch is easy to enclose with those 16 ft animal fence panels, which will be both deer deterrent and make for a great wind block in the winter - all you have to do is throw some cheap tarps over them and zip tie them in place.   I'll probably put the fence up just for that. 

At any rate, it feels like a real accomplishment to have this done and mulched and the hives all ready for the bees when they arrive.   In the meantime, the neighborhood bees have been robbing out the honey and pollen in the hives and it's nice to see a little bee action while I'm waiting. 

Sugar, Sugar

When I was battening down the hives last week, I put mite boards under them to check the mite load.   The 24 hour mite count ranged from 13 to 30, which wasn't awful, but still indicates the presence of mites in the hives.

Varroa mites bring disease and weaken the hives, which contributes to winter hive losses.   Mite loads get highest in the fall and now is the time to treat the bees to get rid of the mites.

Here's the deal though - the chemicals used to kill the mites are really not all that great for the bees and generations of chemical treatments have selected for bees that don't do well without constant chemical intervention.   We want to be as chemical free as possible, so we have a dilemma.

1.  Treat the mites with traditional chemicals.
Con:  Grow another generation of bees that can't survive without loads of chemical interventions.
Pro:  It gets rid of the mites and prevents the spread of the diseases the mites carry.

2.  Don't treat the mites.
Con:  Risk losing the hives.  It doesn't prevent the viruses, like DWV, that the mites carry.
Pro: This selects out the weak bees and selects for bees that can deal with a significant mite load.  Bees that survive are the bees we want.

Basically, the choice was 'treat with chemicals' or 'don't treat at all'.  In the past few years, beekeepers have discovered a 3rd option.

3.  Treat the mites with powdered sugar. 
Pro:  The bees will groom the sugar off each other and knock off the majority of mites at the same time.  Once the mites are off, they can't pass on a virus.  The sugar also acts as food.    If you sugar the bees in the fall, then they can store this food source for winter.   Treatment without chemicals.   It's a nice happy medium.

How to powder sugar the bees
You need about 1 cup of powdered sugar per hive.   You also need some sort of fine screen to sift it through.   You can use a real kitchen sifter, or strainer or something like that.

I used one of those flat round steamer/spatter preventers that we had in the cupboard as a sifter.  [See top photo]  I measured my powdered sugar in 8 oz jelly jars.   All you have to do is turn the jar of sugar upside down and and rub it across the screen.  

Open the hive and sift the sugar all over the frames.  Make sure you put the sugar all over the hive. 

I did smoke the girls a bit because it was a little breezy that day and even though I was working very quickly, they were unhappy about the disturbance.

Once you've sifted all the sugar into the hive, you can brush the tops of the frames to get that sugar down on the bees, too.    I didn't bother.

When I was done, I put some bee candy on the tops of the hives.   The candy was just too fat to fit under the inner cover, so I popped an empty super on top [It happened to have a few empty frames on either side], laid the candy in the center and then closed it all up.  

I'll check them again during the January Thaw and put more candy in if they need it. 

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. 

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. 

Tardis Supers

A beehive consists of a set of boxes.   The bees use the bottom boxes to put their brood in.  That's called the brood chamber.  They only need a couple of deep boxes or maybe three medium boxes to keep their brood in.

A beekeeper puts extra boxes on top for the bees to fill with honey.  Those boxes are called supers.   The very same type of box can be used as brood chamber or as a super.  The name refers to what the bees use it for. 

The Tardis is a horizontal hive body.   It's the same size as two boxes side by side.   We love that arrangement because when you take the lid off, it's easy to see inside and you can see all of the brood chamber at once without worrying about accidentally killing the queen when you're taking one brood box off the other.  

The Tardis still needs supers though so the bees don't feel crowded and so they can collect honey.    If it ever rains here again, we will have a lot of goldenrod and a significant nectar flow.   We have acres of goldenrod that should produce a lot of honey for the bees to overwinter on - if it rains. 

Once the frames in the brood chamber are 80% full, it's time to add supers.   This is what the Tardis looks like with its supers.   

