Steven's Bees

Mid-winter Check

2012-01-28T14:13:00.000-05:00

It's hard to call this mid-winter given the mild weather we've been having. I think I've used my snow thrower a total of 2 times (and since it was a new bigger snow thrower this year, it wasn't a chore). But after all, it is the end of January!

The weather this winter has been good bee-wise. We have had a few days of mid-40's to 50's, and that lets the bees fly and not have to be huddled up in their cluster the whole time. They can move around in the hive and hopefully reach more food when it is warm.

Today got up into the low 40's, so it was a good time to give the backyard hives a quick check. I wanted to see how they were doing on the sugar candy I gave them three weeks ago. I put in my bee jacket and veil, even though I was just going to lift up the lid and have a look (last winter I took a peek just wearing my winter coat, and a bee flew up and stung me on the forehead).

Here's a picture of the green and pink hives' clusters:

These clusters looked good, and they hadn't consumed all of the sugar patties yet. The brown hive looked just like the second picture, so I didn't take another picture. It was interesting to note that the cluster in the pink and brown hives was up to the inner cover (when I lifted the cover, half of the cluster was attached).

So I'll give them another couple of weeks before I look to add more sugar.

A few days ago the weather was in the 50's and my wife took some pictures of the bees flying. Since this is a bee blog, you can't have too many pictures of bees!!

52 Degrees In January?!?

2012-01-07T19:09:00.000-05:00

I couldn't believe it - the temperature got up to 52 degrees this afternoon!

I still had to put out the bee candy on my backyard hives, and the weather was perfect for it. This early afternoon it was 43 when I started working with the hives. Cracking the cover, I saw the Brown hive and Green hive had appropriate looking winter clusters:

However the Pink hive didn't look the same:

I could see quite a few bees in between the frames; but I didn't want to disturb them. I am supposing that the bees have broken cluster due to the warmer temperature, and moved down in search of more food.

In any case, I added 2 pie plates of sugar candy to each hive (the same I added to Sutton). Here's what it looks like:

I gently (as much as possible) scoot the bees over and lay the candy right on top of the frames. You can see the (grey) shim which gives about 2" of space between the frame tops and the inner cover. I'll check them in about a month if we have a warm-ish day to see if I need to add more.

As mentioned, the temperature got up to 52 degrees later in the afternoon, according to the bee thermometer in my back yard:

With the temperature so warm, the bees were able to fly, and fly they did!

I was glad to see a good number of bees flying from the Pink hive, so maybe they were just lower in the box.

Since there are no flowers to get nectar from, the bees were mostly doing "cleansing flights." That's just a pleasant name for bees going out and going to the bathroom! And we had evidence of that - both of our cars were spotted with brown bee poop all over! It's good that they can do these flights, because during the winter the bees "hold it" and wait for warm weather, which can be months away. Not my idea of fun!

Who can take a sunrise, sprinkle it with dew...

2012-01-01T18:05:00.004-05:00

During warm weather, if you need to feed bees, you feed them a sugar syrup solution. But once the temperature drops below 40 or so, this won't work. You hope that the bees have stored up enough honey in the combs to last the winter, but sometimes you need to do "emergency" winter feedings.

I put emergency in quotes because it's not the optimal situation, but it beats the alternative (starvation). For the winter you need to make and feed "bee candy."

Bee Candy is essentially sugar candy. There are a variety of recipes out there (you can Google search and find one you like), but you basically boil sugar and water until it reaches soft ball, almost hard ball stage. Then you pour it into pie plates and let it harden. You then set the bee candy on the top bars, and the bees can eat it. Some people like to use just granulated sugar for emergency feeding, but I had a bad experience with that and I prefer the candy.

Last year I learned a couple of things about making bee candy:

Hot sugar syrup is hot. Don't get any on your fingers when pouring!
Pouring into plain paper plates will cause the candy to stick to the paper, and peel a layer of paper off when you take it off the plates. This year I laid down a layer of aluminum foil first, and had no sticking.

Here are some pictures and comments. Not exciting, I know; but it may be instructional.

Did I mention that the hot sugar syrup is hot?

I lined the plates with aluminum foil this time. They are also sitting on insulated cookie sheets - don't want to run the risk of have a problem on the counter with the heat.

The finished products, all stacked up!!

Winter Prep (a little late...)

2011-12-27T20:29:00.003-05:00

Not much has happened since the fall. In November I put on some jars of sugar syrup, but probably not enough. During the week of Christmas the weather wasn't too bad, so I finally did my winter prep, which consists of:

Remove any feed jars and extra supers (which are simply covering the jars)
Close up the screened bottom boards with pink styrofoam boards
Add 2" shims under the inner cover in preparation for any winter feeding (provides extra space for the sugar candy)
Add styrofoam insulation in between the inner and outer cover
Add mouseguards to the entrances

I was a little late in doing this, so I took a flashlight to make sure there were no mice in the hive (don't want to trap them in!). When I opened the backyard hives, I saw the bees at the top of the bars. So I'll make up some sugar candy feed and put some on early just in case they don't have enough food. It's not perfect, but it'll let them survive.

Here are the backyard hives ready for winter. Note that I don't wrap them - they sit against the woods, which provides enough wind break (in my opinion).

P.S. Being a beekeeper, I always am the recipient of interesting bee-related gifts. Here's what my stepmom sent me for Christmas! :-)

Extracting we go...

2011-10-22T15:06:00.000-04:00

Thanks to the generosity of the Sutton hives, I have honey to extract! I got out my new Maxant extractor that I bought this year, and gave it a good cleaning (didn't need it, but I wanted to get rid of any new residue).

I purchased also a stand for it, but I didn't have time to mount the stand on a solid wooden base (that'll be next year's project). So I just set it on the kitchen table like last time. Here's the setup:

First comes the uncapping of the frames. Like last time, I used a simple serrated bread knife. It seems to work, and I don't feel I need a heated knife. I use a rubbermaid container to catch all the cappings.

My youngest son Jacob was anxious to help - he held the extractor body as I spun it, because the frames were off balance a lot.

Liquid gold! I noticed that this time the honey was very dark.

There's always some honey which doesn't come out the spigot - I solved that problem!

Here are the cappings - I strain those to get the honey out and then let the bees clean up the rest.

So here's the take from the fall - around 25 pounds. Not bad! Enough to give as Christmas gifts as well as sell to recoup a little of my investment.

Notice the difference from the spring honey (on the left - very clear) and this fall honey (right - dark and thick). It all depends on the flowers the bees visit.

Here are the cappings set out for the bees to reclaim. I also made a video so you can see the activity. Especially in the fall (when there are no flowers) the bees are anxious to reclaim all of the honey the can!

Sutton comes through!

2011-10-10T21:39:00.001-04:00

Saturday (2 days ago) I performed the pre-winter maintenance on the hives in my backyard. Since I took today as a vacation day, I decided to do the same for the hives in Sutton. I hadn't been out there since (gasp!) the first week of August! It seems the frequency of my visits is about 2 months. But the bees don't seem to mind (almost as if they know what they need to do without my intervention, right Tom?).

I got there around 4:30PM, a little later than I would have liked, but still plenty of light. I pried up the top inner cover on the right hive, and this is what I saw:

You can see all that goopy stringy brown stuff - propolis. It's a type of "bee glue" they use for many things, but especially for filling in places that are narrow. These bees are italians from Georgia, and they (the italians) are known for how much they propolize everything.

When I lifted up the honey super to set it aside, I got a nice surprise - it was actually heavy. What's this? Maybe some honey? I was excited to look. But first I inspected the top brood chamber.

You can see by this picture that there were a good number of bees hanging out. This hive was doing well. They must like the location.

I pulled out a couple of frames from the brood chamber, and this is what I saw:

This is a frame *full* of honey. That's what I like to see! About half of the frames looked like this. These bees are well on their way to preparing for winter - filling the upper chamber with food. I won't have to feed this hive much.

I didn't go into the lower chamber - just took a peek by tilting up the upper brood chamber. Guess what? More bees :-)

Here's what things looked like when I finished my inspection. Messing around with a hive always brings up more bees:

Now I started looking at the honey super. This is what I saw!

Yay! Honey! I used my bee brush and started brushing off the bees (which for some reason they objected to) as I moved the frames to another super (covered with a towel to try to keep out the bees). Maybe one day I will purchase a fume board, but with the few number of hives I have (and the little amount of honey they produce) using a bee brush isn't bad. I wasn't expecting to have to deal with bees in the super, so it took me longer there (and was more work) than I was thinking.

Then I went to inspect the left hive. Again, a heavy honey super, and a good amount of bees on the top of the frames:

Like the other hive, this one put up a bunch of honey in the upper brood chamber. I didn't take a picture of it, but it was a little less than the other hive, but well on the way for winter. Again, for this hive I will not have to feed much.

This hive has a peculiar habit of building brace comb between the upper and lower brood chamber, in all different directions. I used to scrape it off, but they just put it back so I leave it alone now.

Before, there were drone brood in the brace comb. But now they filled it with honey. Here's what the top of the lower brood chamber looks like - the clumps of bees are along the brace comb, and you can see how it zig-zags around.

Again the bees surprised me and put up a bunch of honey in the honey super:

On both hives I put a 2" shim, then an empty medium super (to cover the syrup jars). I didn't have enough of the deep bodies, so I had to make do with these two parts (the medium super is not quite tall enough to cover these jars, so I needed the extra shim).

So the Sutton hives are also ready for winter.

I ended up with 18 frames (two 9-frame honey supers), and I'd estimate there were about 12 frames of capped honey ready for extraction (the other frames are either empty, or had mostly uncapped nectar). Wouldn't you know it? I just did a major cleaning and put-away of my extractor, thinking I wouldn't have to use it any more this season! My youngest son is excited about the prospect of doing more extraction - I'll probably do it this weekend.

Old Man Winter...

2011-10-10T20:56:00.000-04:00

Well, not really - it's a while until Old Man Winter arrives. But it is time to start getting the bees ready for winter.

In the wild, bees have a certain behavior when the days get shorter and the temperature starts dropping. They start to adjust their nest and move down, and any last bit of honey gets put up above them. The kick out the drones to die (since their usefulness has ended with the end of the summer), and the queen starts slowing down on her laying. But this preparation doesn't always allow the bees to survive the winter (for example, if they don't have enough food).

With managed hives, since we do rob them of some of the excess honey, we also try to help them get ready for winter. For me it's a matter of making sure they have enough food, and they have places they can store it.

This last weekend was a bit of Indian Summer, with temperatures in the high 70's / low 80's. The bees were out in force with the good weather (my wife has some Shasta Daisies growing in the back yard, the bees [including mason bees] are all over it). I decided it was a good time to do some winter preparations.

I needed to do the following:

Take off the honey supers (since the bees haven't put anything up there)
Check the top box to make sure they have room
Put on an empty brood chamber above the inner cover, in preparation for adding jars of sugar syrup

I also dug out my storage bins in the garage that I use to put away some of the frames for the season. I got a surprise - I forgot that I had stuck in 3 full size frames which were pretty much full of sugar syrup "honey." They came from one of the Sutton hives which died last year. I put them there intending to put them on an active hive. Well, that will happen this weekend!

Brown Hive

I started with the brown hive. I started on the bottom box, and this was what I saw:

It's not a terribly large number of bees, but not too bad. I saw some bees bringing in pollen (probably from the daisies and something else which is bright orange). I marked them in the following picture:

There was also a good amount of pollen in the lower brood chamber:

Up top, the bees had collected some amount of nectar, but not enough for winter:

In the honey super I saw that the bees had some nectar stored, and about 1/3 of a frame of capped honey on two frames. These I will scrape open and set out for the bees to rob and put back into the hive.

Pink Hive

On the Pink Hive, I put the honey super (undrawn) on the brood chamber without a queen excluder. I didn't expect them to do anything with it, but it was worth a try. I was right - they didn't do anything with it.

But I did see the queen in this one:

Note that there isn't much brood - it looks like she's already cutting back on production.

Green Hive

The Green Hive got a pretty good makeover. You'll recall that this was a hive from a late summer nuc, so it hadn't really started going up into the top brood chamber (I added the top chamber a few weeks ago). I did see that they had started putting up some nectar there, so that's good.

I also had a Grey Nuc over at a friends house. It turns out that the queen in that nuc was really bad - she hardly had any brood production, even when it was in a nice environment away from other hives pestering it.

So I brought the gray nuc back, and let's say I left the queen there :-)

I decided to combine the bees from the grey nuc into the green hive to boost the number of bees. I did that.

Since the green hive had the least food, it got two of the frames of food from storage. Here is one of those frames:

So I have the hives ready for winter. I set out all of the supers a little way away from the hives so the bees can reclaim whatever nectar and honey is there.

Here are the three hives (the top box is an empty cover so I can easily add jars of syrup):

The empty box of the Grey Nuc is sitting off to the side so the bees that are left in there (there are always some) can go to their new home.

I'll mix up some 2:1 syrup to feed the bees at a later date.

Lazy Queen?

2011-09-17T20:44:00.002-04:00

So I've had a nuc in a friend's yard for quite a while, and for some reason the queen is just not laying like she should.

Here's a nice shot of the entrance:

Plenty of bees coming and going.

The nuc has 5 frames. The first frame was totally dry. The second frame, one side was empty, the other had some nectar and pollen:

Then there were a couple of frames of meager brood - nothing like I'd expect from a solitary nuc with no competition. Then on the last frame, which was empty, I saw the queen:

I'm convinced something is wrong with her. There's no way this nuc will make it through the winter. So I'll probably combine it with the green hive (after pinching the queen)...

Inspection, Removal, and Extraction

2011-09-17T20:08:00.002-04:00

On 9/5 I did an inspection of the backyard hives. It is getting late in the season, so I decided to also take whatever honey there was in the honey super and extract it. Last time I checked, there were about 5 frames which could be extracted. Since then there has been a nectar dearth, where there weren't any flowers producing nectar. I wasn't sure if the bees were going to eat any of that honey.

Brown Hive

This was the hive with the honey in the honey super. Look at this nice frame!

Last time I saw a lot of uncapped cells, meaning they hadn't finished evaporating down the nectar to become honey. This time I saw that there were either capped honey or empty cells - not a lick of unfinished honey to be found. My theory is that when they need food, they first eat the unfinished honey before they start uncapping the honey and eating it. That's a good plan - that means that I didn't have any unfinished honey to worry about!

In the brood chamber the queen is doing well also:

There was plenty of young larvae as well:

Pink Hive

The pink hive had absolutely no honey in the honey super - none. Oh well, they must be storing it below.

I saw the queen, and she is doing well:

Green Hive

The green hive also has plenty of bees, although it is only one brood chamber:

I added a second brood chamber with drawn comb, and I am going to feed the heck out of this hive to get it ready for winter.

So here's the take from the backyard hives: about 4 1/2 frames:

I finally got a chance to unbox the new extractor I bought a few months ago!!

Here we are, all ready to extract my impressive 5 frames!!

I use a regular serrated bread knife for uncapping, which seems to work just fine:

My youngest took this picture; he was fascinated by the hexagon pattern in the comb as seen in the cappings.:

The cage on the extractor can theoretically hold all 6 frames (as shown below), but because the frames weren't uniformly filled, it was unbalanced and shook like a sonofagun! Even with doing just 3 frames each time, it was a bucking bronco. But we got them spun out.

Here's part of the take. It was amazing how clear the honey was this time - last time it wasn't as see-through.

Again, I didn't plan ahead enough to purchase actual honey jars. So I did what I've done in the past and used Ball canning jars; half pint (which holds 11 oz. of honey) and full pint (with 22 oz. honey). I put a round label on the lid, as the jar isn't smooth enough to hold a sticker.

I then set all of the equipment (and wet frames) out for the bees to reclaim. They were having a heyday, as you can imagine!

This year's harvest was a meager 12.5 lbs, but it was enough to share with some friends and sell a few jars.

Now it's time to focus on getting the bees ready for the winter...

Bees like Sedum

2011-09-05T22:08:00.001-04:00

My wife has a couple of sedum plants in the front yard, one plant on each side of the front door. The flowers are now starting to open, and the bees seem to love it (both honey bees and bumble bees). In fact, I have to be careful when I open the glass door not to sweep bees into the house with the wind!

Here are some pictures. You may have to zoom to see the bees, as they blend in with the sedum flowers.

Nuc not thriving...

2011-09-05T21:43:00.000-04:00

I visited the Nuc back on August 18th. You'll recall this is the nuc that I relocated from my bee yard on 7/21 to a distant yard in order to keep the other hives from robbing it. I would expect that it would have rebounded by now and started to show some improvement.

But here's what I found on the inspection on 8/18:

Notice the *very* spotty brood pattern. This looks a lot like a queenless hive - where most of the brood was hatched. But I found the queen:

(lower left quadrant) so I know she is there. Maybe she is a poor layer? The other bees haven't tried to supercede her (yet).

One thing that could be in play is that I noticed a lack of nectar in the comb. I had been feeding the bees sugar syrup (1:1) but haven't been very diligent in keeping feed on the hive. That day I added another 2 quarts.

I'll probably go out and check it in the next day or so, and take more feed. I need to think about moving it back to my yard, so I can get it beefed up for the winter.

Any thoughts and/or suggestions?

I spy three queens!

2011-08-13T20:48:00.001-04:00

Did a quick inspection of the three backyard hives yesterday. Three weeks ago I saw some supercedure / emergency queen cells in the Brown hive, so I was interested in seeing if there is a new queen. The bee inspector last week said he saw larvae.

Brown Hive

I checked the honey super, and found some frames like this:

Of the 9 frames in the super, I would say 5 are ready to extract. The other 4 have some capped cells, but not enough finished for extraction. I think I'll pull the finished frames next weekend, as there are some in Sutton which are ready as well. Maybe next weekend will be the "sticky weekend" with some honey extraction!

Digging down into the brood chamber, I was pleased to see capped brood and larvae. Click on this picture to blow it up:

A couple of frames later I found the queen. She was a lighter colored unmarked queen, which means she was new (the previous queen was a darker queen, with a mark). So I snagged her, grabbed my trusty dusty white paint pen, and now she is sporting a white dot, which is all the fashion in Dudley!

Pink Hive

The Pink hive continues to ignore the honey super - it is bone dry. I decided to take out the queen excluder to see what will happen. If the queen gets up there and starts laying, that's no problem - I can put in the excluder to make sure the frames are emptied before winter (I would prefer not to go into winter with bees in a honey super).

Again, I was lucky enough to see the queen:

Remember I marked her with an orange dot, because I wanted to be able to tell her apart from the white dotted queen I tried to introduce into the hive a month or so ago in case it survived.

