Sutton Moving Up

It's about time to move the Sutton Nuc into a full-size hive. I need to give the queen lots of space to build up for the winter. So I took out the full size hive parts (with extra frames) to transfer the Nuc.

Here's a frame from the Nuc - the queen is doing what she is supposed to!

But as I was transferring the frames, I saw something on one of the frames - a supercedure cell! See if you can spot it:

 This confused me a little, since the queen was doing just fine (I saw her on another frame):

I didn't want to let this hive make a new queen, since it would put it behind about a month. So I decided to bring the frame with the supercedure cell on it home, and put it in a new nuc:

I added a couple of frames of bees and brood from my hive to be able to service the queen cell. Let's see if the queen hatches fine. If so, I have a new hive - woot!!

So here's my backyard now:

Expensive Delays...

I'm behind about 4 posts, so I'm playing catch up. I've dated the posts based on the day I did the activity, not the day I am writing the post (yay Blogger!).

I have been talking for the last couple of years that I wanted to breed some queens. I wanted to increase my hives and maybe over-winter a nuc or two.

Well, like past years, the time has slipped away and now it's too late to start the process. Since I still want to overwinter my nucs, that leaves me to purchasing some queens. I called up my fellow WCBA member George O'Neil and sure enough, he had a couple of queens I could buy. So I took some of my honey money and bought two queens.

So here's my plan:

• Take the queen in the Green Hive (last year's queen) and move her to a nuc
• Put one of the new queens in the Green Hive
• Take some frames from the Green Hive and make another nuc, and put the second queen in.

The idea is that I would have a good queen in the large green hive, and one in a nuc. The other nuc was last year's queen.

So on Friday I made the two nucs, moving the Green Hive queen into one of them (leaving the Green Hive queenless).

Then on Saturday when I picked up the new queens, I put them in their respective hives. Here's the Green Hive - look how the bees are all over the queen cage. They are excited to have a queen again!

Here is the bee yard now.

Does Sutton Have a Queen?

Back on July 14 I performed a walk-away split on the hive at Sutton. I wanted to make a 2nd hive to have two there. A week later, there were some good queen cells starting. Today I decided to check to see if the nuc has a queen - according to bee math, she should be there and laying.

When I got over to the Sutton hives, I could tell summer was being good to the vegetation - there were vines and weeds threatening to overrun the hives!

Here's a back view of the new nuc:

And the front view:

Even the main hive had some weeds growing in front of the hive:

I pulled back a lot of the climbing vine away from the hives as much as I could. My wife said it was a trumpet vine, based on the flowers I described. But whatever it was, it was everywhere!

Sutton Hive #2
(really just a nuc now)

I popped open the nuc, and saw some good activity (the bees were doing well coming and going as well):

The first frame I pulled out had some good evidence of a queen - lots and lots of young larvae! If you click on the picture you can see the white worm-like things in some of the cells.

So now the quest - find the queen! I looked at all of the frames, and didn't see here. But one of the benefits of a 5-frame nuc is that she can't go far to hide. A second pass showed here. She is on this frame - see if you can spot the queen:

If you can't find her, click here for a version of the picture where I circled the queen.

I nabbed her, put her in my queen marking tube, and now she has a very fashionable red dot (red is this year's color).

I put her back in the hive, and I'll check in a week or so to see if it's time to move that nuc into a full-size hive.

Sutton Hive #1

Back to the main hive, popping the cover showed a good number of bees under the inner cover (there were also a bunch on top of the inner cover):

You'll notice the outer frames are black - those are the frames of honey I put in the hive last time, which came from the Sutton hive that died out over the winter.

This queen is doing what the queen needs to do - makin' lots of babies! She has a nice laying pattern:

There were a lot of frames with a good brood pattern - it was good to see!

Looking into the lower box, I found a lot of burr comb on top of the frames. You can see the comb zig-zagging along the top of the 4th and 5th frames.

That burr comb had drones in it, and that comb was destroyed when I separated the hive bodies. So I just scraped it out.

The lower box also had some brood - the queen was using both top and bottom for the brood nest. Again, that's good.

I looked for the queen, but didn't see here. But that's not a problem - I know she's there.

There was still plenty of space for her to lay, so I didn't make any changes to the hive. There was also plenty of honey in the hive. I'll check in a couple of weeks.

Extracting Day!!

As I had mentioned before, the bees in the Brown Hive had been collecting honey for a while now. I decided with the good weather it was time to do some extracting.

In our Church we have missionaries who serve in our congregations. The two Elders in our Ward heard that I had bees and was going to extract some honey, so they asked if they could come over and see / help. Some of these pictures were taken by them.

I have a basic way of removing the frames of honey from the hive. I don't use a bee escape (too lazy to get one) and I don't use any Bee Quick repellent-type liquid. What I do is I remove the super of frames, and set it on the ground near/behind the hive. Then I remove one frame at a time, shake/brush off the bees back into the hive, and walk the frame across my yard (maybe 30 feet) to where I have an empty super on a table. I have a towel over the super to keep the bees out - that is where I put frame after frame.