The box on the bottom is all one box.  There are two boxes stacked on top, under the lid.  This gives the bees plenty of space for honey but the smaller boxes will be easier for us to lift.  Honey is heavy!

Here's a closer look at the center entrances.   The bees are loving the extra space to come in and out of.   There is usually a cloud of bees waiting in front.  This is a very busy hive. 

Notice they like the left one better.  It's the original one. 

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. 

Painted Hive

K2 is done painting the new Langstroth hive.   This is all her design.

Voila!

Here's a close up of the detail:

We used good quality exterior housepaint.  Semi-gloss so it would be a bit easier to wash off if necessary.  

It'll live in the studio for a while until we find a good spot for it outside.  

Parts of a Langstroth Beehive

Langstroths look like stacks of boxes.  It's hard to imagine while you're looking at the outside, just how bees move around in there and draw comb and raise more bees and make honey. 

Here's a guided tour through a Langstroth hive.

This is the hive base.  The white stuff in the middle is actually screening [which you can't see] over a white board which you can slide out.

Hives need excellent ventilation to let moisture out.   The screen keeps the bottom of the hive open and keeps mice and things out.

The white board is only used when you need to do a varroa mite count.   Slide the board in and leave it for 24 hours.   Carefully take it out and count the mites.   As long as there are fewer than 50 mites, the hive is OK.  More than 50 mites and you need to do something about them.

This is the hive door.   You can see it on top of the base, but under the supers [boxes] in the top pick. 

Notice that it has two doors.  You can rotate it to give you the size you need.   A mouse can get in the big side.  During the winter, you can tilt it so only the small door is open and that will keep out the mice that will try to winter in the hive.

 

This is a pic of a medium super and a deep super.   There are shallow ones, too that are 1/2 the depth of a deep super.

 Supers are the 'boxes' of the hive.   Supers come in different depths, which hold different sizes of frames.

Supers are open at the top and bottom.   They only have sides. 

Most supers are built to hold 10 frames, though some are built to hold eight.

The frames hang down in super and that's where the bees will draw comb.   Some of the comb [the inner frames] will be brood comb, where they lay eggs and raise new bees.  Some of the comb [the outer frames], will be for making and storing honey. 

Here are two supers on a hive base.    The bottom super is where the queen will be and where the brood comb will be.   The next super up will be where the bees put the honey.

That is their honey and they need it to keep the hive going, so we won't be taking that honey.

Those two supers together are called the 'hive body'.  

Because we want to have some honey for us, we can put more supers on the stack.   But we want the queen to stay below where we can't accidentally hurt her, so we put a qeen excluder screen between the hive body and the top supers that we will be harvesting.

Here the excluder has been set on the hive body, ready to put another super on top.

Here is the next super set on top of the queen excluder.

Remember, all of the supers have open bottoms and tops, so the bees will be able to walk wherever they want in the hive at all levels [except for the queen, who has to stay in the hive body.]

Factoid:  There's no flying around in the hive.   They walk around.  [No running in the house.]

We can keep adding supers as tall as we can reach.   The supers can get really heavy, so they don't recommend that you stack them higher than is comfortable to lift down.

Rog recommended that you add a new super when the last one has comb on 7 of the frames.    That way the hive won't get crowded.   If the hive gets crowded, they'll want to swarm to start a new colony.    We don't want that because we want the bees working with us in our hives.  

[Note:  One of the problems with Langstroths is that when we need to check the queen, we have to take all the supers down to get to the brood box and check on her.    That's a lot of lifting and monkeying with the hive and a lot of potential for accidentally killing or angering some of the bees.    This is one reason we're going to try a top bar hive, too.]

On top of the hive, there are two lids.   The first is the inner cover, which has a notch in the back for the bees to come and go through and a hole in the center for bees to get into the hive.   This also increases ventilation.   

On top of that, capping the whole thing off,  is the outer cover.


The whole thing will sit in a level situation, on top of cinder blocks so it's about 8 inches off the ground.   That'll help keep the mice out and ensure good ventilation through the bottom.  


We'll be building a top bar hive soon.  Look for a tour of that hive in a week or so.