Reversal of Fortune

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

0 for 3

The arctic vortex killed the last 2 of our hives.  Eric had skirted the bottoms and put up extra wind and weather protection, but those plunging temps [-20 here with much lower wind chills] were too much. We started the winter with 3 hives - 2 regular sized ones  and one tiny one, tucked up well for the winter and with plenty of food.  The first hive died early in December.

Here is a pic [above] of some of the dead bees from the nuc.   You can see the queen in the center with the dark solid butt.

The temp here was 50 a few days after the cold snap [Cold snap.  Hah.  Now that's an understatement].  So we checked the bees and when we found nothing but deadouts, we cleaned them out.   There was a pair of mice in one hive.   We kicked them out and closed up the entrances so they couldn't get back in.   We pulled all the frames except for the two straightest ones in each hive.  I left those in in case we're lucky enough to get swarms this year.

The bees had plenty of candy left, so we tossed that out for the other critters to snack on.  We even saw a bee from a wild hive come to check it out.  I'd love to get those genetics!

We took all the frames inside to strip for honey and wax.   I got 7 pints of honey and about 2 lbs of wax

We thought all the colors in the comb were really pretty. 

Our next decision was whether to try again this year with bees or just throw in the towel.  Beekeeping is EXPENSIVE.  If you start, be aware that the cost for bees, equipment and extras can add up fast.   There are ways to cut costs, but trying to keep an apiary going for a few years is no small investment in money or time. Just sayin.

I love having bees.   We love what they've done for the gardens.  So, we thought we'd give it another year.  I put in an order for 2 more nucs.  They're expensive this year [$165 each], but we're getting Indiana queens and by getting nucs instead of packages, we're getting a 6 week head start, which will translate into bigger hives going into the winter.    I'd like to be able to overwinter the majority of my hives eventually and I'd also like to get a real honey harvest [60-200lbs of honey per hive]. 

Wish us luck.   Clearly we need it.

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.

Swarm Capture

It's swarm season.   As soon as we start seeing drones, we know that the hives are working full tilt to expand for the season.  The hive assesses things and decides it's time to split.  They make new queen cells and raise new queens and when the first ones start to come out, the old queen gathers half the hive and they swarm.

This swarm came from a friend of ours who had a hive in a tree in her backyard.   Happy, calm bees.  They swarmed and she called us and by the time we could gather stuff and get there, they had clustered nicely in a branch just a few feet away.  




Eric cut the ends off the branches and then put the whole cluster in a bucket.  I stood below to catch and Lily took the pics.

When the first part of the cluster hit the bucket, Eric got pinged a few times.   Serious ouch.

This is me looking through the cluster for the queen.   Never found her, but the bees were fanning, so we figured she was in there.

Notice the frame of drawn comb with a bit of honey in the bucket.   I hoped that would make them feel at home.

Then I trimmed the branch down as far as I could so we could cover the bucket with a canvas.  

We bungeed the canvas down and then strapped the bucket in the back of the truck for the long ride home.

It wasn't as dark out as these pics make it look.   We took the cluster out of the bucket and put it into the hive with that frame of comb and several honey balls.

Bees love honey balls.

We put empty supers on this hive so there would be plenty of room for the branch.

Then we closed her up.

The first day they seemed to like the box, but two days later they absconded. 

Since they came from a tree, I figure the queen wanted another one.  Since we have an abundance of hollow trees out here, I figure they found a tree they like better than our boxes.  

You win some, you lose some.

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.

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.

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.

Queen Bee

Queen getting ready to lay

This is the queen in our Tardis hive.   We call her Liz 10.  

[Whovians get it.]

Queen moving across capped honey comb

The Tardis is a horizontal hive body - as wide as two regular hive bodies side by side.   You take the lid off and can see the entire brood chamber without lifting one box off the other.  We LOVE horizontal hives and from now on, this is the way we're going to go. 

We're feeding this hive 1 quart of sugar syrup every other day.   They're sucking it dry.    I hope that if it ever starts raining here again, that when the goldenrod blooms, this hive will actually make us a few frames of honey.  We'll see.

Queen laying [in center of pic] , surrounded by attendants

We have had no problems with the Tardis hive.  The queen laid gangbusters from the beginning that that hive is constantly crowded at the entrance.   They much prefer the lower entrance, even though they can get out under the telescoping top lid.   I also opened a second lower entrance at the other end of the hive body but at the last inspection discovered a bumble bee in there robbing the honey, so I closed it off.   The bees obviously weren't guarding it. 

Thanks to Lily for the pics.   She does the camera thing while Eric and I are working the hives.  I point and tell her what to shoot and she shoots.  It makes things much easier for us.  

A New Queen

We got a new queen from Graham's Bee Works in Morgantown, Indiana.    Rumor has it that they have good genetics and we were happy to get a queen at short notice.   She was already mated and determined to be a good layer.

We killed the old queen on a Tuesday, the drove up and got the new queen first thing on Wednesday.   I installed her as soon as I got home.  

Queens come in a nice little cage.   They usually have some attendant bees with them.   The white stuff on the left is candy.   

There are little corks on both ends of the cage.    You can direct release her if you take out the cork on the right.   Or you can take the cork out on the candy end and let the bees already in the hive eat the candy until they free her.    It takes a couple of days to eat the candy out and by that time they're used to her. 

It had been 16 hours since I took the old queen out, and by then the bees knew she was gone.   We figured they'd be happy to get another one.   Just to be on the safe side, though I opened the cage on the candy end to give them plenty of time to get used to her before she got out.

I put her upside down across the frames in the hive.

The bees took immediate interest, but did not cluster madly around her or act hostile.   This is a good thing. 