Green Hive

This hive is still in one brood box, and I need to start the hive on a second brood box in order to get it strong enough to make it through the winter. I checked, and the bees had filled out a few more frames with some good brood, and put up some honey as well. I also saw the queen:

I opened up the entrance to the medium size on the entrance reduced. I'll probably put the 2^nd brood chamber on next week when I pull the honey from the other hives.

So it was a good inspection, with a winning hand - three Queens!

Lots of bees in Sutton

2011-08-07T21:57:00.004-04:00

On Saturday I decided to pay the Sutton hives a visit. I was thinking in my head that it's been 3 or 4 weeks since I've been there, but checking this blog (which is my "official" record keeping device), I saw it had been 2 months since I was last there - sheesh!

So I wasn't sure what to expect. When I got there on Saturday afternoon, I was pleased to see lots of bees. Here are the hives before I started inspecting them:

Notice the left hive - see how the bees are kind of evenly spread out? I watched them, and the bees were performing an act called "washboarding." I took a video of them:

Nobody really knows why they do this - some say it's a cleaning act; others say it's just because they want to be doing something when they hang out on the hive. But it only happens with hives with lots of bees, where many of them have to hang out on the outside.

For the inspections, I decided to start with the right hive (hive #2) since it looked to have the most bees. I wanted to get the more difficult inspection out of the way first.

Sutton Hive #2

I checked the honey super first, not expecting them to have done much. Well, I was pleasantly surprised - they were putting up honey!

The first frame I saw only had honey on the left part of the frame:

It was interesting that the right side of the frame was completely empty! But I saw other frames with some capped honey. I suspect if I give them a few more weeks they will finish things off.

After looking at the top box, and pulling it off, I started the inspection with the bottom-most box. I pulled off the upper brood chamber, and it was heavy! After removing the box, this is what I saw:

Tons of bees! These hives always have a lot more bees than my backyard hives. I think it's because they sit out in the sun vs. my hives which are in the shade a lot of the day. That's the only thing I can see that I do different with the hives.

Inspecting this hive was very hard. There were so many bees, and they didn't like me making hash of their home. They were butting me a lot, and a couple even tried to sting my (gloved) hands (but to be fair, those were ones which may have been caught in my grip).

In the upper chamber, I found at least two frames full of capped honey, like this one:

Note that the picture isn't fuzzy because it is out of focus; that's a bee buzzing in front of the lens.

Also I saw some real good brood patterns:

I didn't see the queen, but I really have a hard time finding the queen in these hives, due to how many bees there are.

Here's the hive after I inspected it - the bees were a tad upset!

Sutton hive #1

This hive was a little calmer, and I saw less honey when I pulled out the first frame:

But the next couple of frames looked better. Here's a frame full of uncapped nectar:

And here's a fully capped one! Yay!

It was interesting to see that the bees had propolized the queen excluder a lot, to the point where there weren't many passages between the brood chamber and the honey super:

Again a good amount of bees in this hive (this is the top brood box):

And a good pattern of brood:

This was the hive that made a mess of brace comb in between the two brood chambers. I noticed as I was trying to lift up a frame in the upper box, that it felt like it was attached on the bottom. So I tilted up the upper brood box (after prying it up from the lower chamber) and this is what I saw:

What you are looking at is a lot of brace comb, built in between the frames of the two boxes. I suspect it's because there is too much space in between the upper and lower frames, that the bees are building comb in that space. The comb had either honey or drones in it. I felt bad that I destroyed some of their work by lifting up the box, but they'll have it repaired in no time. And I didn't scrape it off like I did last time, because you can see it made no difference...

I'll have to pay attention to my backyard hives to see how much space exists between the two brood chambers, and compare it with the Sutton hives. I may need to modify some of the brood boxes to help eliminate this problem.

I didn't spend a lot of time going through this hive - again, the bees were a little testy. But I was satisfied with what I found.

Overall these hives are doing great! I don't know what it is about the hives in this location - maybe there is plenty of forage for the bees to find. But they are thriving here.

Visit from the Bee Inspector

2011-08-06T18:33:00.000-04:00

I had made a call to the State Dept. of Agriculture / Bee Division (I can't remember the real name) and asked for an inspection. Usually I wouldn't have to do that, since Ken W. would make the rounds to the local beekeepers every year to perform the inspections; but the State leaders, in their infinite wisdom, decided they didn't need to fund the inspection program enough to have Ken do this. It's a bad decision, since through Ken's activities, we keep disease minimized in the bee population, plus Ken provides input on how to improve your hives.

Anyway, my wife called Friday late afternoon and told me that Al, the bee inspector, showed up to inspect the bees. He is an older gentleman, and like Ken, he didn't use any suit or veil for protection when he inspected the bees. Tracy was out there talking to him, and a bee decided to give her the business. After getting caught in her shirt (she successfully let the bee escape without a sting), the bee decided to get tangled in her hair, and she got a sting right on the top of her head! She said she hadn't been stung for 10 years before that.

The hives are doing well, but the inspector did find some bees with symptoms of Deformed Wing Virus, which is an indication of Varroa Mite problems. I'll have to see what I can do about that. He also mentioned that the Goldenrod should be blooming soon, so the bees may bring in some more nectar. Otherwise the hives got a clean bill of health!

NUC inspection - so-so

2011-08-06T18:07:00.002-04:00

Yesterday (Friday) I decided to go check out the little gray nuc that I moved out of my bee-yard since it was being robbed. It's been a little over 2 weeks since I moved the nuc, so I would expect the queen to have started laying (things being calm).

After popping off the top, I saw some bees hovering over a couple of frames in the nuc:

The first couple of frames (counting from the bottom of the nuc in the picture above) were pretty - empty. Plenty of places for the queen to lay. Unfortunately, also empty were any honey stores! I had put on a jar of sugar syrup 2 weeks ago, and it was empty. So these bees don't have enough to eat. Luckily I brought another quart bottle of sugar syrup to feed the bees.

I did see evidence of the queen laying. Here are pictures of a couple of the frames:

You can see some young larvae in the pictures above, so the queen is doing her job. The brood pattern really isn't good (you want a solid pattern, with few gaps); but I attribute that to the fact that they had no food - a queen won't lay if there isn't enough to eat.

I'll stop by every few days to feed the hive, and hopefully it'll take off.

Green Check

2011-07-30T20:44:00.002-04:00

The hives were doing well last time I checked, except for the Brown hive, which I am purposefully leaving alone so it can complete the process of making a new queen.

But since it's Saturday, it doesn't feel like a weekend unless I do *something* with the hives! :-)

So I suited up (just the coat & veil - I was otherwise wearing shorts) and took a quick peek at the Green hive around 5:30PM tonight.

The hive had finished off the jar of sugar syrup, and during the inspection I noticed lots of nectar in the frames, so I decided not to add more syrup. There are plenty of foragers anyway. Next time I inspect, I'll make sure there is still enough food there. I also saw some good brood patterns - a frame almost fully filled with capped brood. Plus I was lucky enough to see the queen (she was on the 2^nd frame I pulled out - I have good luck finding the queen in hives with a single brood chamber!). There are a couple of frames totally empty, just waiting for the queen to lay, so I don't need to add a 2^nd brood chamber.

So I took off the empty upper chamber (which was just covering up the syrup jar) and buttoned things up for next time. Here's the Green hive:

I also took a peek in the new honey super I put on last week. In my hopes and dreams, the bees will have pulled out all the wax foundation and well on their way to filling it up with honey. Reality is another story - it looked like they haven't touched it. Oh well....

I'll probably go out to Sutton this week - it's been a couple of weeks since I've been out there. Don't want to leave them alone too long, in case I need to take some action. I'll also stop by and see the Gray nuc, to see how it is coming along. Hopefully being all calm and isolated, the queen can start laying.

Inspection 7-24-2011 (still HOT)

2011-07-24T20:45:00.001-04:00

Took some time around 5:15PM to inspect the backyard hives today. The thermometer said 68 degrees, but when you are in a bee suit, it's still hot! I use a Nike terry-cloth headband, so it absorbs the sweat to keep it from dripping down in my eyes; but you still sweat like a son-of-a-gun. I wear kitchen gloves, and they fill with sweat when I am through, and my clothes under the suit were soaked!

Green Hive

I was interest to see how this hive was progressing. I put a jar of feed on last week, and this hive was strong enough to keep out the robbers. When I pulled off the top cover, they still had a couple of inches of syrup to go:

Under the inner cover was a pretty good collection of bees, given this was a week old hive made from a nuc.

I like to judge how well a hive is doing by how many bees I see on the top bars when I open up the hive (before smoking, since smoking chases the bees down).

On the frame below, if you look (enlarged) in the upper left area, you can see eggs and young larvae:

I saw the queen (didn't bother to take a picture), and I also saw a frame of good brood:

So this hive is doing fine.

Pink Hive

The honey super on this hive is dry as a bone. Don't know what it will take to get them to put some honey in there! There was some good honey in the upper brood chamber though, so they aren't hurting for food.

Found the queen on this one. It has the orange dot I put on her (to differentiate from the queen I tried to install a couple of weeks ago, which had a white dot).

There was also a foundationless frame they continue to build up:

They are making this frame large cell comb, which they are using for drone cells.

But I did see something strange on one of the frames - a swarm cell:

It looked like it was kind of old, so I debated on whether I should pull off this frame and a few others for a nuc. In the end I decided not to. I pulled off this swarm cell, and it was old and dry, not viable. Good thing I didn't go to the trouble of making a nuc that had no chance of success.

I noticed in the bottom box some new undrawn foundation that I had put in many weeks ago. The bees had done nothing with drawing out the comb, so I replaced them with drawn comb (left over from the old green hive). This'll give the bees more room to lay.

Brown Hive

This hive continues to almost finish off some of the frames of honey:

They've been "almost" for many weeks now - I can't seem to get them to finish them off!

I was reading some of the posts on Beesource and found an interesting comment on someone with my same problem with honey supers. The person said that the bees won't finish off the frames if there isn't more space for more honey. So I decided to add a super to the hive. Other local beekeeper friends are pulling in honey left and right, so I suspect it's still out there

I also read that to encourage the acceptance of a new super (of undrawn comb), you should spray it with sugar syrup so that it is dripping off. So that's what I did.

When adding a super, you can either "top" super or "bottom" super. Top supering means adding the empty super on top of the existing super; bottom supering involves adding the empty super underneath the existing super(s). People have opinions one way or the other, and there is no clear consensus (just like much of beekeeping). Since I had the existing super off anyway, I decided to bottom super - give them the empty space closer to the bottom entrance.

While I was examining this hive, the bees were really giving me grief. They were a lot of bees flying in my face and buzzing angrily - almost as if there were no queen (cue ominous music).

Lots of bees on the top bars of the bottom chamber - a good sign:

But... when I was inspecting the top box, I found quite a few supercedure cells on multiple frames:

And then on the back of the same frame, I found supercedure cells which are opened:

I also didn't see any new eggs or young larvae, nor did I find the (marked) queen. I suspect the queen is gone (I don't know why). But they made supercedure cells, so there could be a virgin queen running around.

So I'll keep an eye on the hive, to see if a queen develops in a few weeks.

Here's the apiary as it stands now:

I chuckled that the hives are increasing heights. Reminds me of the old AT&T wireless advertising:

The (not so) big move!

2011-07-21T21:31:00.000-04:00

So I have this poor nuc, which can't catch a break. I put a jar of sugar syrup on it last week, and my Brown hive robbed the heck out of that nuc! I know that excessive robbing can disturb the (robbed) hive so much it can abscond or the queen could even get killed. I decided to close off the nuc for a day or so to let things calm down, but when I opened it back up, the robbing continued.

I asked the guru's of Beesource for their advice, and one guy suggested relocating the nuc somewhere away from my strong hive for a while, until it grew strong enough to defend itself. I thought that was a great idea!

Now, where to put the nuc? I couldn't put it at Sutton with the other 2 hives I manage, since it would probably get robbed by those hives just the same. We knew a member of the church who lived about a mile away, but they just moved. It would have been a perfect place! I couldn't think of anywhere relatively close, so I asked my wife (who is tied in more with local friends) if she knew someone who wouldn't mind hosting my nuc on their property for a few weeks.

She thought for a while, and then she remembered a friend (who happened to be a former teacher of my youngest son) who lived about 1 1/2 miles away. She contacted her, and this friend said she'd have no problem hosting the nuc. Great!

I took off the (now empty) syrup jar and the upper hive body surrounding it, and put on the regular cover. Then I bungee corded the lid, in preparation for the trip. Here's the nuc ready for travel!

But before I buttoned it up, I decided to check it out. I found the queen, but no new eggs or larvae. Just capped cells from the frame I brought over a week or so ago. Here's the queen:

I suspect that the queen hadn't started laying due to all of the problems this nuc had - the robbing, and the corresponding lack of resources (since it was robbed out).

Here's the nuc in the back of my wife's van ready for the short ride to the new location:

Notice I put the nuc in so that the frames are in line with the direction of travel. This minimizes the sloshing of the frames, which could damage the queen.

We got to the new location and picked a good out-of-the-way location for the nuc. Take a look at this satellite view of the property - I added a red arrow where we stuck the nuc - right along a tree line, out of the way:

I set the nuc back up, and put on a jar of sugar syrup. I also put a bowl of water (with wood pieces floating in it) in case the bees need something to drink.

Here's hoping the nuc can prosper in this calm area and get nice and strong!! I'll check back in a couple of weeks or so.

Inspection 7-17-2011 (HOT)

2011-07-17T20:56:00.000-04:00

I was at Boy Scout summer camp all last week, so I had to leave my babies to their own devices. Would they survive without me being there?

Kidding aside, the day before I left (last Sunday) the bees in the gray nuc hadn't released the queen yet. I didn't necessarily want to go and manually release her last Sunday, since it was only a couple of days since I introduced the queen. So I hoped that the bees would release her on their own time. The person who sold me the queen used actually marshmallow for the candy, and he had never done that before. I wasn't too comfortable with being the guinea pig test for marshmallow!

The weather during the last week was pretty warm, but it rained a little on Wednesday. It was quite warm today, so I decided to wait until around 5:30PM when it would be cooler, right? Well, even though the thermometer said it was only 69 degrees, dressed in a beekeeping suit made it very hot! I was a ball of sweat when I got through! Anyway, here's what I found:

Blue Nuc

It's do or die for this nuc. It has been plenty of time to see if they made a queen. I checked the nuc - no queen, few bees. There were also no bees coming and going in the nuc. So I decided to combine this with the White Nuc (see below).

White Nuc

This hive had some good traffic in and out during the week, and I felt it was time to transfer this into a full-size hive. I check the hive, saw they had some good stores, and saw the queen. So I brought out the pieces to the Green Hive and set it up on the hive stand (which had only 2 hives up to now). I also added in the frames from the Blue Nuc since it was failing. Now I have 10 frames in the Green Hive. Welcome to the world!

That hive was light on stores, so I decided to feed it some sugar syrup. I also added a pollen patty, which should encourage the queen to lay more. This hive needs to build up well to be strong enough to make it through the winter.

Here's a picture of my (now complete) hive stand:

The top level of the green hive is just an empty super covering up the feeding jar.

Gray Nuc

Remember that this was the nuc which experienced some robbing a week or so ago. I checked the nuc, and didn't find any eggs or larvae. The queen cage was empty (the bees had eaten through the candy - yay!) but I didn't see the queen. I also didn't see any honey in the frame at all - nada, and saw lots of pieces of wax in the bottom of the nuc - definitely a sign of robbing. Sigh - another failure. I was going to combine this nuc with another hive, and decided to check one more time for the queen. Upon rechecking, I did spot her! I think the hive didn't have enough resources for the queen to start laying.

So I decided to give them a boost - I added a frame of brood and bees from the White Nuc, added a pollen patty, and decided to feed some sugar syrup. Hopefully this will let the queen start laying eggs. Here's what things look like for this nuc:

I used the body of the blue nuc to cover the feeding jar. I also taped up the inner cover hole to keep other bees from coming in and robbing.

I didn't have time to check the Pink Hive or the Brown Hive - I'll do that later.

Inspection 7-09-2011

2011-07-09T22:46:00.001-04:00

The weather was very nice today, and I had a chance to inspect all of the backyard hives.

Brown Hive

This is by far the most populous hive in my backyard. Here's what greeted me in the bottom box:

(the gap is where I had already removed a frame for inspection). I did a quick check of the brood chamber and saw lots of young larvae (zoom in and look at the lower left part of the frame):

as well as some good capped brood on a different frame:

This hive's been working on filling up a honey super for about a month!

They have about 6 frames like this, some more or less capped. There are 4 frames with no activity - not even drawing out the foundation. Another bee friend said she encourages her bees to draw out a honey super by spraying it with a diluted honey and water mix. I had about 1/4 cup of honey left in one of my jars, so I mixed it with some water, put it in a sprayer, and sprayed the undrawn comb.

I also decided to rearrange the frames to pout the undrawn frames in the middle of the box, since bees like to fill from the center outward. Well, a couple of the frames are drawn out way past the edge of the frame space, into the next frame (one of the undrawn frames was in that place). Rearranging things, I can no longer get all 10 frames back into the super! So I will be running this super as a 9-frame super. I spaced out the frames manually - maybe I'll have to get one of those 9 frame spacers.

Pink Hive

Lots less bees here, compared to the brown hive. That's to be expected, since it swarmed last month. Here's the top brood chamber:

You'll recall that I introduced a new George queen to this hive, and later I figured out it probably already had a queen in it. I was interested in seeing which queen is there. Well, I found out:

If you can't spot the queen, check this version of the picture.

Notice she doesn't have a white dot, and is a lot paler than the Carniolan queens George has. That means this was the queen that was already in the hive, and in all likelihood, the workers killed the foreign queen. That makes me sad - queens are a precious commodity in beekeeping; plus I shelled out cold hard cash for that replacement queen! Luckily I caught myself before doing the same on the White Nuc.

I snagged this queen, and marked her. But I used an orange paint pen, on the off chance the other queen is still in the hive and marked with white (orange isn't an official bee color, so if I see an orange marked queen, I'll know I did that).

Also, the honey super on this hive is bone dry (and undrawn). I did the spray on these frames as well. We'll see how this works...

Blue Nuc

Last time I saw that this nuc was low on food. I was going to feed some sugar syrup, when my friend Tom from work said, "I thought you took out some honey frames from your honey-bound hive. Why don't you give them one of those frames?" Duh...

So that's what I did. By doing this, I'll save from having to spin out those frames to make them empty as well!

