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.

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.

October Hive Inspection

As I mentioned in the September report, both of my colonies were full of bees, but zero honey.

The weather has been warm enough that the bees have had plenty of time to pack on some honey to fill their empty frames. In addition, I fed some 2:1 sugar water to help them out. 

Mouse Guards:
Last weekend, we put mouse guards on the entrances because our mice are sneaky and love the warmth and ready food available in winter hives.  The guards are just 1/2 inch hardware cloth, cut in a long strip, bent and stapled to the bottom board and box in a couple of places.   I've read that mice won't go in a hive with just the smallest entrance open like you see above, but I have personally seen mice in my hives with nothing but the small entrance, so I opted for extra guards this year.

The bees don't seem to mind, too much, but you can tell it gets in their way.   As soon as things get busy in the spring, I'll be popping them off.

The first thing I did in this inspection was to take off the feeders and extra empty shim boxes and then lift the hive [more of a tilt, actually] to see how heavy they were.   The goal is about 100 lbs in 2 boxes.  Since I only have one box per hive, I figured a good goal was 50 lbs.   The left hive was about that heavy but the right one was still very light.

Right Hive:
I opened this hive first.  As I suspected, there was almost zero honey, though I did see some nectar being worked over.   There were a few yellow jackets in there, which I killed.  I saw some dead bees on the bottom of the hive and a bunch on the ground in front of this hive.   I pulled the bottom board and saw that this hive had had some dysentery.  They had had dysentery earlier because one of their feeders of sugar water fermented.  As soon as I got them clean feed last time, the dysentery cleared right up. This time the dysentery wasn't as bad,  but I think it's enough to weaken the hive.  The colony numbers were down - there was just over half a deep box full of bees. I am concerned that this hive won't make it through the winter.  

I put a 4 lb bag of sugar on top of the frames, Mountain Camp style, put a 3 inch shim over that and battened down the hatches.  

Left Hive:
This hive had a few frames of honey and the box was full of bees.  It seems healthy.   It's got a shy queen - I looked over every frame but didn't see her.  They're still pulling in and storing a lot of pollen.   I really hope this hive makes it through the winter, because my feeling is that this queen is a keeper.   If they boom next year, I'd like to make a split.   These genetics seem good.

I put a 4 lb bag of sugar on these guys, too and sealed them up.

Notes:  
There were a lot of yellow jackets around the area and a few in each hive.  I'll put out more traps and see if I can't help get them under control.

Winterizing:
I'll be scooting the hives together and putting insulation around them next month.   In addition, I'll be putting bales of straw on end around 3 sides as a wind break.   They're also on gravel which should hold some heat during our frequent warm spells.

Here's hoping they both make it through this winter.

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.   

First Inspection - July 2014

It's been a month since we installed the nucs in the hives and we did a one-month inspection this week.  

There are a lot of bees.  

But they are not in a hurry to draw out more comb.   Both hives had only 7 frames drawn out and had not even started an 8th.   Weird.    Since they came with 5 frames, I'm unimpressed.

Lily caught a pic of them festooning as we pulled the frames apart.  Bees festoon a lot and it's interesting to see how they hold on.  Blow the pic up for a closer look; it's really cool.

Both queens looked like they were laying well and each hive had a frame or two of honey.  We put a super on each hive to encourage some growth and we're feeding sugar water and honey for the rest of the season.

I hope the queens are busy, busy, busy because I'd like to have a lot of bees in each hive before winter. 

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. 

Newest Queen

We checked on the bees from the bee removal that we did in town and found a big gorgeous queen with a terrific laying pattern.   It's a small but productive and happy hive so far.    Plus, they were nice and calm. 

Here's a pic of a frame of brood with the queen on it.   You can see capped brood and older larvae that are almost ready to be capped.   The queen is out in the open, easily visible.   Can you see her?  Click the pic to biggify it.

The Old Queen

Both of the queens we got in our packages last year died.  One was a dud layer and I replaced her with this one.  The other one didn't make it through the winter.   They both came from the deep south.  We won't be doing bees that way again if we can help it. 