It isn't the quickest way, but it works for the few frames I have. I only had 1 bee make it into the house when I brought in the frames!

Here's a (blurry - sorry) picture of one of the frames - nicely capped with a pale honey!

Last week I was worried if this hive had swarmed. As I was removing the frames of honey, I found a few frames in the center which looked like this:

The empty part was bone dry - not like it would be if the bees had not yet finished capping it. It was as if they had removed it. Either the hive was in need of food, or they took some of the honey with them when they swarmed.

I didn't take the time to inspect the hive - I'll do that later, and look for a queen.

So it's down to the basement and bring up the extractor!

I have a nice hive stand for permanent mounting on some kind of a base, but I still haven't gotten around to doing anything with it. Some day...

Uncapping was accomplished with my simple little serrated bread knife - no heat involved. It works just fine.

I ended up with about 13 frames (some partial) to extract. The honey was not evenly distributed, so the extractor bounced around a lot (another reason to build the stand - I can mount it to a baseboard and stand on it, providing better stability).

Here's the first of the honey!

The only filtering I do is to pass it through a coarse (600 micron) and fine (400 micron) filter, to get rid of the bits of honey and other bee bits. I also have a 200 micron filter, but when I tried that the honey took forever to pass through it!

I had the missionaries put their finger in the stream and taste the honey. They were amazed that this honey was in a functioning beehive just an hour earlier!
It looks like I got a little less than 4 gallons. I didn't weigh the bucket empty, so I don't know the total at this point.

(notice the newspaper - I learned early that leaving sticky honey on the dining room floor does not endear you to the Mrs.!)

Here's the haul. Based on the jars filled, I got about 38 lbs. Not bad for just one hive, in the summer!

What we noticed was that this honey is very light. Here's a jar from last year (left) vs. this year (right). You can see how much darker last year's honey was:

That's about it! I'm going to enter this honey into both the Spencer Fair and the Woodstock Fair - wish me luck!

A Swarm?? Not sure...

Yesterday around 4PM I noticed a lot of activity in front of the Brown Hive, and a little bit less in the Green Hive. It looked like orienteering flights on steroids - there were many bees flying around the entrance. It looks like it may have been a swarm, but I watched for a few minutes but didn't see any bees making for the trees. They all seemed to fly out about 20-30 feet away from the hive, and that's it. But there were a lot of them!

I thought it might have been robbing, but I didn't see bees making mad dashes to the hives (last year I had my brown hive robbing out one of my weak hives).

So it could have been a swarm. But I spent a lot of time looking in the tree tops and didn't see anything. Within about an hour, the traffic was normal. Strange!

Today I went into the Brown Hive to see evidence of a swarm. You know you had a swam because you see capped queen cells, and you see fewer bees. I saw neither. I also saw frames of good brood:

Other frames had very young larvae on them as well (I thought a few days before a swarm the queen stops laying).

Looking at this hive, I wouldn't expect anything amiss. If it did swarm, then there isn't a laying queen, and I should see next week the absence of young larvae.

According to the bee math, there won't be any new eggs until about 20 days if this swarmed. I'll check next week and see.

Sutton Queen Check

Last week in Sutton I did a walk away split, moving some frames to the nuc to let them raise a queen. I thought I'd do a quick check on them to see how they are doing.

Here's the nuc. You can see along both sides of the center frame a bunch of bees.

You can see on the next two pictures the characteristic hanging "peanut" cells of queen cells:

I counted about 5 cells, which is good. I decided not to mess with separating those frames - I'll let the queen be born and they can fight it out to see who wins.

I also decided to bring over a bunch of the frames of honey left over from last year's Sutton hive, to give them a food boost.

It's a shame to let this go to waste, but it won't now!

All Hive Inspection 7-14-2013

We took a family vacation the end of June / first of July, and I didn't have a chance to check the hives before we left. In fact, the lawn needed mowing before we left, but the rain kept me from mowing, so I was a little fearful of the jungle that would be awaiting me when I returned. It wasn't too bad.

Anyway, the weather has been hot, and Sunday I had a chance to check all of the hives. You can see that the bees were active on both of the hives in my backyard.

Brown Hive

This hive continues to have a ton of bees. You can see how many of them were hanging out on top of the inner cover

There was a good brood pattern in the hive.

I even got to spot the queen here, marked with last year's yellow dot:

The hive is doing a good job loading up the honey supers!

I may plan to extract in a week or so. The lower honey super is pretty much full, and the upper one is about 1/2 full.

This hive continues to be a little hot - as soon as I open up the hive, even after smoking it, I get about 4-6 bees just giving me the business! But with the amount of honey they are bringing in, I'm content for now to leave it alone.