Gray Nuc

This is the nuc with the newly purchased queen in the queen cage. They still hadn't released her - if they haven't by tomorrow evening, I'll let her out. The beekeeper who sold her to me said he was trying out using an actual piece of marshmallow. I'll have to let him know it looks like the bees aren't eating it...

I also added a frame of honey/nectar from the honey-bound hive as well.

White Nuc

Still doing well here. Sometime in a week or so I'll move it to the main hive stand and make it the new "Green Hive."

Interesting followup later on this afternoon: I looked out back and saw a ton of bees on the face of and going in and out of the Gray Nuc. I also saw a large cloud of bees going in and out of the Brown Hive. I recognized this scene - robbing! The brown hive smelled the fresh frame of honey I put in the gray nuc, and they wanted it for themselves! Even though the nuc has a small hole, there really aren't enough bees to protect it.

So I went to the gray nuc and spun the entrance disc to the closed (vented) position, effectively closing off the bees from coming and going. Let me tell you, the marauding bees were not pleased! Here's a picture from a couple of minutes after:

The picture doesn't really do it justice, so I made a video. Take a look (and listen):

The bees were also going after the Blue Nuc, but not as much. I went to my garage and cut a piece of 1/8" hardware cloth and duct taped it to the hive, blocking the entrance.

So tomorrow after Church I'll re-open the entrances, and see if the other hives leave things alone. Usually after a day or so the robbing stops.

Expensive mistakes?

2011-07-07T22:05:00.002-04:00

I'll explain the title in a moment.

As I mentioned before, the white queen castle (now reduced to 6 frames in a single nuc) doesn't have a queen. I've been watching it for a couple of days, and see bees coming and going. I felt sorry for them, seeing them do all that work for nothing (with no queen). I thought I might recombine the nuc with one of my established hives, to prevent the bees from just dwindling down and dying.

Well, I saw a Craigslist post from a beekeeper not too far from work who was selling local queens for a good price. So I thought I would buy a queen from him, and get that nuc up and running as a hive. Problem solved! I didn't think that the bees there could wait for a new queen to be made if I should just bring over a new frame of eggs.

So I met Matt Smith, who has a remarkable queen rearing yard in his backyard in Lincoln, MA. Here are some pictures I took of his bee-yard:

In the first couple of pictures you can see Matt getting in the nuc and caging the queen I bought from him. Talk about fresh! At least I know she hasn't been sitting in the queen cage for days!

A lot of his hives and nucs are made of whatever wood he had, plus he buys rough cut wood for some hives. He said he focuses on queen rearing instead of honey (it's hard to do both with the same hive resources). If you need a queen and are near Lincoln, MA, drop Matt a note. He said he is a reader of my blog.

Anyway, I got home this evening and went out to the white nuc to install the queen.

So I pulled out the first frame, looked at it, and what did I see? BROOD AND EGGS and a big ol' fat queen walking around! See if you can spot the queen in the picture below:

If you can't find her, click here to see a version of the photo above where I circled her.

So I snagged her with my marking tube, and put a nice white dot on her:

OK, so now we have a situation: I have a queen with no hive for her.

So I thought I'd steal some bees and frames from the Pink hive and make a nuc.

I opened up the Pink hive, and the top brood box had no eggs or brood in it. OK, I'll check in the lower box. In there I found a lot of brood, and some of it was capped. That was strange, because according to bee math, the new queen I introduced over the weekend couldn't have laid those eggs (bees are capped at 9 days after the egg is laid).

(*sigh*) So it looks like the Pink hive may have already had a queen too, when I introduced George's queen (which I purchased...). I did a quick check through the frames of the Pink hive, and didn't see a marked queen (or an unmarked one at that). It was getting dark, so I am going to check another time (probably not this weekend - I want to let that hive build up without my messing with things).

I ended up pulling out some bees with frames (and no queen - at least that I could tell), and put them in a new nuc. Here's a shot of the nuc with the new queen cage suspended, so the bees can let her out:

So here's the new Gray Nuc (left) sitting next to the Blue Nuc (right):

Also, I took a quick peek in the Blue Nuc and those bees had eaten almost all of their honey. So I'll put a jar of sugar syrup on the hive this weekend for food.

By the way, look at this cute frame of new comb (on a foundationless frame) from the Pink hive!

So, back to the title. It may end up that I didn't need to buy any queens for my hives. I don't know if I didn't wait long enough to check, but I thought I did. Live and learn, but some lessons are expensive.

One of my co-workers suggested I keep a history of where my queens come from. So I added a link "Steven's Bees Heritage" in the right column, a spreadsheet of my hives and their queens. I'll update the spreadsheet as the hives/queens change.

P.S. I know I'm going to hear from Tom: "See what happens when you mess with things? You should just leave them alone." He had a point in this case...

She's Free!

2011-07-04T23:08:00.000-04:00

On Saturday morning I decided to give a quick peek in the Pink hive, to see if they had let out the queen. I had put the queen cage in on Thursday, and it could happen. Well, this is what I found:

The queen cage was empty, with the candy plug eaten away! So the queen is in the hive, and hopefully she'll start laying. I didn't do an inspection on that hive, since if you disturb a hive too soon after introducing a new queen, they might take it out on her. I'll check things next weekend.

I also checked the Blue Nuc. In there was a frame of eggs I had moved from the Brown hive, and last week I noticed a couple of queen cells were built (which was the intent).

I thought to try to get two queens out of the deal, but instead of cutting out the extra cells (which apparently didn't work last time), I was just going to cage the queen.

I made a simple cage out of 1/8" hardware cloth, that you press down in the comb. Here are a couple of pictures:

So I wanted to put this cage around one of the queen cells, and then after both queens were born, one would be in this cage that I could move to the other nuc.

But when I checked the nuc, I noticed the queen cells were on comb which had some holes in it, so the cage wouldn't have kept in the queen. So I don't think it will work.

A New Queen (just not one of mine...)

2011-06-30T18:47:00.000-04:00

Well, it's been enough time for all of the remnants of the swarmed hive to have produced queens, and I am sad to say I am zero for 5. I split off 4 nucs from the original swarmed hive (leaving cells in the pink hive as well), and nobody made a queen.

So I called up one of our bee club members, George O'Neal, who breeds queens, and met him this afternoon to buy a queen. I have had great results with George's queens in the past - they are dark queens (Carniolan genes) and do very well here in the north.

Here is the new queen, in her cage (she wouldn't hold still so I included two poses):

I put my bee jacket on and went out to install her in the Pink hive.

I watched a neat video (found here) on how to see if a hive is queenless by seeing how the bees react to the new queen. So I just set the queen cage on top of the bars to start with:

A few seconds later, some bees came out to check things out:

Then even more came out:

I couldn't really see if the bees were being aggressive to the new queen or not, but there was plenty of interest.
So I went ahead and put the cage in between a couple of the frames, face down:

That's the nice thing about these California queen mini-cages is that you don't have to take any frames out to fit the cage in.

I'll check on Sunday to see if they have released her. Hopefully in a week or so she will start laying.

Last Sunday I put a frame of eggs in the Blue Nuc and when I checked, I saw that the bees had built out a couple of nice looking queen cells. This is the mating calendar for that nuc, as best I can figure out. I still have the white queen castle (made into a single nuc) to deal with. This Sunday I'll probably move another frame of eggs from the Brown Hive to the White Nuc and let them make a queen also. Again, with the (now) two nucs, I am not worried about honey, etc. so I can afford to let them take their time.

Castle Experiment - FAIL

2011-06-26T19:59:00.000-04:00

After a few days of rain, it was finally nice enough to inspect the hives. In fact, it was a little too warm - I was sweating like a hog! But mid/high 70's is a good temperature for the bees.

Queen Castle

When last checked, the queen castle was struggling. The second and third chambers had further dwindling bees. Well, I checked it today, and it was even worse condition. There was probably only about 3/4 cup of bees in each of the chambers - take a look at this pitiful frame:

I addition to the few bees, you can see a lot of brood that has never emerged - I suspect the nights got too cold for the few nurse bees to keep the brood warm, and it got chilled and died. Here's another shot with a lot of half-born bees. Sad.

In addition to few bees, the two chambers were absolutely overrun with big black ants. They enjoyed the feast of sugar water and nectar, and there weren't enough bees to keep the ants at bay.

Luckily the first chamber had a good number of bees, but I did not see a queen or eggs. It's still a but pre-mature to call it a complete failure - on the 31st I should see some eggs. I ended up pulling the divider between the first and second chamber, and added a frame of nectar I pulled from the pink hive (more on that later). So I ended up making a 6-frame nuc out of the two seconds, and I hope that if there is a queen, she'll have more resources. I also added the pitifully few bees from the other two sections.

So I'm about ready to declare my queen castle experiment a failure. If I end up with a queen in the first chamber, it'll be a miracle.

Pink Hive

I did an inspection of the Pink hive. The honey super was very light - almost empty. They are putting the nectar in the upper brood chamber like gangbusters. As this hive swarmed because it became honey-bound, I pulled out a couple of frames full of nectar/honey and put in some empty drawn frames. This will give the queen (if/when she starts) plenty of room to lay. I moved those two frames to the queen castle to reinforce their stores.

Still no evidence of a queen. But it has until the 31st, and then I'll probably buy a queen.

Brown Hive

The brown hive continues to do well. The honey super had a good 7 frames with nectar in it - they have to finish it off and cap it before it is ready to harvest. When I separated the upper and lower hive bodies, there was a good number of bees on the top bars:

The upper chamber was pretty full, so I removed a frame and put in a fresh empty one (drawn). I also removed a frame with new eggs and larvae and put it in the blue nuc (see below).

Blue Nuc

The blue nuc was made at the same time as the queen castle, and it is doing well with regard to the number of bees. But I didn't see evidence of a queen (yet). I took a frame of new eggs and larvae from the brown hive to put into the nuc, just in case they don't have a queen. They will make a new queen from those eggs.

I am not too concerned about the blue nuc - I am not depending on it for anything. I will get a queen for the pink hive if it doesn't have one next week, but I don't mind waiting for the blue nuc to develop one of their own.

I also got a chance to go to Sutton and inspect the hives there.

Sutton Hive #1

This hive continues to be a booming hive - full full full of bees! I put a honey super on it a while back, but they have done nothing with that hive.

Here's the top of the top box right after I opened it up, and you can see a ton of bees there!

I inspect from the bottom up, so I cracked open the two boxes to take a peek. Here's what I found:

What you are looking at is a lot of brace (or burr) comb, built between the bottom bars of the top box, and the top bars of the bottom box. The white things you see are drone larvae that were unfortunately damaged when I separated the boxes. The bees had built this comb every which way - not just in line with the frames. It was bridging multiple frames. These bees were building a lot of drones, which is a good sign (they won't make drones if there aren't enough resources)

When I got done inspecting the bottom, there were still tons of bees on the top of the bars:

The brood pattern looked pretty good. I didn't see a lot of eggs and larvae, but I saw enough to know the queen is there (I didn't see her, even though I looked).

Since I had a swarm at home due to being honey bound, I am very mindful of making sure this didn't happen. I removed two pretty full frames of honey/nectar from the top box and replaced them with empty comb, to give the queen more laying room.

When I got done and put everything back together, I had to take a picture of this hive. Can you believe the number of bees here???

Sutton Hive #2

Hive #2 wasn't a populous as hive one, but it looked good nonetheless.

The first frame I pulled out from the bottom chamber had the queen on it!

This was the one I found and marked last time; it's so much easier to spot the queen when she is marked!

The upper chamber was super heavy, so I removed a couple of honey-bound frames from that one, and replaced them with empty drawn comb.

Finally, when I was finishing up and loading things up in my truck, I saw this on the driveway:

You'll notice a theme in what I've been doing lately - I've been removing frames of honey/nectar and replacing them with empty frames. So I have a few frames that I need to empty out. I plan on using my new extractor and extracting out the frames. I'll save the honey and nectar to feed back to the bees this fall. It isn't for human consumption, because 1) some of the frames are not capped, so it isn't ready to be honey, and 2) some of the nectar may actually be sugar syrup. So it's just for the bees.

Ugh! I can't win!!

2011-06-21T15:55:00.000-04:00

So I have this queen castle in which I am attempting to incubate a couple of queens.

I did a quick inspection on Sunday and saw that the left and center sections had very few bees, and almost no stores (food). So I thought I'd feed them some sugar syrup.

I made up some 1:1 syrup and put it in an inverted mason jar on top of the screened-in covers on the two sections, and I put an empty body around it. It looked like this:

I noticed that there was a lot of bee activity around the castle, especially noticing bees which were coming and going in the little gaps you can see in the inner covers (between the castle and the gray empty hive body). It appeared bees were getting into the empty hive body and robbing the sugar water from the jars. Sure enough, I checked the next day and the jars were empty.

So I thought I would outsmart the bees, and use an internal feeder, which looks like this:

Here's another view where you can see down the inside:

The reservoir holds the sugar syrup, and there are little floats that the bees can land on to take up the syrup. This feeder takes the place of a frame.

So I grabbed 2 feeders and installed them in the first two compartments. There! Now I am done!

Well this morning I looked out, and I saw a ton of busy bee activity in front of the queen castle, as well as in front of my brown hive. Observing the bees, I saw them making a "bee line" in between the two - oh no!! The queen castle is being robbed!

The bees from the brown hive were coming in the main entrance of the two sections and robbing out the sugar water. When a hive (or a nuc) is being robbed, it is very stressful on the home bees. Imagine thousands of marauders coming in and rifling through your house taking whatever they want.

When this happens to a full size hive, you add a robbing screen. It's basically a screen that forces the bees to take a roundabout way to get into the hive. The house bees can navigate the route, because they are willing to learn the changes. The raiding bees are just interested in the food, and don't know they have to go up a little to go in.

But I didn't have a robber screen for the queen castle. But I did have a lot of #8 hardware cloth (basically a metal version of your window screening). So I cut off some pieces and made a channel about 10 inches and stapled it to the two entrances of the queen castle (the other section wasn't being robbed). Here's what it looked like after I put on the screens:

Sorry for the bad quality - it was taken by my iPhone. But if you zoom in you can see the screens I installed. You can also see the bees congregating around the bottom of the entrance, and around the (screened) vent holes. They can smell the food, but can't get to it via a direct method.

I hope this is enough to help the bees in the castle survive. If any of them survive and produce a queen, it won't be because of any help from me!!

Split Up Queen Cells for Nucs

2011-06-10T19:37:00.000-04:00

So all week I've been reading up and watching YouTube videos about making up Nucs from swarm cells, in preparation for me doing it. In all of these videos they make it look so easy.

Based on when I saw the queen cells get capped, they should be born around Sunday. You can see the information in an on-line queen rearing calendar. In case the time may be off a day or so, I decided to make up the queen castle today (Friday).

So after I got the kids up and started getting ready for school, I had about 1/2 hour to go out to the back yard and put together the queen castle. The castle has 3 sections in it, and each section can hold 3 frames. I decided to find a frame of brood, a frame of honey/pollen, and put in a new undrawn frame. Then I was going to feed them sugar water and a pollen patty. I ended up taking one frame of brood from the Pink hive, and two from the Brown hive (the Pink hive was the one which swarmed, so there wasn't an abundance of brood and bees like the Brown hive).

Then I went to the frame which I moved to the nuc, which had a lot of queen cells on it. My intention was going to separate (cut) the queen cells out, leaving plenty of margin around the cells. While this looks easy on YouTube, it was less than easy for me.

The frame on which the queen cells were built was a wired wax foundation, which was quite a few years old. So the queen cells were built in the corners, and were not very distinct. I was as careful as I could be, and I think I did OK. But I was only able to cut out two groupings of cells, and I needed three (one for each of the sections of the queen castle). Plus, the wire in the foundation was causing me problems (the knife couldn't cut it easily), so I had to carefully pull the comb away from the wire.

I could only get two sets of cells cut out in the morning, so I left one section of the queen castle without queen cells for the day (not a problem).

I observed an interesting thing while I was stealing the frame from the Pink hive. I looked through the other frames, because there was one with a good number of queen cells on it that I was leaving for the Pink hive. Well, as I went through the frames looking for a good one with brood to bring to the queen castle, I found another frame with two good looking queen cells on it:

So I decided that the other frame I was originally saving for this hive could go into the 5-frame nuc, and the frame from which I cut out the extra cells (which was in the nuc) I could move to the 3rd chamber of the queen castle. I made that move after I got home from work. Now everyone has cells!

It's too bad I couldn't separate more queen cells. I could probably have made 12 more nucs - on this frame, below, there are probably 8 or 9 cells total tucked away along the bottom edge, on both sides:

I was also surprised this evening how busy the queen castle was, with bees coming and going already:

(the gray box on top just covers jars of sugar water) I would have figured any foragers would have returned to the home hives which are about 20 feet away. I've found that every time I've made nucs in my backyard, the foragers orient to the nuc with no problems right away. Lucky me!

Since pictures don't convey the activity like a video does, here's a video of the queen castle in action. I love videos!

I also swapped out the nuc body of the original nuc I made up. When I opened it up this morning to cut out the cells, there was about 1/8" of water at one end of the nuc! (it has the bottom board permanently attached to the body). I don't know how it got in, except maybe from a rear 3/4" diameter vent. We had a pretty rainy day yesterday, and some of it could have driven into the nuc. That nuc is more of a "commercial" style nuc - no frills.

So I moved the frames into one of the nucs I bought from the beekeeping supply place. This nuc has a screened bottom board (any water will fall right through), plus has a telescoping cover so rain can't drive sideways into the nuc. Here it is:

Now that I've seen the queen castle in action, I noticed a design flaw. If you look at the picture above, you see some gaps in between the gray box and the castle below. These are due to the fact that the queen castle's dimensions are not the same as the gray hive body, and it doesn't sit down correctly. Bees were getting up in the gaps (before I did some adjusting).

I should have started with a deep hive body for the queen castle, but wanted to modify some features (as I had explained earlier). I may re-do the body using a real hive body, and adding the permanent bottom and shims as needed.

New frames

2011-06-09T14:09:00.000-04:00

This is probably not worthy of a new blog post, but since I took a picture, I've got to put it somewhere...

I am planning on making some nucs in a day or so (for my new queen castle), and will need some frames to back fill. I have some frames with drawn comb, but I thought I'd put together some new frames just to have them on reserve.

In the past I have purchased the pieces to assemble frames, but didn't put them all together. So I dug out of the basement the wood pieces, nails, and sheets of wired wax foundation.

It's really not hard to assemble the frames, and I only did 6 so it didn't take too long (I assembled them on my kitchen table). Look here for a page describing frame assembly. I always glue the various joints on the frame, and put an extra nail in the side (fixing the side piece to the top bar better) since when prying out a frame, you could put enough pressure on the end of the frame to lift up the nail and separate the pieces (I actually did that accidentally on a frame, and had to wait for the winter before I could swap it out).