Here's a pic of the queen in the Tardis hive - red-ish gold and gorgeous.   This is a local queen; we got her from Roger Graham of Graham's Beeworks in Morgantown, Indiana.  This is the queen that survived the winter. 

This is her laying pattern.  Almost solid all over the deep frame.  Calm bees.  Overwinters well.

I split this hive in May and she threw another great calm queen for the other hive.  

This is what we're looking for in queens.

A New Queen!

At the beginning of May, I split our overwintered hive.   I did an equal split, walkaway - which means I divided the hive in half into two new hives [One frame for this, one frame for that - dealing the frames like cards] The Tardis had the old queen, which means the lang had to make a new one.  

The lang started with 3 frames of brood and a lot of field bees.  I checked on things a couple of weeks later and gave them another frame of brood, just in case.

I checked them again last week and lo, and behold, I found a hive with 4 frames of good brood:  eggs and larvae at all stages.  This means a queen!  And then I found her.  Large and very golden. She's in the center of this pic. 

Bonus:  These bees are very calm.  They only got disturbed when I took this frame out of the hive.  The rest of the time they were very calm. 

She's got a good laying pattern for a new queen and here's hoping they make us a lot of honey.

Hive Split

May 1st I did a complete hive inspection of our remaining hive with Lily assisting.  I had seen a lot of mouse poop in the sugar we fed in February and feared there was a mouse nest in the bottom box, so I knew we'd have to do a complete inspection top to bottom to clean out whatever was in the bottom.

Also, now's the time to do splits, so I was planning on taking at least a nuc's worth off and hopefully splitting two nucs worth off.  

There were a lot of bees in the top box, so I just took the whole box off and set it aside on a spare SBB [screen bottom board.] between the Tardis and the lang.

In the bottom box there was a lot of evident mouse damage.   You can see how the mouse started on one side and ate the honey through center to the wax capping on the far side.  Smart, but seriously aggravating.

This is what I found in the bottom of the box. A whole lot of wax cappings, dead bee parts, mouse droppings and other debris.

But no nest!   The mouse must have had a nest elsewhere and just come in from the top regularly to feast. The debris was a couple of inches deep on the bottom.   I cleaned it all out.

I went through every frame in the bottom box and there was no brood at all.   I knew then that I wouldn't be getting more than one nuc's worth of split, but since we're down to only one hive, I figured that was better than nothing. 

I  left one frame of honey on the south end and left the rest of the frames out.  I'd be replacing them with the split.

The other box was full of bees. I decided to do an even split and a walkaway.

A walkaway is where you take some of the bees out and put them in a new hive and leave them alone to make a new queen.

An even split is where you take the frames and deal them like cards - one frame for the old hive, one for the new hive, etc. 

There were five frames full of capped brood, larvae and eggs.  I could see where the first brood had emerged already and those spaces were full of larvae again.   Good queen!

Click the pics for closeups of the larvae.

Here's a close-up of the eggs.  They look like grains of rice in the bottoms of the cells.  The cells are yellow because the bees are tracking pollen all over everything right now.







We did sight the queen - and she's gorgeous.  Very calm. 

We ended up putting her in the Tardis with two frames of brood.The other three frames of brood I left in the lang.


I made a couple of mistakes that you can learn from. 

1.  Lots of beeks talk about checkerboarding - where you put an empty frame between the drawn or full stuff to encourage the bees to expand the hive.   I did that with the brood - put empty drawn comb between the brood frames.

MISTAKE:   You want the brood in a tight cluster because it's easier for the bees to keep it warm.  I just split the hive, so there are many fewer bees to keep the brood warm and this is Indiana - no telling what the weather is going to do for the next few weeks.

Checkerboarding is fine for honey supers, but not for brood.   I went back in a few hours later and took the empties out and tucked the brood frames next to each other.   I thank Michael Bush's book for making this clear to me [The Practical Beekeeper - link on my sidebar] Having that book handy is like having a 24/7 mentor.

2.  I put the queen and two frames of brood in the Tardis, with 7 more frames of honey and partials and the follower board.   