Green Hive

I put a honey super on this hive a few weeks ago, but it is plumb empty. However, the upper brood chamber is *heavy*!! It has a lot of honey in it. You can see this frame has more honey on it than usual.

I may have to take out some honey and give them more room, but we'll see if they start moving things to the honey super. Not as many bees in this hive as in the brown hive, but it is doing well.

Sutton Hive

There is only one hive in Sutton now. I panned on splitting it today. There were plenty of bees in the hive.

This next picture has an interesting pattern - not full of brood like you'd expect, but the cells without brood have pollen in them. I wasn't aware bees mixed things up so much.

But another newer frame showed some good "traditional" brood pattern:

I purchased this package from a RI bee supplier, and like last time, paid extra for a marked queen. But like last time, I got a package with an unmarked queen. Nothing like taking extra money for nothing! (I don't think I'll use him again).

I found the queen this day, and marked her with a red dot (for 2013).

As I said, I wanted to split the hive. So I just pulled over a couple of frames that had eggs and young larvae into a separate nuc. There wasn't too much in the way of extra honey available from the main hive, so I gave them what I could. I'll stop over with some frames of honey from last year's (failed) hive.

So now there are two hives in Sutton!

Mass Bee Field Day 2013

On June 22 the Mass Bee Association held their annual "field day." This is a day full of bee-related expositions and demonstrations, held out at the UMass Agronomy Farm in South Deerfield, MA. Think of it as the "Comic Con" for beekeeping, but with not quite as many weird people :-)

I went last year, and had a good time, so I decided to go this year as well. I learned a couple of things based on last year's field day: 1) bring sun screen, and 2) bring lots of water. You literally spend the whole day out in farm fields (they have some covered areas, but the demos are all in the fields).

Here is the flyer from this year's field day (both sides) so you can see how the day lined up:

The demonstrations were targeted at both new beekeepers as well as experienced ones. Because there are only 4 sessions, I wanted to make sure I didn't pick the "how to spot your queen" type of demonstrations. Like last year, I was able to pick activities which interested me and where I may learn something new.

This year I picked the following:

• First session - I split my time between "Queen Rearing" and "Nuc Management"
• Second session - "Doolittle and Harry Cloake Queen Rearing Technique"
• Third session - "The EAS Master Beekeeper Program"
• Fourth session - there wasn't anything here that I particularly wanted to listen to, so I watched Ken Warchol do "Hive Inspections" and talked with some of the other beekeepers (networking).

Here's a view as I was walking from the parking lot:

The agronomy farm is just that - a real farm. As I was passing one of the wooden barns, that farm animal smell wafted over me, and brought me back to when I was a little child and visiting my grandpa's farm in rural Utah. Amazing how smells can do that!

One of the nice things about field day is that there are a couple of beekeeping supply vendors that show up selling their wares. You can pre-order ahead of the field day, and they will bring your order with them so you don't pay shipping. Or you can buy stuff directly from them that day. It's quite a savings, considering a lot of the beekeeping equipment is wooden, and therefore heavy and expensive to ship.

There was a big tent set up, and people could rest, talk, and get out of the sun.

You can see that there was a lot of people in attendance, around 250 I heard, coming from in some cases many hours travel away (from PA).

Here is Dean Stiglitz talking about queen rearing:

Daniel Barry from the Franklin County Beekeepers was giving a demonstration of Nuc Management:

As with most beekeeping demonstrations, the audience gets up close and personal with the bees!

Dan had a nifty dual Nuc arrangement in a full size box. I took lots of pictures to be able to make one myself. Here's an audience member checking it out:

Oh, by the way - the box she is checking out is full of live bees. Just thought you should be impressed! :-)

One of the problems here in the northeast is getting quality queens. Most of the queens come from the south (Georgia), and can't handle the colder weather up here (really!). You really want to have bees which are hardy and they aren't easy to find.

The Plymouth County Beekeepers recognized this problem, and instead of complaining about it, created a Queen Rearing Initative in their club. They have members do grafting and queen rearing as a group, to increase the quality of the queens in their club. That'd be something nice to have in our club.

Here is Bob Hickey giving a presentation on the Doolittle/Cloake method and the QRI.

And some pictures from the QRI:

Someone brought a big blow-up skep (traditional looking bee hive). It was hollow inside, and people were sitting in there during lunch. Not sure of the purpose...

During lunch there was the annual Smoker Contest. People vied for the honor of being the winner of the contest. This was my first year, and I thought I did well, but the choice of the winner was a little arbitrary...

Here I am taking a lunch break. I had someone take a picture of me since in most of the pictures I am absent.

And finally, here's Ken Warchol, the Bee Whisperer, giving a demo of a hive inspection. He is in his usual garb for such a thing (no veil, etc.)

All in all it was a good day. I enjoyed it, got to meet some new people, and talk to some of the regulars I usually see.