I also do not embed wires in the wax foundation after I install it - instead I use a method I learned from the "FatBeeMan," Don in GA, using fishing line as shown in this video:

It's worked for me in the past, except I didn't use thick enough fishing line last time. This time I bought a roll of 25# test line, and that should keep the bees from chewing through it.

Like an Expectant Father...

2011-06-07T11:25:00.000-04:00

It's funny - I've got a nuc in the back yard with capped queen cells in it, which should hatch on Saturday. I've been thinking about it a lot, because it's not something which has happened in my beekeeping career a lot. It struck me that it's almost like how an expectant father acts!

Anyway, I checked the frame quickly this morning, and where I thought there were two queen cells on that frame, a closer examination shows about 8 or 9 capped queen cells! Some were on the back side; some along the gaps in the frame. So it looks like I have the possibility for more queens than I planned.

A few weeks ago I made a queen castle, which can hold the equivalent of 3 nucs. So with the current gray nuc, I can have 4 nucs going at the same time. What would I do with all those queens? Who knows, but I will probably find someone who can take one or two later in the season. I also have space on my stand for another hive (the former Green hive).

So I plan on Friday morning to steal some resources from both the Pink and Brown hive and make up the 3 sections of the queen castle. I also will take a couple of frames out of the gray nuc which are full of nectar (I don't know why I put 3 frames full of honey/nectar in the nuc - that's way more than they need). Then Friday evening after work I'll go into the nuc, cut out a couple of queen cells for each castle section, and put them in the frames.

Exciting times!!

Backyard Nuc Touch-up

2011-06-05T21:14:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I made a nuc with a frame with a couple of uncapped queen cells on it. But I was nagged a little bit in my mind that maybe I didn't put enough nurse bees in the nuc. Last time I made a nuc, I made sure to shake an extra frame of nurse bees in the nuc from another frame (which remained in the main hive). But since this was from the Pink hive which had just swarmed, there weren't really too many extra nurse bees to share. I had a nuc fail the first year because of insufficient nurse bees.

I watched the nuc a lot yesterday, and did not see any activity out front (which may make sense, since the foragers left with the swarm, and the nurse bees stay with the brood). But I would have expected a little something more than a bee peeking out every once in a while.

So I decided to steal some nurse bees from the Brown hive, which had enough to spare. The problem is, to the nuc, those bees would be foreign invaders, and if I just shook them in the hive, some fighting may ensue (people say you can move frames of brood with nurse bees from hive to hive, and they nurse bees won't fight, but I wasn't sure about just shaking random bees into the nuc).

I remember reading that people have been able to shake bees by giving them something to do as a distraction. So this afternoon I made up some sugar water and put it in a sprayer, and sprayed the nurse bees on the frame I was shaking from, to hopefully disguise their foreign-ness for a while. I then shook the bees into the nuc. I would guess I added a couple of cups of bees, and I felt better with that population.

I also got a look at the queen cells. Yesterday they were open, but today they had been capped. Here are two pictures where you can see two queen cells capped.

There may actually be more than one cell on that first picture - I can't tell for sure.

According to bee math, the queen should be born in 8 or 9 days, and she should be laying in around 20 days. So I'll leave that nuc alone for 3 weeks, and check back then.

A-OK in Sutton

2011-06-05T21:01:00.000-04:00

After my fun experience with my backyard hives swarming, I decided to go out to Sutton and check on those hives. Both hives were made from packages, and it is rare for a package to swarm the first year (although mine did my first year). I also wanted to see how they are progressing with the frames of honey/pollen/old bee parts I gave them to start with (from the dead-out hives).

When I arrived in the mid-afternoon, the bees were very active out front, as you can see from this video:

(I love taking pictures and videos - can you tell?)

Sutton Hive #1

I always inspect from the bottom up (this was a tip given to me by an experienced beekeeper - if you inspect from the top down, when you smoke the top box, it drives the bees to the lower box, and makes it more difficult to inspect with all those extra bees!). This was what I saw on the top of the bottom box:

Lots of bees - I like it! Here is one of the frames:

You see that along the bottom of the frame? No, it's not swarm / queen cells - it's just regular old comb where the bees felt they needed some larger drone comb. The frames themselves are worker sized cells, so sometimes the bees build this burr comb for the drones. That's what you get with pre-formed foundation. If you let the bees draw their own wax, then some of the cells will naturally be drone cells.

This hive didn't have a fantastic brood pattern - there was plenty of brood (and I even saw fresh eggs). But I attribute this to the fact that a lot of the frames started with honey and pollen in it already. The bees have to eat the honey and pollen to make room, and until then, the queen lays where she can.

I didn't see the queen in this hive (she is unmarked), so I was worried the "Sutton Curse" would be in effect. Last year I *never* saw the queen in the over wintered hive, no matter how much I tried!!

Sutton Hive #2

The second hive didn't seem to have as many bees as the first one. Here's the shot of the top of the bottom box; compare it with the photo above:

Not quite as many bees as the other hive, but still a good number.

Like hive #1, this hive built burr comb along the bottom. Here's a good shot of the drone comb - you can see the cells bulge out, look like bullet heads!

I got a kick out of the bees on the frames who still had legs full of pollen. Here's a couple of shots with bright orange pollen legged bees!

Both of these hives were super calm - I barely used any smoke, and didn't have any dive-bombing guard bees harassing me at all. Here's a shot of the frames with some little bee faces lined up looking at me (look in the dark slot along the bottom of the picture).

I got lucky in this hive - I found the queen! I snagged her in the marking cage - here's a crappy picture:

But the important thing is that I was able to mark her, so next time it should be easier to find.

I put honey supers on both of these hives to see if they will fill it (I don't expect any honey the first year, but you never know!).

All is well in Sutton.

SWARM!!!

2011-06-05T20:39:00.000-04:00

The past few days have been real nice, and the bees have been very active. Every late afternoon when I came home from work, I would think, "I could check the bees" but then I thought to wait until the weekend.

Today (Saturday) I suited up around 11:30AM and while I was lighting my smoker, I noticed a lot of bee activity in front of the pink hive. Then I started hearing that characteristic bee swarm sound, and the air in front of the hive started filling up with bees. Yep, the pink hive started to swarm! Here's a video I took of the swarm:

I also took a picture. If you zoom in full screen, every little light brown speck which looks like part of the leaves is a swarming bee!

If you are a beekeeper and you witness one of your hives swarming, you get this pit-of-the-stomach feeling, like "I could have done something!!!" People say that once a hive is determined to swarm, there isn't much you can do. But there are things to do prior to that point to keep it from getting there. More on the condition of that hive later.

I was surprised by the swarm, because I inspected the hive 1 week ago, and I didn't think I saw any swarm cells. But then it just goes to show you how easy it is to miss!

I was hoping (beyond hope, it turned out) that the swarm would land somewhere I could recover it. But my hives sit right up against a heavily wooded area, and just like last time (2 years ago), the swarm took off up and above the trees. This time they went waaaay back in the woods, and I couldn't see the swarm bivouac anywhere (it was either too far up or too deep).

Since I was suited up, I went ahead and inspected the hives. I had never inspected a hive immediately after a swarm.

Pink Hive

Looking at the hive, it was definitely obvious that it had swarmed. There were clearly a lot fewer bees than before and they were very jumpy. I wasn't sure of the new queen had been hatched or not, so I went looking for a queen or evidence of one. I couldn't remember if a swarm occurs before or after the new queen is born.

The top (honey) super wasn't very heavy - the bees had started putting some nectar there, but not in any quantity. Also there weren't too many bees there.

But... when I pulled off the upper brood chamber, it was *heavy*!!! It turns out that there was a ton of nectar (and probably sugar water from earlier feedings) in the super. I suspect this added to the swarm problem - the hive felt there was no room for the queen to lay (and it was probably true).

I had never experienced a hive where the brood chamber was filled up with too much honey/nectar, so it didn't raise any red flags when I saw it last week. But now I know better!

I wanted to look for queen cells or evidence of a queen. What I found was very strange. I found a couple of frames with what looked like torn-out queen cells:

But I also found some uncapped queen cells as well, on the same frame!

I think the bees started some queen cells at different times, so the uncapped cells are still maturing.

It looks like there is a virgin queen somewhere in the hive (I didn't see her, but then a newly hatched queen is small and easily missed). Given the uncapped queen cells which were there, I decided to pull off a frame with those cells into a nuc and start another queen (I didn't want the newly born queen to destroy the queen cells being made). I also left a frame with other queen cells on it in the pink hive, just in case there wasn't a virgin queen there.

I'll leave the frames with nectar/honey alone for a couple of weeks until the queen starts laying, then I'll do some swapping.

Brown Hive

Compared to the jumpy pink hive, the Brown hive was positively tranquil. You could tell they had a queen present. The honey super had some good progress in it. Here's a frame showing some capped honey started. I may get something from this hive!!

The upper brood chamber wasn't as heavy as the pink hive's, so they had a lot more room for eggs. There were plenty of bees in the hive, as seen here (where I removed a frame):

I also was lucky enough to spot Her Majesty:

Notice how the worker bees are clustered around her.

I didn't see any signs of a tendency to swarm - a few queen cups were present, but they were all dry. I'll keep an eye on them. There were plenty of bees in the hive, as you can see from the bees on top of the bars on the top brood chamber (which I had set aside when I inspected the lower chamber):

One of the things I noticed was the rich variety of pollen colors the bees had collected. I tried to take a picture, but it doesn't show the vibrancy of the colors. Click on these to take a look full size:

As I mentioned, I pulled off the frame with a couple of incomplete queen cells from the Pink hive, plus a couple more frames of honey/nectar (I had many to choose from!) and pollen, and made a nuc:

So now my little apiary has grown a bit:

Later that evening, I was finishing up a project for my wife (making a potting bench), and had a little more time left. There was one bee-related construction project I hadn't completed: I need to make a frame to hold grafted queen cells. I could buy one on-line, but I have a lot of standard frames around, so I thought I could make one cheaper.

I had previously purchased the queen cups and the grafting tool. The cups have a little nib that fits into a slot in the frame. It turns out that my table saw makes a slot exactly the right width to hold the queen cups!

Here are pictures of the frame I made:

I spray painted bright florescent orange the top of the frame (so I don't misplace it!) and marked which bar fits where (since I didn't cut them exactly the same size, I wanted to remember which bar went where). So now I have everything I need.

Later in the evening I noticed a lot of activity of bees in and around the two empty hives (one standard size, one nuc) that I leave on my back porch. There were even lots of bees checking out the hive I have in my garage. I had not seen this much attention in the past; I suspect it is foragers from my swarm earlier in the day which were looking for a new home! Wouldn't that be a hoot if they decided to take up residence in one of my empty hives??

(sorry for the lawnmower sound on the video - my neighbor was mowing!)

Cleanup/Fixup day!

2011-05-26T19:39:00.000-04:00

Last Saturday was a gorgeous day. The weather was very mild, and the sun actually came out!
Over the winter I had accumulated beekeeping equipment and parts in my garage, since three of the 5 hives died. I needed to do some cleaning, arranging, organizing, fixing, etc. to make things fit better.

Two of the supers were destined for the Sutton hive (which I put on today; see last post). But I still had another hive's worth of parts (and more) to deal with. I also had some repairs to make to various pieces of equipment.

I took all of the equipment out of the garage and stacked it along my front walkway while I checked out what needed cleaning, fixing, etc. Here's part of the stash:

Over a year ago, while I was inspecting one of the backyard hives, a piece of one of the frames split off. It was the piece which assures proper spacing between each of the frames. Without that extra piece jutting out, the frame would get too close to the adjacent one and squish bees (when working in the hive, you often use your frame tool to pry the groups of frames and squeeze them together). I was able to move the frame to the outside of the group of frames, but needed to wait until the bees emptied the frame before I could fix it.

Well this spring I noticed that the bees had eaten all of the honey out of the frame, so I removed it to fix it. Below is my gluing a replacement piece of wood to the frame:

You may ask, why bother? Well, that was a beautiful frame of drawn comb, which is like gold! So I wanted to salvage the frame if possible.

I also had some unpainted bodies I made late last year, and took advantage of the good weather to paint them:

So now everything sits nicely stacked in the corner of my garage (after I gave away a broken push lawnmower that was previously taking up that space).

Sutton Hi-Rise...

2011-05-26T19:19:00.000-04:00

I've been in some training classes for work for the past three days, and today (the final day) the class ended a little early. I thought it might, so this morning I put the two upper brood chambers for the Sutton hives in my pickup truck to take to work; I was planning on stopping over to the Sutton hives if there were time.

Well, there was time, so off I go. As I was driving there after work, I realized I left my smoker at home!! But I knew I was going to simply give the hives a quick glance, and put on the super, so a lack of smoke wouldn't be too bad.

The temperature was in the mid 70's so the bees were out and about:

I popped off the outer and inner cover, and saw good numbers of bees on the tops of the frames:

When adding an upper chamber, I always pull one frame of bees and larvae from the bottom box and put it in the upper chamber, to give the bees a clue that they should use this chamber too. The frames I added to both hives were fully drawn, so the bees can occupy them immediately. Here's a good example of one of the frames:

This frame shows a good brood pattern (center), surrounded by pollen, then surrounded by what would normally be honey, but it looks like the bees had eaten it (maybe due to the rain). Another frame had a lot of nectar in it, so I am not worried about their food condition.

I also tilted up each of the bottom boxes checking for queen cells or cups; I saw neither on either hive, so that is good. With these new brood chambers the bees will be able to expand all they want!

When I got back home, I went out by the backyard hives. When the weather is this nice, I like to go out back and just watch all the industrious activity. Today the bees were very busy! Take a look:

If you build it, they will come...

2011-05-21T23:09:00.000-04:00

(this is a long blog post with many pictures, so enjoy!)

One of the things that I really like about the hobby of beekeeping is that you can be personally involved in as much or as little of the creation of the hive components as you want. If you don't want to (or can't) deal with any woodworking, you can purchase everything fully assembled, and even painted, ready to use. But you pay a premium for that. Or you can go half way, getting the items pre-cut, but unassembled. You assemble the parts; nail, glue, and paint; then you are set. This is what most people do (myself included). But you still have to pay for shipping costs (wood is heavy). Then there are those who cut and build everything from scratch.

Some items just don't make sense to create from scratch - like the frames. There are many intricate cuts needed to build a frame, and they are not that expensive (a little over $1.00 in quantity), so the time/value isn't there. But then there are the simple items, such as a hive body. It's basically 4 pieces of wood nailed/glued into a topless and bottomless box. I have made these (although I can't do the fancy box joints; mine are just rabbet joints or simpler) with good success.

As I've mentioned previously, I am not a woodworker. I don't have a shop, and have the basic tools. Every time I want to do anything, I have to pull out my wife's van and take over the garage for a while (and my wife is very patient with me on this).

But as I contemplated raising queens this year, I was reading about queen castles. A queen castle is a special hive body which is divided into 3 (or 4) sections, each with their own entrances. Basically it's equivalent to 3 or 4 nuc boxes attached together. Sure, I could buy one on-line, but I wanted to try something different.

Beekeepers tend to like to experiment, and that includes making modifications to standard equipment. So I wanted to try to "improve" the queen castle in the following ways:

More space below the frames - one complaint I have with a couple of the all-in-one nuc boxes I have is that there isn't a lot of space below the frame. If I have a frame with a queen cell hanging off the bottom (as is often the case for swarm cells), it can be damaged when I put it in the nuc.
Adjustable space above the frames - when you make a nuc, you often have to feed pollen patties to help the nurse bees along. A pollen patty won't fit in the regular bee space (3/8") on the top of a standard nuc, so I wanted more
Able to easily feed syrup - I want to be able to put a jar of feed above each of the sections.

So I decided to take what is basically a 10-frame deep body design and make it into three 3-frame nucs for a queen castle. The dividers I will put between the sections don't add up to an entire frame width, so there is plenty of room in each section for the 3 frames (or 2 frames + a frame feeder).

I started by measuring the inner dimensions of one of my deep hive bodies, and added 1/2" on the bottom (for the extra space for queen cells hanging down) and 3/4" above the bars (for the pollen patty). I decided to use 3/8" plywood for most of the box, which is why I focused on the inner dimensions of the brood chamber (normal wood used for hive bodies is 3/4" thick). I also decided to not have to rabbet any of the plywood; but instead I would overlap pieces of plywood for the frame rests (a technique currently being used for plywood-based nuc boxes on Beesource).

I started off with my big sheet of plywood, and transferred my measurements to it. You can't see it, but the plywood is sitting on a couple of garbage cans in my driveway (since I have no shop):

The other week I had an old broken down dresser I demolished (and burned a lot of it in my firepit - Mmmm s'mores!). I saved parts of it for re-use, like the drawer bottoms. The bottoms were made out of the same material as pegboard boards, and it was thin and stiff. I had an idea those pieces would work great for the dividers in the queen castle.

Here you can see the slots I cut for the dividers:

You can also see that the front and back ends (where the frames rest) were cut lower, and then I attached another piece of plywood on the outside to complete the box:

You can also see above that the plywood was very "knotty" on the non-good side. I decided to give the bees the smooth side, and left the crappy side on the outside. I'm just going to paint it anyway, and we aren't going for looks (plus, the bees don't care).

Another modification I made to the standard queen castle design was to add some mini landing boards for each entrance. You can see them here on the bottom board:

Here is the queen castle with the bottom board and side pieces attached. You can see that the frame rests are extra deep. My modified top covers (below) will account for that space:

Vent holes are drilled, and they will be covered with 8-count metal mesh inside:

Here is a shot of the dividers. They go all the way to the bottom of the box, and also block on the frame rest:

Here is a shot of one of the modified inner covers. You can see it's a piece of 1" board (which is really 3/4" in thickness) attached to the plywood piece. The 1" board fits inside the rim of the castle:

With the inner covers in this position, there is proper bee space on top of the frames:

With the inner covers in this position (flipped over), there is an extra 3/4" on top of the frames, perfect for a pollen patty:

Here's the top cover I made:

I painted the castle with some white outdoor paint I bought on sale. I learned that bees orient by position of the hive, but also by color and patterns. So I painted a different color/pattern on each of the 3 sides:

So now I have a queen castle ready if/when I decide to raise some queens!

Since I had the tools out already for the queen castle, I decided to make another useful piece of beekeeping equipment: a Snelgrove board. This is basically a hive divider with a screen on each side (so the heat can be shared). Then on each of the 4 edges (on both sides) you build closeable bee doors. Here are the plans I followed (the link is to a PDF file), and it was very easy.