Pollen that fell out of some cells during the move

MISTAKE:  The Tardis is in a different place - all of the field bees are going to come back to the lang, which will leave a lot of bees with the 3 frames of brood in the lang, but will leave the Tardis short handed.   Short handed for keeping the brood warm in a big box. 

I went in the next morning to see how much action there was in the Tardis and while the brood was well covered, there just weren't a lot of bees coming and going, so I quickly went back in and removed 4 frames.   Now they have a frame of honey, 2 frames of brood, then 3 more frames of honey and partials - 6 in all, then I put in the follower board to make it a much smaller space to keep warm.   [A follower board is a removable wooden wall in the shape of a frame that you use to make the space smaller or bigger as you need to.]


I figure that the two hives are now on roughly equal footing for different reasons.

The lang has no queen, but they have three frames of brood in various stages, plus eggs, plus all the extra field bees.

They were super busy coming and going the next day and I think they'll do fine.

I'll keep an eye on things and after three weeks I'll go in and make sure they've got queen cells. 

The Tardis has fewer bees and only two frames of brood, but she has the queen. And she's a good queen.   I'm hoping that will make up for it.

Also, the Tardis has a window at the back so I can easily monitor the numbers.  If I need to shake a few extra bees into the hive from the lang, I can. 




When I was all done, I put the rest of the bee candy on the tops of the frames in both hives and put supers around them, then put rocks on the landing board in front of the Tardis entrance so they'd have to go around them to exit and enter.  They'll re-orient.   Also those bees were fanning like crazy during the relocation [pic], so I think any bees that moved with the queen will stick with her.  



Fingers crossed everything will be fine and they'll be ready for the main flow in a few weeks.

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.  

New Queen Check

So, you know we had our share of problems with the flower lang hive.

Good. Gravy.

Drama, drama, drama. 

At our last inspection, things looked good in that hive - good laying pattern, calm bees.

And then we put the top box on the bottom box and the bees started roaring.

Roaring is not good.

I feared we killed the queen.    And a couple of days after that, I read Linda's blog, where the same thing happened to her and indeed the queen was dead when next she looked.

Crap.

So I decided not to panic.   [You guys from Beemaster will be so proud of me.]

And we did nothing.  [When in doubt - do NOTHING]

And we waited two weeks for another inspection figuring that if she were really gone, then the bees would make a new one and we'd see ripe queen cells when next we checked.

And when we checked, we found this.  

Beautiful brood comb.  Lots of larvae.

And the queen!

I'm so relieved!

These guys have started taking more syrup and I'm hoping that they'll have a good boom now just before the goldenrod blooms.

We have acres and acres of goldenrod and bees love it, so we might actually get a super of honey this year.   Fingers crossed.

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.

Six Week Surprise

In the center of the photo is a queen cup.  It's round and hanging facing down.  

The bees in the Flower Lang decided to build a queen cell.  Experienced beekeepers told me that it's normal to see these built and torn down.    We did see the queen that day, but not very many eggs.   Also there was syrup in the brood comb - not a good sign.    We saw huge celled comb at the perimeter of the hive - likely where they will make more queen cups.  

We might be seeing preparations for supercedure.   

If the bees don't like the queen, they'll raise another one.  Actually they'll raise a bunch.   One is raised in the center of the hive and others will be raised on the outer edges of the hive.   The extras are for insurance.   Say the first new queen goes out to mate but doesn't come back.    They'll have another queen there just in case.   

Why do bees supercede?    They know the queen.   If there's a problem with her, they'll know and they'll take steps to replace her.   Could be she's sick or damaged or misfiring.   The bees'll know.

If this queen cup is much longer when we inspect next and if we find others, we'll know they're serious.  If we see few or no eggs, we'll know why they're serious.    Even if the queen is still there, we'll know they're going to supercede and we'll just stay out of the way while they do it. 

If the cups are gone, we'd expect to see a lot of eggs and business as usual.   If the cups are gone but there are few eggs, I'll consult the experts.  

Should be interesting.