Swarm... ?

Throughout the year, I've seen evidence of my hive having swarmed - namely queen cells which are hatched, and new queens which are unmarked. Each time I haven't seen any physical evidence of a swarm, e.g. when they are actually leaving the hive. At the Mass Bee field day one of the instructors said it's easy to miss the actual swarming event, as it can occur in a 5 minute timeframe.

This afternoon my wife called me at work, and mentioned she was outside and was looking up at a low flying helicopter. She just happened to notice a dark mass in the leaves of the tree waaaay up high, and sure enough, it was a swarm of bees! They were in a tree directly over where my hives sit.

Here are some pictures she took - some with the telephoto lens.

Just my luck, it was about 70 feet up in the air - too high to capture. I got home around 6:30 and expected the swarm to be gone, but it was still there.

She wasn't sure which hive threw the swarm - she seemed to notice one of the nucs (the Blue Nuc) having a lot of activity. So I suited up and took a look at that nuc. I pulled out the first frame, and there was the (marked) queen bee. So no, that hive didn't swarm. Besides, I didn't see any swarm/queen cells.

The only hives that I knew about having queen cells were the Brown Nuc and the Pink Hive. I opened up the Brown Nuc and saw that one of the queen cells had hatched - it had a nice opening where the queen had chewed open her own cell. There were a couple more cells unhatched also. But 1) I don't think the hive would swarm with a new queen right after hatching (since 2 days ago I saw the same queen cell capped), and 2) I don't think it's possible for a freshly hatched queen to fly right away. I thought they need to "harden" a little first. I'm not sure - I'll ask on the bee forums.

It could be that another of my hives had developed swarm cells - I wasn't necessarily 100% diligent in looking for them the last time I inspected. Anyway, I didn't feel like diving into the big hives tonight. I'll do some looking around the next time I do a big inspection.

Anyway, I have a nuc sitting on my chimney as a swarm trap. And since the swarm was still in the tree tonight, I set up a new empty hive on a table on my desk, with some old frames, and put a little lemongrass oil as a scent inducer. I've heard that swarms don't like to re-hive in/near their own bee yard, but it's worth a chance.

I'll update if the hive decides to take up residence in my equipment. It'd be a first!

Good Inspection, and a Surprise!

The weather lately has been very hot. This weekend, we had a beach picnic event with our Church on Saturday morning, 10 to 2, during the hottest part of the day. Then when we returned, I had the prospect of getting into a bee suit and inspecting my hives. I did so about 4:30PM, but the temperature was still around 90, and I ended up spending 1 1/2 hours during the inspection. To say I was a little sweaty was an understatement - I was soaked!. But for some reason, that day, spending all that time outside in the heat, I felt really good. Good honest sweating isn't necessarily a bad thing!

Anyway, the bees were very active. They are adapting to the heat, as evidenced by the amount of bees on the outside of my hives. I saw one of my nucs looking like this on Saturday:

I like inspecting nucs. The bees in 5 frames don't give me a lot of hassle. Plus, I can (usually!) find the queen in 5 frames (but not always - see below). After I inspect my 4 nucs, I take a look at the green hive with it's 2 deep and 3 honey supers, and it's daunting!

Grey Nuc

The grey nuc continues to thrive. After taking out one of the frames for the inspection, here's what was left - look at all those bees!

The brood pattern on this frame looks a little spotty. But if you look, the cells without brood contain nectar. I should probably do something about giving this nuc some relief - either pulling some frames and giving some empties, or I have a little medium "super" for the nuc - maybe put that on. I'll think about it.

Here's the queen. I got a better shot of her - not so blurry this time!

White Nuc

The White Nuc was made up a few weeks ago from some frames on which I found a queen cell or two (from the Green Hive). Today was about when I'd expect to see eggs/larvae, and I wasn't disappointed!

You can see the new larvae in these photos - beautiful!

Also note in the first frame that on the left side you see honey. Bees usually put honey above their brood. But I remember in this case there was a frame completely full of honey - I think it was this one. The bees removed the honey to make room for the queen, and the honey on the left is still remaining.

Also, I wasn't able to see this queen - she was very elusive! I checked every frame twice, which is my limit when inspecting a nuc. Next inspection I'll try to find and mark her.