I'm not going to go into detail as to how the board is used - you can read about it in this very detailed slide presentation.

So here's the final item:

No Honey, Sonny...

2011-05-21T13:26:00.000-04:00

The past week+ we have had a lot of cold drizzly rain - definitely note "bee" weather. My wife reported the last couple of days when the weather was nice, the bees were falling all over themselves to get out and go foraging. So I (silly me) was getting my hopes up to see some good nectar/honey collection in the upper super(s).

Today before lunch it was nice and sunny and around 72, so I decided to do a little inspection of the backyard hive. I also wanted to make sure nobody was poised to swarm (you'll recall a couple of years ago about this time, after a protracted period of rain, the brown hive swarmed).

The Brown Hive

Like a kid on Christmas morning, I anxiously cracked open the top cover of the Brown hive, and peeked into the honey super, to find... nothing. No nectar, no honey - just bees. They had not put anything up above for storage.

Continuing the inspection, I saw some brood in the lower chamber, but it wasn't covering the frame well like you'd like to see:

Is this a queen who isn't doing well in her job?

But when I got to the upper chamber, I saw good things:

And I saw the queen herself. Look for the white dot:

I was satisfied with what I saw - lots of brood, and even some young larvae (look closely at the bottom left portion of the first picture above). I did see a few queen cups along the bottom of some of the frames, but they were bone dry, and sometimes bees just do that.

The Pink Hive

Moving on to the pink hive, I was wondering if the honey super would be any different. Nope, exactly the same. Plenty of bees, but bone dry...

In both hives I started inspecting with the bottom brood box. This hive had a better amount of brood present in the bottom. Take a look:

There was a frame with a good example of young larvae, and eggs. The second and third pictures are closeups, and you can see the eggs (thanks to the black foundation):

And this is all in the lower box. Moving on to the upper chamber, I was amused at the row of bee faces looking up at me in between the frames:

The queen was busy in the upper chamber as well:

But...

I saw something on that frame (above) which bothered me. Here's a (somewhat fuzzy - sorry) closeup of one of the bees:

You'll notice that the bee has some deformed wings. This is called "deformed wing virus" and is a sign of a Varroa Mite problem. I'll do a mite check next time to see how bad it is. But some of those frames of brood are just pretty!

So I was thinking of why the bees aren't bring in on honey. Bees are girls, and girls like to have color coordinated things, and I realized the hives didn't have matching colors. I fixed that!

So now girls, get to work! :-)

I'll probably go out to Sutton to check those hives later today...

Super Up!

2011-05-09T20:26:00.000-04:00

Things are really blooming, so I decided to add supers to my backyard hives. Not exactly the most exciting of operations:

Give 'em a little smoke
Remove the inner cover
Add a queen excluder
Add the medium super

I sprayed some of the frames of the super with sugar water, which in theory encourages the bees to use the super (I have a mix of drawn comb and undrawn foundation).

I also did a quick "tilt check" - this is where you tilt up the upper brood chamber and look in between them, looking for swarm cells. You do a tilt check when you can't do a full inspection - at least you will be able to see swarm preparations. In my hives, I didn't see any swarm cells - I saw a queen cup on one of the frames on the brown hive. But it was empty. But I did notice the upper chamber of the pink hive is very heavy - probably lots of nectar/honey. If it gets too full, I may have to spin out a frame or two (with my new extractor! yay!) to give the queen some more room.

So here's how we look now:

(Oops! I just noticed that I put the brown super on the pink hive, and vice versa! Good thing bees aren't too picky!)

There's still an empty spot on my stand; we'll see if the bees decide I need to create a new hive (if they want to swarm); or I can make one myself.

Sutton Check

2011-05-09T20:10:00.000-04:00

Last Sunday I hived two packages in Sutton. On Saturday I went out to make sure the queen was released. Every once in a while a package will abscond (just up and leave) after hiving, and while it is rare, I didn't want to discover that in Sutton.

When I got to the hives, I saw some good activity at both hives - good news; they are still there! I needed to take out the queen cages and put in the 10^th frame (check here last week to see the queen cage in between two frames).

Bees, especially new hives from a package, are geared up to build comb (that's what a swarm would do first thing upon finding a new home, and a package is not much more than an artificial swarm). So like has happened before, the bees built comb in the gap left by the queen cage.

Here's what I pulled out of hive #1:

They had built two lobes of comb off of the queen cage! The queen had been released (in both hives), by the way - the main thing I was checking for.

You can also see here they added some comb in the gap, attached to the side of the frame:

All in all, this is what I removed from the hives:

I checked some frames to see if the queen was laying. The frames had a lot of bee activity on them:

They were bringing in a lot of pollen and nectar, but I didn't see any eggs, in either hive. It's not too much a cause for concern, for often after she is released, the queen takes a few days to start laying (after all, she had been confined many days in the queen cage).

I'll check next week or so to make sure she is doing her job.

By the way, I am calling the left hive Sutton Hive #1, and the right on Sutton Hive #2 (I know, not as imaginative as some peoples' naming, but it suits me).

I bought an extractor!

2011-05-08T20:29:00.000-04:00

For the most part, being a beekeeper doesn't involved a lot of complicated or expensive equipment. The wood hive parts can be built from scratch, and put together piecemeal (i.e. not a large up front expense). One exception to this is the extractor. It's a simple concept, but extractors cost hundreds of dollars, and even more depending on if you want a motorized one. Extractors hold their value, and used ones are hard to find.

I am lucky that near me is Maxant Industries, a company that makes honey extraction equipment (check out their website to see all that they make). They are running a sale on a 9-frame hand crank extractor at a very good price. So after work last week I drove up to Ayer, MA (1/2 hour from where I work), and happened to get Jacob, the Vice President of Maxant, to give me a nickel tour of their factory.

It was very interesting - they actually fabricate all of their equipment there in the factory. They form the stainless steel into the hive bodies, and weld up the extractor cages. It was a very good tour.

So I came out with a new extractor (and extractor stand)! I am excited to have one of my very own, as I can now do those little adjustments that I need to do. There is also a condition where the hive can get "honey bound" which means that you can have too much honey in the lower part of the hive. The way to deal with it is to spin out some frames, and give the bees back the honey later. I can now do this.

I haven't opened the extractor up yet, so I don't have any pictures. But when I do, I'll put up some photos.

Home Remodeling...

2011-05-08T20:16:00.000-04:00

Last weekend was the bee-full weekend. On Sunday I did some reworking of one of my home hives.

Going into the winter, I created a hive with a combine of some medium frames (of brood - from a nuc), and had a shallow honey super that they never finished off. So I left it on the hive over the winter. Here's the configuration going into winter:

The hive came through winter OK, and in spring the bees were in the shallow and medium super, and had started laying eggs.

When this happens, the easiest thing to do (and what I did) was to put a queen excluder under the medium super (making sure the queen was in the deep box). Then the babies would be born in the top two boxes, but the queen wouldn't repopulate it with brood. I also left an upper entrance since any drones born needed to be able to get out (they can't fit through the queen excluder).

Where I went wrong was that in March I started feeding sugar syrup (to stimulate brood rearing). The problem was that as the bees were born in the upper boxes, the bees started putting away the sugar syrup in the supers. I didn't want that, since I want to use those supers for honey collection.

So I asked some of my bee friends who have more experience what I could do. Most suggested I take off the supers and spin out the sugar syrup with an extractor, and let the bees put honey in the supers. The problem is that I don't have an extractor, and it's a hassle to borrow an extractor.

So I decided to take off the two supers, and set them outside and let the bees do the extracting! They will clean out the sugar syrup, and put it back in their hive.

So the fun began where I needed to take each of the frames of the 2 supers out, and brush off the bees back into the hive (I added an empty deep super first). Let me tell you, the bees were NOT happy being brushed from the supers back into their hives! Good thing I had my bees suit on. But I did it, and after a day or so they had calmed back down.

Here's what things looked like after I got done (the one on the left):

I'll let the bees clear out the sugar super, and then I'll put on some supers and hopefully catch some honey!

Package Installation

2011-05-01T21:08:00.000-04:00

With 20,000 bees sitting on the kitchen table for a day, it was time to get them into their home(s). These poor bees were shaken out of their hives in GA probably mid week last week; put on a truck and trucked up to RI; sat overnight in a garage in RI; driven to my house in MA; and sat overnight on my table.

Sunday late afternoon was when I decided to hive the bees. It's good to do it in the late afternoon / evening, so the bees will stay in the hive and get used to it. If you install bees in a hive in the morning / early day, there's a chance they might abscond.

I took a video (embedded at the end), but since I was the cameraman and beekeeper, I didn't get a video of the actual shaking of the bees (since it required two hands to do). Here are some pictures of the event:

Here's one of the packages sitting on it's new home. I sprayed the package with some sugar water, to give them something to do to keep them from getting too agitated.

I took out some frames to leave room to dump the bees

The queen is in the cage, along with a few attendant bees. Note the candy on the left side that the bees slowly eat through to release her.

Bees dumped in!

It's got to be a little traumatic to be dumped this way. But they weren't aggressive at all!

I wedged the queen cage in between two frames, screen down (I left out a frame to leave room). Some people embed the queen cage into the comb, but I prefer to do it this way.

The bees are on the queen cage.

The second package was installed just like the first.

Here's the final result. I left the packages in front of the hives since there are always some stragglers. The syrup cans are left in the middle for them to be emptied later.

And finally, here's the video of the event:

I'll go back in about 5 days to check and make sure the queen was released, and to put in the missing frame.

A Bee-Full Weekend

2011-05-01T20:43:00.000-04:00

Wow! This has been a weekend full of bee activities! Lots of pictures in this blog post.

First, on Friday, I got a call from the person from whom I purchased 2 new packages of bees. They were delivered, and I planned on going out to Warwick, RI to pick them up the next day (Saturday morning). This was the same guy that provided the bee packages last year.

So Saturday morning I made a road trip and picked up 20,000 live honeybees!

I got them home and set them on the kitchen table, since they weren't going to be installed until the next evening. I gave them a good squirt of water with the sprayer every once in a while, to keep them hydrated.

Then it was off to the first outdoor meeting of the Worcester County Beekeepers Association. It was held at Norm Mercier's home, and he had a bunch of hives on his property. Each outdoor meeting has some time spent in the hives, usually done by Ken Warchol the bee inspector, and it is used as an educational opportunity for the new beekeepers (as well as the old timers - never too old to learn!). In this case, after Ken did his demonstration, the group split into three groups and 3 other old-timers took a group and did some more in-depth examinations, and there was a good Q&A time as well.

The weather started off very chilly, and the bees didn't like it. Ken got stung at least once, and he actually had to pull out his veil and use it for a while! Here are some photos of the event:

This is only about half of the group.

Some of the hives on the property

More hives

Ken doing some lecturing :-)

The bees weren't really coming out, since it was a little chilly.

Ken taking apart a hive

Showing off a frame

This is an example of a good spring build-up

Notice Ken's right eye - a little red and swollen. I wonder why?

One of the experienced beekeepers showing a frame

Pointing out a freshly born bee

Notice the drone comb (bullet-topped cells near his thumb)

All in all it was a good meeting. The weather got warmer later, and that just made the gnats come out! So I kept my bee veil on after the hive inspections - it may have looked funny, but it kept the gnats away!

The next blog post will talk about the hiving of the packages in Sutton.

Eggs, I think...

2011-04-14T14:09:00.000-04:00

Brown Hive

During last weekend's inspection, I didn't see any brood, eggs, etc. in the brown hive. I saw what I thought was a queen, but she wasn't marked, so she was a new one. I was wondering if she was new from late last year, or early this year - but I didn't see any queen cells either last fall or now. In any case, I grabbed her last week and marked her with a white dot to make it easier to find her. I wanted to check later to see if she would lay any eggs.

So I took a quick peek today, as the temperatures were in the mid 50's, and the bees were flying. I didn't pull all the frames, but I wanted to see queen evidence. I saw some frames which could have been eggs in the cells, but it was hard to tell because 1) I was looking through a veil, 2) the sun was in the wrong place, and 3) I'm old. I pulled a 2^nd frame to check, and lo and behold I saw the queen I marked last week! Here's a picture:

I watched her for a little while, and was amazed I saw her sticking her rear end into cells looking like she was laying eggs! Here's a picture I took; if you zoom in on it and look carefully, you can see her rear end bent into a cell:

So I am going to hold off on getting another queen for another week, to see if there were really eggs being laid. That hive didn't take much of the sugar syrup, and still has 1 1/2 patties of pollen, so they have enough resources.

Pink Hive

While I was out there, I wanted to check out the pink hive. In the upper supers, there is still developing brood, but no new eggs since I put the queen in the lower box under a queen excluder:

I checked the bottom box, but didn't see any eggs or brood. But I got lucky twice in the same day; I spotted the queen on the frame I pulled out, so she is there. Not quite sure why she isn't laying yet, but it could be because of the brood in the upper chamber is keeping the nurse bees up there. Hopefully with more bees being born, the queen will kick into gear.

Pink's syrup jars were empty, so I added some more syrup.

Should I breed some queens?

2011-04-11T15:51:00.000-04:00

I recently purchased a book called Queen Rearing Essentials by Larry Connor, who is one of the experts in the beekeeping community concerning queen bees and queen rearing. I've also been reading a lot of on-line articles on queen raising written by other beekeepers.

Last year, when I was dealing with a hive which was looking to swarm, I split off some frames and made "walk-away splits." This is where you take the frame(s) with the queen cell (which the bees made as a result of an urge to swarm) and separate it into a nucleus hive, to hatch and mate. I had some good success, but it is a reactionary process.

When you set out to raise some queen bees specifically, you take action by grafting some 2-day-old larvae into special cell cups, and then induce the bees to make them into queens. You can do this and make a lot more queens than the swarm cells generally produce. Then you can set up the queens into a Queen Castle (basically a beehive condo) while she matures and goes on a mating flight.

This is a natural progression for beekeepers - they begin with hives and after they get comfortable keeping those, they make increase via splits. Eventually they try their hand at grafting. You can either sell the new queens, or use them for re-queening your own hives.

I know I have a few hobbyist beekeeper friends who follow this blog. What do you think? Should I do some queen rearing this season?

Spring chores... done!

2011-04-09T16:15:00.000-04:00

The temperature got up to 60+ degrees F today - a perfect day to do some bee spring chores! This is going to be a long post, because I did a lot today. Lots of pictures too - be sure to click on them to see them full size!

Sutton Hives

This morning I went over to the Sutton hives. You'll recall both hives died over the winter - one from Nosema, and the other from starvation. I needed to bring the hive parts back to my house to clean up in preparation for new bee packages which are supposed to arrive next week.

While I was loading the hives, I noticed that Hive #2 (the one started from a package last year) had a lot of honey stores in the upper brood chamber. But the (dead) cluster of bees was a little smaller than other hives I've seen. I am surprised that one died, but I suspect it had a lot to do with the number of bees going into winter. Because those hives aren't in my back yard, I think I didn't tend to them as much as the convenient ones.

I didn't take any pictures, because there was nothing exciting to see - just loading hive bodies into my pickup truck...

Then around noon I suited up and went through each of the two remaining hives in my backyard.

Pink Hive

I started with the pink hive, which was created late last year from a nuc that I grew myself. The bees were very busy bringing in pollen in this hive. Here are a few pictures I got before I started the inspection. Lots of good action shots!

This hive went into the winter with a deep, a medium, and a shallow. The medium was from the nuc (I needed some medium frames drawn out, so I put it on the nuc, and the queen used it for brood). The shallow contained frames of not-quite-finished honey from last fall. Since there was no queen excluder on the hive over the winter, the queen could go where she wanted.

I found lots of good bees in the top (shallow) box and in the middle (medium) box. Here are some pictures, first of a shallow frame, then of a medium frame:

You can see here the good amount of bees sitting on top of the medium frames when I lifted up the shallow:

I was hoping to see the queen, and I wasn't disappointed!

You can see she still has her blue dot from last year - this was a good queen, made it through the winter!!

I couldn't get any good pictures of it, but this queen had some nice brood patterns, and I saw eggs, larvae, and capped brood. It looks like she's gearing up for a good spring!

Even though this hive made it through the winter, it didn't do so without casualties. Here's what I found on the bottom board:

Those are all dead bees (the white is the paper from the bee candy I fed over the winter - some paper stuck to the candy, and bees don't eat paper). All in all this hive looked real good - lots of space, and no sign of swarming.

As I mentioned, the queen was laying up in the two upper supers. I want those to be empty for honey. So I put the queen in the lower box (which was pretty much empty), and put a queen excluder above her. As the bees in the top boxes are born, the freed-up space will be used for honey (since the queen can't get up there to lay).

I also decided to add to each hive one of the green Drone frames to help control Varroa mites. The queen lays drones in the larger cells, and Varroa mites are attracted to drone cells. After they are sealed, you freeze the frame and it disrupts the Varroa's mating cycle.

Brown Hive

This one didn't look as active as the pink hive. But still good activity out front.

When I opened up the top, I didn't see as many bees on the frames as the other hive:

But I saw lots of bees on a few of the frames I pulled out:

There were about 3 frames like this, but I was concerned at what I didn't see: no eggs, larvae, or brood to be found anywhere!

So I went on a queen hunt. I saw something which I wasn't sure was a queen, but I captured her and sure enough, it was a queen bee. But it wasn't the marked queen I had from last year, and it wasn't as large as normal queens. Could it be a virgin queen? I don't know how, since I didn't see any queen cell remnants (and I looked) and it's early for new queens. So I marked her (since I had her captured), and I'll keep an eye on things. When I look next week, if I don't see any eggs or the queen, I'll look into getting a new queen. Things just didn't "feel right" with that hive...

This hive had a similar looking bottom board - needed to scrape it out as well.

To finish things out, I put another pollen patty on each hive (even though they probably don't need it), and put on jars for sugar syrup feeding. Then I put an empty gray deep body shell over the jars.

On your mark... Get set,,,

2011-04-08T00:24:00.000-04:00

I can feel it! Spring is right around the corner!

Lately it's still been pretty cool. The bees come out for a little on the warm days, but it's definitely not full-on spring... YET!

I spent some time tonight digging out some of my hive equipment I put away last year wherever I could find it. Most of it was in the garage (shown above).

I stored the empty frames of wax comb in large tubs where I added some PDB crystals (a type of moth ball which is not harmful to the bees or leave residue on the comb). I had a couple of frames show evidence of wax moth infestation (you can see webbing as the worm burrowed in the frame), but nothing the bees can't repair.