Then I put another box on top of her with the frames taken out in that section since her box stuck up some.  

Then I put the inner cover on.  Then the jar feeder on top of that with a super around it.  Then the top cover. 


And then we waited.





On Sunday [4 days later]  we inspected and discovered that she had not been let out yet.   A lot of the candy had been eaten but not enough to free her.

So we let her out.

And she promptly flew away.

...

[I'll just let that sink in for a minute.]

...

Yeah.   We were stunned. 

We watched her orient around the hive [flying in circles a few times around the hive] and then she was gone. 

The good news was that she did orient.   Bees do that so they can find their way back home.   We hoped that she wanted to come back.  

Why did she fly?    Possibly, she wanted to mate again.   Maybe she just wanted some air.   Who knows. 

We did a quick inspection of the rest of that hive and found about 24 queen cups including three capped queen cells.    This means that the hive was well on its way to making their own new queen.  

Even if the new queen never came back, they'd probably be just fine.    It would take three weeks for them to have a laying queen, but at least they'd have one.  

If the new queen did come back, then at the next inspection we'd hopefully find her and we'd find eggs. 

In the meantime, we decided to put a frame of eggs in from the other hive.   That would keep the bees busy raising brood and give them a little boost if the other queen didn't come back and they had to wait until their own new queen was ready. 

***

Flash forward to our next inspection 6 days later.  

We opened the hive and it was the quietest it had ever been.  This was significant because it was always a noisy hive.   Queenless hives often are very loud.  It's called a 'queenless roar'.    As new beeks, we didn't know whether the bees were loud because they didn't like the queen or because it was hot.   

At any rate, this time the bees were quiet.   We were hopeful that this was because it was finally a queenright hive. 

One of the first frames we saw looked like this.


Those bump outs at the bottom edge are queen cells.  

The arrow is pointing to a queen cell we found with a larva in it.  

This means that they're still interested in making a queen. 


Hmmm.  





We looked through the rest of the frames and did find a queen.

A queen!

Yay!    Pause for celebration!

We also found some eggs

We did the math and the queen we found had to be the one we got from Graham's.   She came back. 

We found only one of the previous three capped queen cells and it was in tatters.    The other two were already completely gone.  

We're curious to see what happens to the queen cell in the previous pic.   Will they cap her? 

We'll inspect again in a week and let you know. 

Our other hive is booming!   They have 15 frames with comb and they're drawing new like crazy.    There is always a traffic jam at the entrance to the hive.   They've gone through a quart of syrup every two days for the past week.     Thank heaven they're doing so well.   They provided two frames of eggs for the weaker hive during the queen drama. 

How to Kill a Queen

[Warning:  This post unapologetically discusses the premeditated killing of an insect and contains quite a bit of gallows humor.   Just saying.]

So, the queen in our Flower Lang wasn't laying right.  

At all.

We suspected a problem during this inspection, and then the next inspection confirmed it.   She's a really bad layer.   I watched her for a while with a magnifying glass and noticed that she went into the cell to lay, but didn't let go of the egg and it came back up with her.   No eggs were getting in the cells.

This is problematic. 

The eggs are supposed to be in the bottom of the cell.   All neat and tidy and regular.  

That's the queen's job.  It's the only job she has.   The Only.  Job.

Bummer.  

When a queen isn't doing her job, she jeopardizes the whole hive.   They'll all be dead in just a few weeks. 

This means that a bad queen has to be killed and replaced.   I double checked with the Beemaster Forum and they confirmed.    We had to pinch the queen.

Drat.

There is no queen killing service, that I know of.   I mean, I'm sure that if I had connections to the underworld, I could probably hire someone to kill a queen, but not this kind of queen.

It's the kind of thing, a beekeeper just has to do for herself. 

Double drat.

And it all brings up the question of just how one goes about killing a queen.    When experienced beekeepers call it 'pinching the queen', they mean it literally.

Eew.

I just didn't see myself pinching my queen. 

So we considered other options.   But first we had to find her and get her out of the hive as soon as we could so that the bees would either start making a new queen or be accepting of one we put in there for them. 

This means going to the hive, opening it up and searching every frame until you find her.   

The sun was low in the sky when we got home that day and by the time we found her the sun had gone down behind the trees and the bees were getting a little antsy to get us the heck out of the hive.  

We finally found her and Eric got her in the little handy dandy queen catcher.   He handed it to me and in the transfer it opened and she got out and promptly fell to the bottom of the hive, where she skittered under the frames and high tailed to the back of the hive.  

Like any sane queen would do if threatened with imminent kidnapping.  

Not that I'm anthropomorphizing or anything.

So we had to search through the frames again to find her.   And we did, on the very last frame in the box, sort of festooning with the other bees.    And we got her again and this time were very careful to keep the blasted thing shut tight. 

And we closed things up, and headed to the house, where I was unable to put off her offing any more.

I hemmed and hawed.    Which surprised me a bit, because I've killed my share of bugs, let me tell you.   And moles.   And mice.  And possums.  In cold blood. [OK, not the possum.  It wasn't actually dead.]  I"m thinking I was kind of bonded to this dumb bee. 

I considered my options.

Pinching was definitely out.  

No freaking way.

We considered stepping on her.   Kind of a variation on the pinching theme.    Messy.

One of the guys on the forum said to drop her in a jar of water and then run away.     This appealed to the girly girl in me.    A lot.    Turns out it's really slow though.   You can only do this if you don't mind watching for a while or if, indeed, you run away. 

We also considered hanging.

We considered swords at dawn.

We considered poison.   

We considered arson.

In the end, I opted for the squishing.   But I chose a really nice shoe.  

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.