Blue Nuc

This nuc has a long-standing queen, and continues to do well. I should probably sell her. She is a good layer:

And here she is on the top right of the wood part of the frame:

The frame she is on is interesting - it is a foundationless frame that was made last year by the bees with drone-sized cells in it. You'll see it is pretty much empty, while the other frame was packed with brood. The hive obviously doesn't feel they need drones now, so I should probably switch the frame with regular sized cells.

Brown Nuc

This is the nuc from which I stole and sold the queen. I am letting them build another, and it is too early for a queen.

You can see that there are plenty of bees:

And here are some queen cells.

All is proceeding according to plan.

Green Hive

This hive has 3 honey supers stacked on it. I put the top super on mostly because the frames had a little mold on them, and i wanted the bees to clean it up a little.

To my surprise, they have been going like gangbusters putting honey in it! Here's one of the frames:

Here are some of the lower frames: 

This is what I like to see! There are enough frames to justify some extraction action. I have some family visiting in a couple of weeks, so I am going to put off the extraction until they come so they can see it. It'll be fun!

I also saw young larvae in the hive, so I know the queen is good.

Pink Hive

The Pink Hive suffered from a laying worker weeks ago. I was moving over a frame of larvae and eggs each week for about 3 weeks. That appeared to stop the laying worker, and I saw this during the inspection, a queen cell:

That queen cell was capped, but I also saw another one uncapped:

I tried to get a picture up inside the cell - I don't know if you can see it, but there is a larva in there!

More capped cells on another side:

So this hive is on it's way to recovering.
I also saw lots of nectar in the brood area. Maybe I'll drop on a super to see what they will do with it.

Brown Hive

I dropped a honey super of undrawn frames on this hive a while back, and they pretty much ignored it. Last inspection I saw that they had just started drawing out some of the frames, and putting up some nectar.

This inspection I got the nicest surprise. It started when I lifted up the inner cover:

The bees had added lots of wax between the tops of the frame and the inner cover. Whenever this happens, you know the bees have been busy!

Then I looked down and saw this!

You see nice white wax right up to the top of the frames, all clean and straight, and what looks like capped honey. Could it be???

YES!! The bees had been going gangbusters filling up the honey super!! They started out with undrawn frames and now we have honey! On a white frame, the new wax and new cappings look fabulous.

On the next frames down, I saw the typical brood chamber pattern: 

Great pattern here. Notice that there is a line of wax 2 pictures above - the bees will only start filling a honey super when there is a little bit of honey along the top of the brood chamber. Otherwise they won't make the jump over.

One thing about this hive - it was NASTY! The bees were very irritated, and I got head-bumped a whole lot inspecting this hive. I had to wait extra time on my porch after closing everything up to let the bees calm down and leave me alone. Last week I was mowing the lawn and got stung on my neck (I wasn't anywhere near the hives when I got stung!) and I wouldn't be surprised if it was from this hive.

Summary

So here's a summary of the hives (I updated my spreadsheet - link on the right):

• Grey Nuc - Marked Queen, doing well.
• White Nuc - Unmarked Queen, as yet unseen.
• Blue Nuc - Marked Queen, doing well.
• Brown Nuc - No queen yet - expect eggs/larvae around 8/24
• Green Hive - Eggs/larvae visible, doing well
• Pink Hive - Queen cells visible - expect eggs/larvae around 8/24
• Brown Hive - Eggs/larvae visible, doing well. A little mean.

Finally Saw the Elusive Queen...

For the past few weeks, I've been seeing in the Grey Nuc evidence of a good queen - lots of eggs and larvae and brood. But I've never been able to see her. In a 5-frame nuc it shouldn't be so hard!

Well this weekend I didn't have time to do a long inspection, so I decided I'd just try to find that queen. It took me looking at each frame TWICE, but I finally found her, and was able to grab her and mark her with her own yellow dot. Here's a picture - see if you can see her (she is a little obscured by some other bees, but you can barely see her yellow dot - look for the bees grouping around the queen):

Here's a zoom in of that picture:

She's a real nice dark queen, probably descended from one of George's Carniolan queens.

So now all of the nucs have marked queens, except for the White Nuc which just received some frames last week. I gave that nuc a quick check, and didn't see any capped queen cells any more - hopefully there's a new virgin queen there. The bees were very jumpy and jittery, which means no queen.

The Green Hive is still working on a couple of supers for me, and I decided to add another super just in case the bees need more room to store honey (hint hint!). That hive still has tons of bees - this is what I found when I lifted up the outer cover:

Lots of bees, and I didn't even open up the hive proper yet!