I also made up some sugar syrup with a 10 lb. bag of sugar:

I had a problem over the winter with one of my hives dying from Nosema, so I decided to add some Fumigilin-B to the syrup which will combat the Nosema. I generally try not to over-medicate, but in this case I believe adding the medicine it is waranted. Also, I'm going back to using mason jars for the feed. They don't hold as much as the buckets I tried last year, but at least the lid will seal well. The buckets were like big butter tubs, and the lid didn't hold a seal worth anything.

My plans this weekend are to get into the backyard hives and really give them a good looking over, assuming the temperatures cooperate. If it's too cold, I'll probably just pull a couple of frames to see how things look. In any case, I'll add some sugar syrup to the hives.

I also need to go out to the Sutton hives and bring them back for some cleaning. The package bees arrive in about a week, so I need to get those hives ready.

It's close!!

And the winner is...

2011-04-01T13:22:00.000-04:00

Earlier this month I announced that I found an extra jar of honey from last fall, and I would give it away to someone who either followed my blog or "liked" my Facebook fan page.

I didn't gain that many extra followers. Here's what I have:

Followers of the blog: 54
Like'rs of my Facebook page: 84
Total people: 138

So I went to the random.org web page, and generated a random number from 1 to 138. Here is the result:

117 is in the "Facebook" part of my list. So I went to the Facebook fan page and counted down 63 in the membership list.

And the winner is: Kimberly Lockley

Kim will receive the jar of fall honey.

Thanks to everyone mew who joined as a result. This was fun - I think I'll do something like this periodically (assuming I get any more honey this upcoming year).

Lonely...

2011-03-31T19:06:00.000-04:00

Earlier this week I took down the dead Green Hive and cleaned out the frames of the dead bees. I stored the hive in my garage for the time being, until I have a need of making a new hive.

Looking out my back window, those other two hives look so lonely!!

Also, this is the last day to follow this blog in order to be eligible to win my last jar of fall honey! This evening I'll use random.org to pick the winner, and the jar will be on the way!

So far so good...

2011-03-18T20:45:00.000-04:00

The weather was warm last Friday, and the bees were out. You can see they hanging out on the front of the hive, with the snow still visible in the background:

My wife was out on the front porch that day, and told me a bee came up and landed on her arm to rest. I told her that 3 years ago she would have probably freaked out and frantically tried to brush/shake off the bee; but now she just waited for the bee to decide to take off on her own!

Today was even better for the bees - the weather was great, a lot of bees were flying, and some even managed to find pollen from somewhere. There were a few bees (not many) coming in with a dark pale yellow pollen. I couldn't get a picture of the bees with pollen (those bees are fast!) but you can see in this picture the bees coming in:

I also had an interesting thing happen today; last week I took off the top box of the dead green hive. I took pictures of the dead-out for my last blog post, and I just put the box on it's side in the back of the garage.

Well, with the weather so nice, we had the garage door open all day. My bees managed to find that box of frames (which still had nectar and honey in it) and told all the other bees, and we had a bee smorgasbord (FREE FOOD!!). My son Jacob was not pleased one bit with a garage full of busy bees! I walked over and grabbed the box and moved it out to the back deck so the bees could have it, but it took hours before the bees stopped checking out the garage (where's the food? where's the food?). I should have known better, as something similar happened last year.

Don't forget I'm giving away a jar of honey at the end of the month; see the blog post here for all the details!

This is What a Dead Hive Looks Like

2011-03-05T22:11:00.000-05:00

I mentioned in previous blog entries that one of my backyard hives is dead. The weather was nice enough that I started taking it apart (this spring I hope to start a new hive in it, so I need to clear it out).

I took off the top super, and started taking out the frames. Here's what I found:

If you look carefully, underneath the dead bees on the comb surface, are dead bees head-first in the cells. The poor dears died trying to get the last licks of honey out of the cells. This is the classic evidence of starvation. Every beekeeper knows it, and every beekeeper dreads it.

Also, you can see not too far away from the mass of bees the light glistening off of liquid in cells. I do not know if this is honey/nectar, but it very well could be. In very cold weather, bees won't "break cluster" to even go inches away, and can starve in 3 days if there is no food.

In the second picture you can see the blue dot on the queen's back. She was in the middle of that cluster, nice and warm originally, but she too died with her daughters. Very sad. That was one of the queens that I reared.

I can learn from this experience that I need to put the bee candy on the hives (as food insurance) a lot earlier than I did. The weather was so cold so quick, I thought the bees had enough food. But obviously not.

In the Home Stretch...

2011-03-05T19:54:00.000-05:00

It was a nice balmy day today, with the temperatures in the mid 40's (°F). I did a quick check of the bees in the backyard, just lifting up the cover, and you can see above what I found. There's a 2" shim above the frames that you see there, so that's the space the bees (and sugar) are occupying. Both hives looked about the same - that is good. The white you see is the "bee candy" (sugar patties). Also in there somewhere is a pollen patty - I'm not sure where it is; it could be that gap in the middle.

So unless something drastic happens, I think these two backyard hives will make it. I'll keep checking during the cold weather to make sure there is enough sugar. When the weather warms up, and is relatively steady, I'll start feeding sugar syrup. Also, I haven't seen moisture building up (which is the other thing - besides starvation - which can kill a hive in the winter).

In a related note, I placed an order for two packages of bees (with queens) - the owner of the Sutton hives wants to re-populate them. They should arrive in early April.

A Honey of a Giveaway!

2011-03-03T14:53:00.000-05:00

For most of my life, I didn't care about the various seasons. When it got warm, it got warm. But since I have been keeping bees, I have been more aware of the life cycle of the bees as it relates to the seasons.

Spring is when the bees come out of their hives and start looking for pollen. It's the start of their season.

In celebration (and encouragement) of Spring to come as soon as possible, I have decided to give away a jar of honey!

Here's what you need to do to win a half-pint jar of Steven's Bees honey:

You can get one entry by clicking "Like" on my Steven's Bees Facebook page (see the "Find us on Facebook" banner at the right)
You can get an additional entry by "Following" this blog with Google Friend Connect (look for "Followers of Steven's Bees" a little lower on the right)
So you can have up to two chances to win if you both "Like" the Facebook group and "Follow" this blog (note: you do not have to leave a comment on the blog like other blogs' contests. It won't change your chance of winning)
On or around March 31, 2011 I will have a random number drawing for the winner of the jar of honey
I will then mail the lucky winner the half-pint jar

So that's it! I look forward to finding out who will receive the honey!

(I am solely responsible for determining the winner, and all decisions are final. It's only honey, after all!)

Bad news in Sutton...

2011-02-27T20:02:00.000-05:00

Bad news for the Sutton hives - both are dead.

When I visited them last month, only one hive was dead. I put sugar candy on the live hive, with hopes that they would make it through the winter.

This was the sight when I arrived to check the hive today:

You can see the bees had eaten the center of the bee candy, and there was plenty left. But the clue to the bees demise is all the brown spots you see - that's a sign of Nosema.

So the Sutton hives are no more. I need to contact the owner to see what he wants to do - if he wants bees next year, we'll have to get a package or two of bees.

So the current count is:

Sutton Hive 1 - dead (Nosema)
Sutton Hive 2 - dead (starvation)
Green Hive - dead (starvation)
Pink Hive - living
Brown Hive - living

Bummer.

Mid-winter Checkup

2011-02-17T16:32:00.000-05:00

I just noticed it's been a month since I put up a Bee Blog post. Like I have mentioned before, the winter time is when you do as little as possible to the hive (how would you like it if in the dead of winter a giant hand came and lifted off the roof of your house, letting out the hot air??).

With the recent snowstorms, the snow has built up under the hive stands, and it looks like the hives are sitting on the snow. Here are some shots from Feb. 8 when we had a very wet snowstorm, and the snow stuck to the tree limbs. Very pretty, but very non-fun to shovel!!

Remember, there's about a 2-foot tall hive stand those hives are on, so you can see how deep the snow is! Other than the snow, the weather was not windy at all, and I am confident the bees were snug in their hives.

I actually did a quick check of the backyard hives on Jan. 29. I wanted to see how the bees were taking to the sugar candy I put a couple of weeks earlier. At that check, the brown hive had bees all over the bee candy, which is a good thing. The candy provides energy for the hive, since they have run out of honey. On the pink hive, there was just a bee or two on the candy. This tells me that either the hive is weak, or that the bees were still lower in the hive and had honey to eat, and they didn't have to be at the top looking for food. The green hive was still deader than a doornail...

We've had a couple of extremely warm days (relatively speaking), around 50 degF which allowed the bees to fly. One of those days was Valentine's Day, and my wife took some pictures of the hives. You can tell that there are bees outside on the hives, but not much else:

She also said that the bees in the brown hive were clearing out dead bodies, which is a good thing for a hive to do. I did see a lot of dead bees in the snow in front of the hive too (some of those may have been flyers who got too cold and didn't make it back to the hive).

Today was another 50+ day, so I took the opportunity in the late afternoon to check how they were doing with their candy. I wore my bee suit coat and veil this time, as I learned last time it isn't too cold for a worker to fly up in your face and sting your head!

The brown hive had a whole lot of bees between the top of the bars and the inner cover. That is where the bee candy was. They had eaten a lot of the candy, but not all of it. It looked to be a good healthy number of bees, so I put on another disc of bee candy, and also put on a pollen patty to help feed any brood the bees may be raising. The bees pretty much covered all of the top of the bars in the hive.

The pink hive had the same appearance, with a lot of bees covering the top bars. I guess they finally ate their way to the top. It looked to be the same strength as the brown hive, so that is a good thing. Again, I put on another disc and a pollen patty.

Green hive - still dead (hey, I can hope!!). Tracy said she saw a bee or two checking out the green hive, but they were just visitors.

So it looks like this spring I'm going to try to re-populate the green hive with a split from one of the other hives.

I put bee candy on the Sutton Hives at the same time last month that I did the backyard hives. Seeing that there is still candy left in the backyard hives, I can make a trip over to Sutton this weekend or so to feed that hive.

I am getting really excited for Spring to come, so I can get these hives going!

Ouch!!!

2011-01-15T13:00:00.000-05:00

At Friday's Bee Club meeting, Ken Warchol (Worcester County Bee Inspector) mentioned that he is seeing a lot of starvation in hives this winter. We had a poor nectar season last year, and it didn't get cold until later, so the bees ate their stores more (when the bees are cold and in cluster, they don't consume as much food).

I made some bee candy last week, and took the opportunity today to put some on the hives. Usually you don't have to do this until mid February, but as Ken said, a lot of bees are starving.

I hadn't been out to the Sutton hives in a while, so after wading through over-knee-deep snow to get to the hives, I took a look at them.

It turns out that I think the left hive is dead. This was the hive which was started up from a package last spring. When I opened up the top, I could see unmoving bees in between some of the frames. I cracked open the two hive bodies and took a peek, and saw more dead bees. I tapped on the side, and heard nothing. So I fear for the worst. I went ahead and put the shim on and some bee candy, but I am not hopeful. But I was surprised by one of my hives last winter that I thought was dead, so who knows!

The second hive, which was the hive which came through the winter last winter, had about a 6" cluster of bees visible at the top bars. In the following picture, you can see them in the upper right corner (in between the bee candy).

That's a very small cluster, but they may make it through the winter.

Back home I went to my backyard hives to put some bee candy on them as well. I started with the Green Hive, and saw no life there as well. Saw some dead bees, and no sound. I wasn't too pleased - that was a good hive going into the winter. Again, I put a piece of bee candy on it just in case.

The then opened up the Pink Hive (middle hive) and didn't see any bees on top. But then I heard the hive start to roar (in protest), and a couple of bees came up to the top bars. I quickly put some candy on and closed it up. Because I didn't see bees all the way to the top, I am hopeful that they had honey in the hive they hadn't eaten all of, and still had a good amount left.

Then I opened up the Brown Hive, and woah! I was very surprised to see this:

They were all over the top bars, and on the inner cover as well. While that is a great number of bees, it also means they were out of food. I gratefully put on about 4 sugar patties, and the bees were very agitated. They flew up into my face (I was just wearing my winter coat and hood, which is usually find in the winter), and I got a sting on my forehead for my efforts! (as an aside, that was my first sting for the season - I made it through the spring, summer, and fall without a sting, only to get one in the winter!).

So the tally so far:

Sutton Hive 1: small cluster, may not make it
Sutton Hive 2: dead
Green Hive: dead
Pink Hive: cluster low in the hive, will probably make it
Brown Hive: big cluster high on the top bars, with feeding will probably make it.

I'll keep up on the feeding for he winter and hopefully those 3 will pull through. My plan for the spring is to do some splits to make some nucs.

Bee Club January Meeting

2011-01-15T12:25:00.000-05:00

Yesterday was the January meeting of the Worcerster County Beekeepers Association. I hadn't been to a meeting since October, as for November and December I had conflicts for those meeting dates.

That night's meeting was a dinner meeting (always a good affair, as beekeepers love to eat!), and we had a special presentation by Loree Burns, who wrote a book The Hive Detective. The book is a science-oriented book geared toward children (6-14), and discusses the Colony Collapse Disease (CCD) problem facing bees.

Her presentation wasn't about the book itself; instead it was about what she learned while researching the book. It turns out some people in the WCBA were instrumental in helping her with the book. Loree isn't a beekeeper herself (yet, she says), but she has attended bee school in the past, and thinks someday that she would like to be a beekeeper.

The presentation was extremely interesting, and what I found fascinating is some of her observations coming from an "outsider" to the beekeeping community. Some of the things she said she learned:

Bees are not scary. That's the first impression that kids and adults have when they hear about bees - the stinger!
Bees are fascinating. The biology and social structure of bees and beehives is very interesting
Honey is good for everything. You can use it in most cooking
Beekeepers are passionate. They love to share their knowledge and are very selfless about it.

As she was discussing these points, I found myself nodding in agreement with most of the other members of the club. Beekeepers really are a different sort of folk, and it's all good.

She ended the presentation with a quote: "Keeping bees is an art, a gift, an obsession... and a mighty fine way to spend an afternoon."

Before and after the meeting she was selling copies of her book and signing them if people wanted (I didn't pick up a copy for myself there). Another member of the club donated 3 fully functioning beehives (with bees) to use for raffles, and tonight was the first raffle for one of the hives (the bees are available for pickup in April; obviously the winter isn't a good time to move beehives!). I bought some tickets, but the Christensen luck holds true and I didn't win.

It was good to see people I hadn't seen for a while at the club. This year has some exciting events planned; I'll post details on the WCBA Facebook Fan page later.

Flying and Candy!

2011-01-01T15:05:00.000-05:00

Happy New Year! And what a wonderful way to start the new year - with temps about 52 degrees. I decided to walk back to the hives (first time in a couple of months) and see what was going on, and I was very pleased to see bees flying in and out of all three of my hives!!!!!

I was so excited about it, I even made a short video:

It started getting cold around the first part of November, and I hadn't checked on the bees since then, so it was very gratifying to see that there is some activity in all the hives.

I have my doubts that the hives have enough food to get the bees through the winter without some help, so today I decided to make up some Bee Candy. It's basically sugar candy that they can eat in an emergency. I got the recipe from another beekeeper's blog. I bought a candy thermometer a while back so I had all of the tools.

Here's the pot of sugar with the corn syrup and water:

Let me tell you, stirring 10 pounds of sugar with corn syrup sure puts my muscles to the test! I even had to switch to a stiffer spoon, so I didn't bend it. After a lot of stirring and a lot of heating, things finally got a little easier. But it still took over 1/2 hour of cooking (and did I mention stirring?) before the solution got thin enough to easily stir.

I had never made anything needing to boil sugar for candy, so it was a learning experience. Item #1 learned: boiling sugar syrup is HOT if you get some on your fingers. Item #2: EVERYTHING is going to get sticky, so be prepared.

After the candy reached the correct temperature, then cooled down a bit, I poured it into paper plates:

Item #3: you should not use the simple thin paper plates. Even though I used two plates per patty, it was a little flimsy and some of the sugar syrup spilled (see item #2 above). Next time I'll get Chinet plates.

Now that the candy has cooled mostly, it doesn't seem to set up as hard as I would have thought. Maybe I didn't let the temperature get high enough (although it did say 240 on the thermometer). But it'll do just fine when I put it in the hives. All in all it made about 13 plates of candy.

I'll probably put these in my hives this weekend; and maybe make a run to Sutton as well.

Here's to a prosperous new year for the bees!!

End of the Year Recap

2010-12-31T16:07:00.000-05:00

I got an e-mail from a work friend wondering if I had taken ill, as I had not updated this blog in a while. I was touched by his concern for my health, but I explained to him that during the cold weather, there isn't too much to do with the hive. Since I haven't updated the blog since November 13^th, I thought I'd do an end-of-the-year recap, with some ideas for next year.

Looking over the blog posts for 2010 (there were 61 of them), I would rate the year as "good" for the bees. I didn't have any catastrophic losses - just a queen here or there. But I counter-balanced that with the few Nucs that I created. I started a new hive in Sutton (from a package), and those hives did well. The yearly inspection from the county bee inspector gave me a clean bill of health - no parasites and pests to speak of.

One thing which did not go well was my honey production - or should I say my lack of honey. Only the Sutton hive produced any excess honey. I am at a loss to understand why the hives in my backyard don't thrive. Even the numbers of bees was less than I would expect (based on comparisons of the Sutton hives).

I ended the year with a lot more equipment than I started with. Between buying some used equipment, a run to Mann Lake in PA (during my vacation), and constructing some items, I am all set with enough frames, etc. to handle any issues. I also have about 3 Nuc boxes.

I hope that the bees make it through the winter - I am planning on cooking up some "bee candy," which will be supplementary winter feeding for the bees. There's not much to do in the way of inspections until spring, so I'll just lay low and get back into the habit of going to the WCBA bee club meetings (in Nov. and Dec. I had some conflicts, so it's been a while).

What's coming up in 2011? Who knows! I think I'll make some spring Nucs like last year. Hope to be able to extract some honey! Other than that, we'll just play it by ear.

So if you are a reader of my blog, I say thank you. If you haven't been to my Facebook Fan Page, please go and "like" it.

From my family to yours, many wishes for a prosperous 2011!

Ready for Winter? Not Quite...

2010-11-13T20:12:00.000-05:00

Today was great bee-weather! The temperature got up to 60 degrees, and the bees were out this morning. Here is a picture of my backyard hives:

I took the opportunity to go visit the Sutton Hives. I hadn't been over there for a couple of weeks; last time I left some sugar syrup. Sure enough, it was empty when I visited today. But I also saw that there wasn't much in the way of stores there, so I am going to have to feed some more. I thought I would be done for the winter preparations, but not so!

Here is a picture of the Sutton Hives:

I'll probably feed my backyard hives as well.

More Winter Preparations

2010-11-06T19:00:00.001-04:00

The bees are into the winter mode of operation - with the weather being cold (less than around 50 degrees) they don't go out. So they stay huddled in the hive passing the time (do they have cable TV in there??)

I have a couple of liquid syrup feeders still on the backyard hives, and I went out to check / remove them. I still had some feed for the Pink hive (since I used smaller jars on that hive), so I put that jar on that hive. It turns out the Green hive still had about an inch of syrup in the feeder. I didn't take off that feeder - I'll check in a week or so and remove it if they still haven't taken it all in.

Some people wrap their hives with black roofing paper for the winter. The purpose is to keep drafts from the hive (since hive bodies don't always fit together perfectly, especially over time). Last year I didn't wrap my hives, and I won't this year either - they sit at the edge of a wooded area, and I feel that the drafts won't be too bad there.

There are two other pieces of preparation I do. One is to add a piece of Styrofoam insulation in between the inner cover and outer cover. I buy a large pink sheet of it from the hardware store:

Then I put an inner cover on the sheet and cut out a piece slightly smaller than the inner cover. Then I cut a small channel from the middle of the piece of Styrofoam (where the hole in the inner cover) to the outer edge (where the notch is in the inner cover). This allows air to flow out, taking moisture out as needed. Here's a picture of an inner cover and the resulting piece cut:

One of the things which will kill a beehive over winter is for moist air to hit the top, condense, and then drip cold/freezing water on top of the bees. Having the channel is supposed to keep the air moving a little. I also put a piece of Styrofoam loosely under the bottom screened board, just to keep the wind from whipping up through the screen unimpeded. Last year things worked out well with this arrangement, and I am hoping for similar success this winter.

The other item for winter is a Mouse Guard. Since a beehive is nice and warm in the winter, it makes an attractive place for a mouse (or family of mice) to spend the winter. Since the bees are in a cluster and can't leave it, the mice won't be bothered. But they make a terrible mess of a beehive - they chew the wax, bring in nesting material, and urinate everywhere. So you put a metal guard over the hive entrance with holes big enough for the bees, but small enough to keep out the mice.

Last year I forgot to put in the mouse guards, and was lucky to not have any visitors. This year I wanted to put them on. But I had a problem - I didn't have enough (I forgot to buy one when I bought the Pink hive, and the Sutton hives don't have any).

Here's a picture of a regular wooden entrance reducer (in the foreground) and the metal mouse guard (background):

So I decided to make my own. When I was at the hardware store buying the Styrofoam, I bought a strip of aluminum corner material you use when you put up wallboard. I cut the pieces to size (easy to do with heavy scissors) and drilled some 3/8" holes (same size as in the other mouse guard). Here are the results of my labor:

Pretty inexpensive! I went out and put the mouse guards on my hive (using thumbtacks and a hammer). I had a lone bee come out and check me out, since I was pounding on their door!

I still need to put together a few 2" shims to use when/if I need to feed some fondant in the winter. I'll put the shim under the inner cover, so it leaves a gap for the sugar fondant.

[Update 1/8/2012 - corrected hole size from 3/4" to 4/8"]

Pack it up, girls!

2010-10-26T15:26:00.000-04:00

We've had a few weeks of really fall weather now, but today was amazing - a true "Indian Summer" day. The temps were in the high 70's, so it's time to check the bees. I had wanted to see if the pink hive was going to finish off the honey, but it was not meant to be. So I removed the queen excluder, whipped up a batch of 2:1 sugar syrup (from 20 lbs of sugar), and prepared to feed.

Brown Hive

A few weeks ago I put a pollen patty on this hive, and today when I checked, the patty was just about gone. So I can remove the shim I put in to leave space for the pollen patty.

One thing I noticed when I lifted the inner cover was that there were a ton of bees clinging to the underside of the inner cover! Here's a picture:

They weren't agitated or anything, just hanging out. The only thing I can figure was that there was extra space under the cover (from the shim for the pollen patty) and they were just resting.

Green Hive

The green hive also got a pollen patty last time, but they hadn't eaten it all. Here's what was left (which is most of it):

So I left it on, and left the shim on as well.

Pink Hive

Nothing remarkable to report on the pink hive. It is still the strongest (based on the number of bees I see coming and going) of the three hives.

So I put the feed on all three hives. It is 2:1 sugar syrup, which should encourage them to take it and store it away for the winter. I also added a bit of my "secret ingredient" (which is a little lemongrass and spearmint oil) as a stimulant.

Like I said, the bees were very busy due to the nice temperatures. They were actually finding some pollen to bring in!

And I made a video so you can see how fast they are coming and going:

I guess bees don't let any opportunity to gather more and prepare for winter go to waste!

As far as preparations for winter go, I have very little left to do. I need to add the top and bottom pieces of insulation, and the entrance mouse guards (don't want any visitors!). I don't wrap the hives for the winter, or do any other preparations. Hopefully they will come through OK!

Here are the three backyard hives with the extra supers (covering the feed buckets):

The House Smells Like Honey!

2010-10-09T17:19:00.000-04:00

Yesterday evening I started the process of extracting the frames I had. I wanted to spin them out last night, so the honey would strain through the strainer over night.

So I starter by setting up the extractor that I borrow from my friend Joe:

Here are the frames that I am planning to extract:

First step is slicing off the caps. I don't have an uncapping knife, so I just use my wife's bread slicing knife. It works just fine - I don't need to heat the knife or anything - it cuts through just fine. I did have to use the capping scraper a little, as some of the frames weren't built out enough to cut with the knife.

Then came the fun part - the spinning! For some reason this time the cage holding the frames was very off balance. It shook like an unbalanced washing machine! I had to get my kids to hug the extractor to try to keep it from walking off the table. I didn't have anything to secure it to, so it was an experience.

Here is the first of the honey coming out of the extractor:

You can see that I have a 2-stage filter set up - a 600 micron (coarse) filter, followed by a 400 micron (fine) filter. I initially had a 200 micron filter on the bottom, but hardly any honey was coming through. I suppose I could have set up a space heater to heat up the honey and make it flow more, but I just swapped the 200 for the 400 and it worked fine.

I was left with the cappings which still have hone in them. I put them in a colander and strained out a little more honey.

No, this isn't the level of honey in my bucket (I wish!). It's the honey sitting in the 200 micron filter which wasn't flowing.

I ended up with only about 3" in the bucked, which I weighed out to 11.5 lbs. It isn't a lot of honey. I probably left a pound or 2 in the frames, as I couldn't really spin the fast (due to the shaking). Heating up the frames a little would have helped, but oh well. I'll put out the frames for the bees to clean up so nothing will be wasted.

Here are the jars I filled. I'm probably going to use a lot of it for Christmas gifts for family and friends.

I thought the honey looked darker, but a side-by-side comparison of a jar of this honey and a jar from back in August had them looking identical. But the flavor this time seems a lot stronger, maybe due to some goldenrod.

I was hoping to extract some frames out of my backyard this weekend also, but I did a spot check and only about 15%-20% of the frame is capped - way too unfinished to extract. We've had a lot of rain this last week, so I am hoping with the dry weather, the bees will evaporate and finish off the honey. If they don't, I'll just leave the honey for them for winter.

Sooooo close!!

2010-10-08T20:01:00.000-04:00

My friend Tom keeps reminding me of the last time I updated the blog - it was September 6. So it's been a little over a month.

I had a chance to do a couple of inspections the last couple of weeks. On Saturday 9/25 I checked out the hives in my backyard. It was nice to spend some time arm deep in bees - it had been too long, and it really felt good to get back in (strange as that may sound). I'm going to have to come up with a better way of documenting what I see in the hives, as I can't remember hive to hive what needs to happen, and just taking pictures sometimes doesn't do it. But I did take lots of pictures for this post!

Pink Hive

This was the hive I did not put sugar syrup on. I wanted to see if the hive would collect any honey, as they had a start last month. Well this time I found something very interesting.

The hive had filled the top super with nectar, but hardly any of it was capped, as you can see in this picture (look at the shiny syrup in the open cells):

To further add to my confusion,I found a lot of uncapped nectar in the next super down (the medium, which was being used for brood).

Now, the optimist in me says, "yea!" the bees are doing what they are supposed to do. But then I remembered that early in the month I put sugar syrup feed on the other two hives, and it is possible that the bees from the pink hive went to the other hive and stole some sugar. But I really haven't seen any evidence of robbing - no nervous bees, no bees crawling in the access hole, etc. Adding to this thought is the fact that up until now, this hive hasn't put away much nectar, and now a bounty? Suspicious.

I'm going to let them continue to work on the super, since they are soooooo close to capping it off. We've had a bunch of rain in the past week, so it could be they haven't done much. I'll check this weekend.

I also saw the queen in the pink hive - it's been a while. Look along the bottom wooden part of the frame:

And here's a good shot of some brood in the hive. Nice pattern:

And a good number of bees on top of the bars of the lower box:

And more good patterns in the bottom box:

You can tell I like taking pictures of the bees! This hive is the one I have the most hope for coming through the winter.

Brown Hive

The bees in the brown hive are doing a great job putting away the sugar syrup I have been feeding them:

You can see a good crown of capped "honey" with the nectar in the middle (with pollen) still to be capped. Good brood pattern in this hive as well:

Green Hive

The Green Hive also is putting away syrup for the winter. You can see the food along the edge of this frame, with brood in the center:

And I saw the queen in this hive too - I haven't seen her since I did the combine to create this hive:

Last Saturday I also got a chance to go out to the Sutton hives. It has been even longer since I visited these hives - clear back on 8/13.

Sutton Hive #2

This was the hive started this year from a Nuc. I had a difficult time prying up the top inner cover - the bees had attached it with a lot of propolis, and connected it with a stiff wax (which I think was mixed with a lot of propolis, as it was very stiff). In this next picture, look along the top and bottom edges at all the propolis, and you can see the wax on the top bars:

They had also added a lot of propolis along the side of the frames under the frame rest, so I did a lot of scraping (almost chipping) to get the frames out. I accidentally broke one the of the frames trying to lift it out. It was full of honey, so I just put it back, after marking it with a paint pen so the spring I can swap it out.

Here is what I found in the hive, a large frame of capped honey:

But I am not fooled in this instance - I know this is probably sugar syrup mixed with honey, since early in the summer I fed this hive a lot of sugar. They put it away nicely. Generally I don't like messing with the "honey" in the brood boxes since you can't be sure that it is honey (especially if you feed).

I did a frame-by-frame inspection of this hive, and saw lots of good brood:

I didn't see the queen, but saw lots of young larvae so I know she is there.

There was a medium super of undrawn foundation on the hive, which I took off, since the bees had done absolutely nothing with it.

I put a bucket of feed on this hive; it looks good for the winter.

Sutton Hive #1

When I stole the honey from this hive, there were some frames which hadn't been capped which I left on the hive. I also put on some empty frames to see what they would do. All told, there was one medium super (with undrawn frames), and two shallow supers (with drawn frames). I checked, and here is what I found:

Since I was going to start the winter feeding, I pulled off all of the frames. There were about 8 total frames with something in them; every side had capped honey except for two sides (which contained uncapped honey). I will extract all of the capped honey, and leave the unfinished honey in the frame, so when I set them out for the bees to clean, they will reclaim the nectar.

Here's a nice shot of the Sutton hives, looking good for the winter:

Feeding time...

2010-09-06T14:07:00.000-04:00

As we start getting toward fall, it's time to think about feeding the bees for the winter. You need to make sure they have enough food stored in the hive to make it through the winter.

For feeding sugar syrup, all I have is quart jars. I end up refilling them a lot, which is a pain. I heard from another bee buddy about these feeder pails which hold 2 gallons. That would be great, so I went looking for something local so I don't have to pay shipping. I found at Lowes a 5 quart plastic paint bucket with a lid, so I bought some of them to try it out. Not quite 2 gallons, but better than 1 qt.! I made up some sugar syrup and drilled some small holes in the lid and I'm going to give them a go. Here's what I ended up with:

The blue ovals on the lids are where I drilled the holes (I like to mark with a marker where the holes are to make it easier to line up the holes on the hive).

Did a quick inspection to day of the home hives as well. In general I saw a lot of pollen coming in, so hopefully with this sugar syrup, the queens will do well.

Green Hive

The hive made quick progress at removing the newspaper between the supers. When I opened up the 2 supers, there was no sign that there ever was newspaper, except for the part outside the hive! The bees were nice and calm (except for 1 or 2 who always make a nuisance out of themselves every time I inspect this hive!).

Didn't see any new eggs or brood, but I didn't do a lot of looking. I suppose the queen was still getting used to the new digs, especially since I severely rearranged the frames when I combined the hive. I'm going to give them a couple more weeks and then check.

Pink Hive

This hive still has the shallow honey super on it, and last inspection it wasn't hardly used. I planned on putting the sugar syrup over the super, and letting them fill the honey super with sugar syrup (to be eaten over the winter). Well, I took a look at the honey super and believe it or not, there was quite a bit of nectar in it! I decided not to add sugar to this hive yet, to see what they might do with any incoming nectar. Worse comes to worse, I'll add 2:1 later and they will finish off the super. But if I am lucky, maybe I'll get some honey. Hey, a guy can hope, can't he?!?

I found the queen in the middle super, along with some good brood patterns. I can't resist taking a picture of the queen when I find her:

So I did not add any sugar to this hive at this time.

Brown Hive

Didn't look too deep in this hive. Saw some brood, but no queen. But I am not worried with this hive. I closed up the hive, and right before I was going to put on the feeder pail, I saw a line-up of bees scenting. I t was cute, so I took a picture:

It's a little hard to tell from the picture, but those bees are all in a line with their tails in the air, beating their wings.

By next week the bees should have taken in all of that sugar syrup. Next week I plan on adding a pollen patty to each hive (since I have some left over and need to use them this year). I still need to go to Sutton to check those hives - maybe next week.

Finally, it's been a while since I posted a video. Here's one of the bees outside the hive today in the early afternoon.

Early Fall Inspection 8-31-2010

2010-08-31T18:03:00.000-04:00

I was reminded by a co-worker that I have been a little lax in updating my blog. Part of that is due to the fact that I have been busy on the weekends and haven't had a chance to inspect the hives.

I took today off as a combination wedding anniversary celebration and first-day-of-school celebration, and had some time in the afternoon to take a look in the backyard hives. The last inspection was on 8-13, but in the meantime I have been watching how the hives are looking from the outside.

We had a rash of rain last week, about 3-4 days of it. The bees couldn't come out at all. But as soon as the rain stopped, the bees were making up for lost time! I've noticed the strongest hive looks to be the pink one. The brown hive is 2nd, and the green hive looks the weakest.

It was about 90 degrees when I did the inspection, so when I was done I was a dripping ball of sweat! But that was the best time to do the inspection, with a lot of bees out foraging.

White Nuc

The white nuc continues to have a lot of activity. Here are pictures of the top and bottom boxes of the nuc. You can see the (empty) yellow feeder in the top box:

I've usually had good luck finding the queen in this nuc, and today was no exception. She was on the first frame I pulled out:

This is a George O'Neal queen, and she has some Carniolan genes which give her the black coloring.

This hive had some OK stores, some nectar and good brood patterns, but I know I'll need to feed to get it ready for winter.

Green Hive

OK, now for the one which concerns me the most. I opened up the hive, and under the top cover I didn't see as many bees as I would have liked / expected:

I started pulling frames for inspection, and I didn't like what I saw. Every frame was completely empty of brood - nothing. Everything had hatched, and obviously there was no queen in this hive. I saw a lot of open swarm cells - so the hive tried to make queens in the past, but no go. There wasn't even very much in the way of nectar and pollen - all that the bees were bringing in was used to feed the current bees.

What we have here is a doomed hive - no queen, and fall fast approaching. If it were earlier in the spring, I'd simply move over a frame of eggs from another hive and let the bees make a new queen. But it's way too late in the season for that. Besides the delay in adding to the population, by the time the queen is hatched, it will be too late to find any drones for mating.

I've heard Ken Warchol preach about combining weak hives for the winter, so now I get to put that into practice. Hmmn... which hive to combine it with.... Hey, there's a nice strong white nuc sitting here!! So I decided to do a "newspaper combine" with the white nuc.

The first step is reducing the brood chamber(s) down to a manageable size. This hive has a medium honey super on it (totally empty too), and 2 deeps. Luckily due to the queenlessness, I could remove the honey super and 10 empty frames. I shook off the bees all into a single deep (they all fit - that shows you how much they were hurting for population).

After the hive was reduced to a single box, I laid a single sheet of newspaper on top:

I used my hive tool to make some slits in the paper, and then I put an empty deep super on top. I then proceeded to transfer the frames of the White Nuc over to the new super. Let me tell you, those bees were very confused. While I was making the combine, the nuc's foragers were returning to ... nothing! They were very disoriented and were buzzing around like crazy. I decided to leave the empty nuc in the original place, and then tonight I'll go out and dump any bees I find in there into the new hive.

The ending configuration was: bottom deep with queenless bees; newspaper divider; top deep with queenright hives. The purpose of the newspaper is to give the bees time to become acclimatized to each other, during the time it takes the bees to chew through the newspaper and removed it. I also put a fern in front of the hive entrance to cause the bees to notice that things are changed, and the bees from the nuc will re-orient to the new hive. So now I have a new hive with a jump start in population (basically doubled the number of bees in that hive) with a good functioning queen.

I think for the next few days I'll have some confused bees coming back to the old location, but since the old location is about 6 feet from the new one, maybe they will figure it out.

Pink Hive

As expected, the Pink hive is doing really well. I put on a super last time hoping to get something from any goldenrod flow, but it is completely empty.

I didn't see the queen, but saw lots of brood and young larvae:

You can see a good pattern in the 2nd picture above, and in the 3rd picture if you zoom in you can see larvae.

I didn't go too deep in this hive, since it is doing well.

Brown Hive

The Brown Hive was inspected next, and I saw a good number of bees in the top box:

But I was a little dismayed at what I found on the very first frame I pulled:

It's a little hard to see in the picture, with the sun coming through leaves behind me, so I circled my concerns. What I circled were a bunch of queen supersedure cells or emergency queen cells, all with larvae in them. They aren't as large as some I have seen in other hives, but the same concerns with letting the green hive raise their own queen also hold for letting this hive supersede the queen: no drones for mating. I didn't want to indiscriminately wipe out the cells, in case the hive really was queen less. So I laid this frame aside and went looking for the queen.

I didn't have to go but 2 more frames before I found her:

This is another dark George O'Neal queen. For some reason, her blue dot has worn off a little. But you can see here in the picture above.

In addition to the queen, I saw lots of brood in all stages of development. So I decided I didn't want another queen possibly superseding this one, so I ... "took care of" the supersedure cells on the first frame.

With that, I buttoned up the hive for another time.

So what do I have to look forward to next? I think given the fact that I haven't seen them bringing in anything from goldenrod, I should stop dreaming and start preparing for winter. I'll start feeding a 1:1 concentration of sugar syrup to keep the queen producing, and then later switch to 2:1 to get the bees to start packing it away for the winter. I've got some pollen patties from last year I'll feed them too.

I was at a large blue box hardware store, and found in the paint department some 5 quart buckets with lids. I wanted something larger than the quart canning jars I was using, so I don't have to add feed too often. So I'll prepare those as feeding pails, and mix up some sugar to feed them.

I still have to check the Sutton hives - I may get some more honey from them yet. We'll see.

Bee Meeting 8-21-2010

2010-08-31T17:00:00.000-04:00

A couple Saturdays ago we had the WCBA bee club meeting for August. Like all summer meetings, it was an outdoor meeting at the home of a member who has bee hives (of course!). The first part of the meeting was the instructional part, with Ken Warchol going through the hives talking about starting Fall preparations.

He focused on what we should be seeing at this time of the year, and also focused on types of pest treatments for the hives. In this part of the country the biggest pests are Varroa mites, tracheal mites, and later in the year (and over winter) Nosema. Treating hives for hobbyists is a personal choice - not everyone chooses to treat, and different people treat different ways.

For example, treating Varroa mites can be done using pesticides (Mite Away strips); Thymol gel (which vaporizes in the hive); or powder sugar treatments to help the bees themselves handle the mites.

Here are the hives that Ken was working - I like the different color combinations:

Incidentally, the hive owners are also participating in a USDA study on the effect of the Asian Longhorn Beetle pesticide on beehives. There are some "USDA Hives" on their property too:

The instruction went well, and I was pleased to see that there were no grand revelations in what was said (in other words, I knew a lot about what was discussed). There was a pretty good crowd of people there:

Ken spent some time showing us what we should be seeing if things are going OK in the hives: good brood patterns with honey on the edges:

The owners have a very nice piece of property. There were lots of other bees and butterflies around:

There was also a small pond in the back yard with lily pads on it. Of course, the bees were making use of it as a water source!

And one last funny situation: at the meeting there were refreshments (of course!). Someone brought some cupcakes shaped like hexagons, with a candy bee on a toothpick on top. It looked like the cupcakes were made with honey, given how popular they were with the bees!

Ken came up and grabbed a cupcake, gently brushed off the honey bees, and started chowing down...

Inspection 8-13-2010

2010-08-16T21:57:00.000-04:00

Had a chance to inspect both sets of hives on Friday. I didn't take the camera to Sutton, so no pictures from those hives.

Sutton Hive 1

This hive is doing well. I still haven't seen the queen, but plenty of evidence of a queen. I wanted to see how the remaining honey frames were doing, as well as those I put on the hive after I "stole" the capped frames for my honey extraction.

It's apparent we are in a little of a dearth going on, as the bees had done little to further their nectar/honey collection. There was maybe 1 frame which was capped enough to be taken, but I left it so they could still work on the empties. They had added very little to the empties. Within the hive body there was evidence of hone being stored in the corners as well.

Sutton Hive 2

Hive 2 has a lot of "honey" stores (mostly sugar syrup I fed the hive earlier in the spring). I decided to put back on the super of foundation in order to catch any flows which may come up. Didn't see the queen, but I didn't really look, and I saw lots of young larvae, so all is well.

White Nuc

I have a frame feeder in this nuc, which was empty, so I needed to fill it up. Last time I filled it, there were a few bees within the empty feeder, and I managed to drown a few. This time I took out the empty feeder and set it in front of the nuc. Later that afternoon the bees had all left and returned to the nuc, so I was able to fill the bee-less feeder and put it back in the nuc.

Green Hive

This hive continues to baffle me. I found at least 2 supercedure queen cells along the side of a couple of frames, and about 10 swarm queen cells along the bottom edges of the frames in the top brood box. When I pulled out the frames for inspection, I accidentally damaged some of the swarm cells, as the bees had attached the closed end to the frames below.

When I was examining the top box (which happens to be a honey super), I heard a queen piping. On one of the frames, I saw a queen, but she wasn't as large as the queens I've seen before. I suspect she is a an un-mated queen, but I grabbed her and marked her anyway, so I can keep track of things. Here is the frame with the queen on it - note that her abdomen isn't as solid colored as a mature queen (compare with the picture below from the pink hive):

Once again I left things alone to let the hive sort out what it wants to do. Since this hive wasn't a honey producer, I am not out any production.

I beekeeper friend of mine gave me a slatted bottom rack and suggested I try it out. So I put it on the hive, to provide more room and ventilation.

Pink Hive

This hive is doing well. I did find the queen in this hive:

There was plenty of nectar (sugar syrup) stored in the frames of the brood chamber, so I put an empty honey super (above a queen excluder) on this hive to catch any flow which may come up. This hive has lots of bees, as they were bearding earlier. I also added a slotted bottom board to see if it gives the bees a little more room.

Brown Hive

I am still feeding this hive - lots of empty space in the hive. I decided to keep feeding it to encourage the queen to lay. It is by far the weakest of all my hives, but I saw lots of capped brood and good young larvae. I hope the population will increase when all those bees are born.

So here's the bee-yard as it looks now, with the new super and slatted rack on the pink hive, and slatted rack on the green hive:

Inspection 8-7-2010

2010-08-07T21:05:00.001-04:00

My wife is sick with a cold, so plans for today for her are canceled. We stayed home and I took the opportunity to inspect the home hives. I wanted to especially see how the Pink Hive is coming along.

White Nuc

I am still maintaining this nuc, and recently put on a second story and also added a frame feeder. As expected, the frame feeder was empty, so I filled it up with more sugar water. The bees hadn't done much in the top box except to start drawing out some wax along the bottom part of a couple of frames. So I brought up a frame of brood to the top level in order to get the bees to start working up there.

Here's what the nuc looks like after I took off the top box - lots of bees; I like that!

There is lots of capped brood, so this hive is doing fine. I didn't see the queen when I was looking frame by frame, but when I put the frames back in the bottom of the nuc, I saw her scampering along the top of one of the frames. So she is there.

I did see something of a problem - I saw about 3 or 4 cells with white chalky bodies in them - chalkbrood. Chalkbrood is a fungal disease which is seen a lot when there are wet springs. We haven't had a particularly wet spring, but that hive is sitting in the shade a little, and it is reasonable that the moisture content could be high. I need to prop the top open a little to encourage air flow (that nuc has a screened bottom board anyway). As I was looking at the frame, I saw a worker bee pull out one of the mummified bodies and pitch it off, so that is good!

Green Hive

The green hive is the only one which I am not feeding. There was a good amount of nectar/honey in the hive last time. It's been a few weeks since I inspected this hive; last time I saw lots of queen swarm cells, but the hive hadn't swarmed.

Today I saw that the queen had been up in the top super (I took out the queen excluder to let the bees work the top a little more). In this picture you can see along the bottom there are some drone cells:

As I was inspecting the top box, I heard what I thought was some queen piping. I pulled out a frame and it sounded like it was coming from that frame. I flipped it over, and sure enough, I saw a queen bee! It was unmarked, and looked a little thin, so it could have been a virgin queen - especially since I heard the piping. Unfortunately, as I was looking at the frame the edge slipped out of one of my hands, and the frame jarred on the box. I lost sight of the queen then - I hope she didn't fall out (I looked around and didn't see any bees clumping on the ground like they would around a queen). I didn't see her on the frame; I can only hope she fell in the hive.

When I pulled out some frames in the middle box, I was surprised to see this - more queen swarm cells!

Some of them were capped; some open; and some got torn open when I lifted up the frame (since they were stuck to the frame below). I don't know what it is about this hive and swarm cells - they make them, queens get born, but the hive never swarms (at least I can't tell that it swarmed). I'm going to let it alone to let it do what it wants to do...

Pink Hive

The Pink Hive is doing well. Here's a picture of one of the frames in the top super:

It's interesting to note that there are about 10 queen cups on this frame. A queen cup is the starts of a queen cell. It's not always something to worry about, especially if the queen cups are empty - these were all empty.

When I transferred the nuc to this hive, I saw some chewed out queen cells. When I looked for the queen, I found her:

She's in the upper left corner of the frame, and you'll note that she is marked. That means she was the original queen that I marked when I found her in the nuc. I don't know what was going on with the swarm cells I saw in the nuc before, but they didn't supersede this queen.

I refilled the sugar syrup jars on this hive as well. Here's how I feed:

I use quart jars for feed. Some people use gallon buckets - I suppose I could do that, and I would have to fill them less often.

I also switched the entrance reducer to the "medium" position, as the hive is strong enough to defend more of the entrance.

Brown Hive

The Brown Hive is also being fed to encourage the queen to keep laying. And she was doing a great job. There are many frames of capped brood, and the hive is doing well. I didn't see the queen, but saw some brand new eggs so she is doing her job.

The bottom brood chamber continues to be almost entirely empty, but I am not messing with things. I saw a few cells of capped brood, so I know she knows how to go down there.

As I was closing up this hive, I saw some bees "scenting" - broadcasting a "the queen is in here" odor for other bees to find their way. It was cute, them with their hind ends in the air. I took a couple of pictures:

Also, an update on the honey situation. I am pleased to report that I have sold all of the honey - a lot of it to people at work. I took in a small jar and gave people tastes of the honey. That was usually enough to convince them to buy a jar!

Honey Extraction

2010-08-01T22:31:00.000-04:00

Today I did my first honey extraction. Here is the extractor set up on my kitchen table:

The extractor is a manual crank (ugh!) which holds 3 large frames or 6 shallow frames at the same time. You have to flip over the frames to extract the other side. For some reason, people always do 2 flips - side A, side B, and then side A again. I suppose that you get some more out of the first side, and that is what I found.

The first step is to remove the wax caps from the honey frames. You do this using a knife. They make fancy heated uncapping knives, but they run close to $100. I found a very nice serrated bread knife which worked just fine, especially since I only had 9 frames to uncap. I also didn't have an uncapping tank, so I used a plastic bin to collect the caps. There is still honey in them, and you can get that as well.

The supers that these frames were in had 9-frame spacing mounts in them, instead of the usual 10. Having 9 frames causes the bees to draw out the comb a little higher, and put more honey in. Since the comb was high, it was easy to slice off with the knife, and I had to do very little with the capping scratcher. Here I am slicing off one of the frames:

Here's an interesting frame - look how the honey in the center is darker than that on the ends:

When it is extracted, it will all mix together.

After extracting all 9 frames, I started draining the extractor into the honey bucket. On top of the honey bucket are 2 filters - a coarse one at 600 micros, and a fine one at 200 microns. Here is the start of the flow:

It took about 1/2 hour to drain the extractor, and about another hour for the honey to flow through the filters.

I did not buy any of the traditional honey jars (the WCBA club does a large order to get good rates, but that was months ago). So I went to Walmart and bought some Ball jars at different sizes - a lot of small ones to give as gifts and samples.

All in all I was able to harvest 22 pounds of honey from the 9 frames - not bad! Next year I'll plan better.

I also still need to come up with a good label for my honey. I am thinking over a few designs, and will post them when they are finalized.

The whole experience wasn't bad - I've heard horror stories about getting everything sticky. I put down some newspaper under the extractor, and had some drips, but it wasn't bad.

Sutton Inspection 7-31-10 - and HONEY!

2010-08-01T21:05:00.000-04:00

Saturday I made a trip to the Sutton hives - it had been a couple of weeks since the last check. At last check Sutton Hive 1 was working on capping some honey frames, so I was excited to see if I could steal some frames!

First I checked out Sutton Hive 2, the new hive from a package in April. One thing I noticed about this hive is that it propolizes the heck out of everything! Take a look at the inner cover, and you can see the gummy propolis which was connecting the inner cover to the outer cover:

But I can't complain how this queen is performing - pretty solid brood pattern:

A couple of weeks ago I had put on a honey super, but because we are in a nectar dearth, the bees were starting to cannibalize the wax and were destroying the frame. So I took the super off - I'll add it later in the season if I see they are bringing in nectar. This hive has no problem for food, since I fed them earlier this year pretty seriously, and they have lots of honey (actually sugar syrup) in the top box.

Then I went on to check Sutton Hive 1. I wasn't going to bother with checking the brood box, since I was more interested in seeing if they have any honey ready. Well guess what - they did!

I brought with me 9 empty shallow frames to substitute for those which I took, and I easily found 9 frames of honey ready for extraction. I actually could have taken a couple more, but I didn't have any more frames, and besides I can always come back!

I brought an empty deep super and I used it to hold the frames I took. I would take out a frame, and then using my bee brush, brush off the 50 or so bees which were on the frames. Then I would put the frame in the super and cover it up with the towel (to keep the bees out).

A couple of times I had to take the frame about 30 feet from the hive to have the bees stop buzzing around me. The bees were pretty gentle, but after about the 6th or 7th frame they figured out what was going on and started to get more jumpy. But I never got stung during the theft.

I have a friend at work who is a beekeeper, and got a steal of a deal on a manual extractor and a bunch of honey jars. He had already purchased an extractor, so he was nice enough to lend me the use of his spare extractor. I plan on doing some extracting on Sunday.

Here are a couple of pictures of my friend's bee yard.

You can see it is very similar to mine - the hives are lined up, and somewhat tucked under the trees in his back yard. He said he is getting some honey from his hives.

Next up - extraction!

A New Home... and A New Queen??

2010-07-26T20:42:00.000-04:00

Tonight I decided to put the Brown nuc into a new home. I had to scoot the brown and green hives over a little to make room for the new Pink hive :-)

There were tons of bees in the nuc, since I did the move around 6:30PM when most of the foragers had returned. I should have hived the nuc a couple of weeks ago - there were enough bees there to make a full deep I'm sure!

I had 5 deep frames and 5 medium frames to move - in retrospect I should have made that yellow mini-super a deep size instead of a medium. So I put the 5 deep frames with 5 new deep foundation frames, and the same with the 5 mediums.

I noticed something interesting as I was transferring the medium frames - along the bottom were 2 chewed out queen swarm cells! The nuc had definitely not swarmed, so I don't know if there was a virgin queen running around in the nuc or not. I was told that if swarm cells are created, as soon as they are capped the current queen leaves in a swarm. I didn't see the marked queen, but I wasn't looking too closely during the hiving.

So here's a picture of the new Pink hive!

I set the old nuc in front of the hive to let the bees find their way to the new home. There were lots of bees flying around, so hopefully they will all find somewhere to go.

I also added a pollen patty and some sugar water jars for feeding. The blue stripe is a 1 1/2" shim because the jars are a little too tall for the medium super which surrounds the jars.

I also took the super off of the Brown hive and added jars of sugar water. The Bee Inspector said that hive was seriously in need of food. The honey super was absolutely empty anyway.

It was interesting to see about 30-40 bees around the old nuc site, very confused because their home is gone:

I'll give the hive a week or so before I do a full inspection to see what I have in the way of queens.

Current hive count: 2 full hives in Sutton, and in my backyard 3 full hives and 1 nuc.

Time to Build!

2010-07-24T22:51:00.000-04:00

My brown nuc is ready to be hived:

(I just love this nuc - especially the way the bees just hang out on the outside!)

Here's a video of the activity at the entrance (since some of my blog followers like videos) :

Last month I bought a bunch of woodenware for new hives from Brush Mountain. Unfortunately, it comes completely unassembled - that is my job. Luckily, the wood is cut and the box joints are prepared (they even drilled holes for the nails).

I had some time today so I spent it out in the (hot!) garage. I started with assembling the hive pieces. I make sure to use exterior wood glue to make the joints last longer. I assembled 2 medium supers, 3 deep supers, and one deep nuc. Here is the unpainted wood:

Whenever I am at Walmart or Home Depot I always look at the "mis-tint" paints. These are cans of paint which for some reason were improperly colored, and are usually offered at a discount. I bought a quart of nice blue paint from Sears for $1.50 and a quart of a really good looking pink/purple from Walmart for $3.50. The bees don't care what color the hive is.

Some beekeepers don't bother painting their hives, and those are usually commercial beekeepers where the time to paint takes away from their profit. But for hobby beekeepers like myself, the part of the fun of the experience is the painting.

I always put a coat of Kills primer before I paint, as I want the wood to last a long time. I had a 2" shim I made last year which I didn't paint, and it looked real bad after a season (I painted it this week).

I have a real neat system of drying the paint - I hang the pieces on my garage door rail with pieces of coat hanger!

I decided to paint the Nuc blue:

And the rest of the hive pieces will be painted the pink/purple:

Things will be drying overnight. If the paint is dry enough, maybe I'll put the hive together tomorrow and move the bees.

I assembled all of the woodenware today, but only painted the parts to make a one deep/one medium hive. I'll paint the rest later.

Clean Bill of Health!

2010-07-21T01:16:00.000-04:00

Worcester County has a Bee Inspector, and each year he makes the round to all of the hives for the annual inspection. Last year he showed up and I wasn't around, but this time I was at home. So I got a chance to watch him and we talked about our hives.

Like usual, Ken was dressed in Ken fashion - no bee suit, just a t-shirt and a long sleeve blue shirt. I think he wears the same outfit when he goes into hives - he had the same clothes on at the bee picnic:

Come to think of it, I don't think he wears anything but these clothes when he works the hives!

Anyway, armed with just a smoker and a hive tool, Ken started looking at my hives. The short answer is: they all passed with flying colors! None of my 4 hives (2 full-size and 2 nucs) had any problems which commonly beset hives: no mites, no DWV (deformed wing virus), nice queens, etc.

He did mention one concern: the brown hive had almost no honey stores. That could be why the queen isn't laying many eggs, he said. He suggested that I feed that hive some sugar syrup, which I will do. The green hive had some nectar/honey in the super, so he said I didn't need to feed that one, but I'll keep an eye on things.

We also talked about making a full-size hive out of my brown nuc (the one with the cute yellow mini-super). That nuc is full of bees, and is ready to be transplanted. So I guess I'll have to get off my duff and assemble some of the woodenware I bought last month. That cute little super is going to cause me some problems, however - it contains medium frames, and you usually only have deep frames in a nuc. So I am probably going to have to put a deep and a medium together, and then I can put a queen excluder under the medium (making sure the queen is below it). Then when the bees hatch out of the medium frames, I can remove them and put deeps on for the brood chambers.

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