Inspection Sutton and Home - 7-14-2012

Sutton Hives

It's been over a month since I inspected the Sutton hives, so I decided to pay them a visit. Remember last time the hives had almost completely plugged up the queen excluder, which I think made the bees believe that it was the top of their hive, and they didn't put any nectar in the honey supers.

Well, a check today showed no change - still bone dry honey supers. Last time I used my hive tool to open up the excluder grate, but they closed them back up again. They were even desperate for places to put honey, that they built some burr comb right under the queen excluder and had filled it with honey!

At the Mass Bee field day there was a Brushy Mountain booth and there I bought a couple of plastic queen excluders to try.

Here is the before:

And here's the after:

I hope the bees figure out that there is an attic in their house! Sutton is usually a good location for honey collection.

Now on to the hives in my backyard.

Brown Nuc

Good pattern here:

I even saw the queen! (not too hard to do in a 5-frame nuc, usually):

Blue Nuc

Saw the queen (marked), and saw brood. Sorry no pictures of that nuc!

Grey Nuc

This nuc continues to struggle with a little bit of chalkbrood. See the white things here:

The white things are bee larvae with chalkbrood. So far it's not too bad - need to just trim away more of the foliage to give it more sun.

BUT... I did see eggs and brood, so it has a queen! Here's one of my favorite types of shots - shows the eggs along the bottom of the picture, then as you move upward you see successively older and older larvae. This shows how the queen lays eggs first in the center, then spirals around the edges.

Even with this evidence, I still wasn't able to find the queen. It shouldn't be hard in a 5-frame nuc, but she has eluded me...

Green Hive

One of the things about this hive is that they make a ton of propolis! It's a very hot day, and that stuff is like sticky putty glue. I had a hard time getting the inner cover off of the hive, and here's why. This is a shot of the top of the frames. Those peaks are where the gummy propolis pulled apart.

I didn't expect any surprises when inspecting this hive, but once again, what do I know. Here's what I found:

In the previous two pictures you can see lots of chewed out queen cells. It looks like this hive decided they needed a new queen. I don't think it swarmed, as you can see there are tons of bees still around:

But I didn't see any new eggs or brood. The picture two above you can see the older brood in the outside rim of a pattern. If there were a queen, she'd be laying in the newly freed up cells. So I suspect there may be a virgin queen running around. Got to give it more time.

I did find a few frames with what looked like unhatched queen cells on them. I decided to pull a couple of them, plus a frame of honey, and put them in the White Nuc. The White nuc was pretty much gone by then - only a couple handfulls of bees left. So I just added these frames to the nuc to see what they will do.

Brown Hive

Hallelujah! They finally started using the honey super! Here's one frame where they have started drawing it out and filling it.

This is the only one so far, so they have a ways to go.

Good brood in this one as well. Note that I've been "stealing" from the brown hive when I needed to move a frame of eggs and brood to the other hives. Since this one isn't putting away much honey, I can afford to steal some of the (future) workforce.

Pink Hive

Still no queen - stole a frame of eggs and brood from the Brown Hive to add. I did notice there weren't any more eggs being layed by the laying worker, so the frame of eggs and brood brought over from another hive did it's job of suppressing the urges of the laying workers.

---

So here's the tally of the Nuc status:

• Brown Nuc - laying queen (marked)
• Blue Nuc - laying queen (marked)
• White Nuc - brand new with queen cells from Green Hive. Expect something around 3 weeks from now (Aug. 4 or so)
• Grey Nuc - laying queen

I'll probably put an ad in CraigsList to sell one or more of my queens.

Here's a shot of the main hives, complete with bees hanging out on the front porch:

Inspection 7-04-2012

Happy Fourth of July!

This being a holiday from work, I decided to look into the hives in back. But first, my wife and I were out in the backyard in the morning the day before, and there were lots of dragonflies flitting around (we have lots of them). There was one flying around us and a certain plant - he/she would land on the plant for a few seconds, then take off.

I told my wife to stand by the plant and hold her hand out away from her body, and the dragonfly may land on it. Sure enough, it did. It stayed there about 10 seconds of so before going off on another adventure. Neat!

Nuc Checks

A quick check of the nucs revealed:

• Brown Nuc - saw the queen and marked her (yellow dot).
• Blue Nuc - no sign of a queen, but could be she isn't mated yet. Still need to give time.
• White Nuc - still on the decline. I haven't done anything with it. Still trying to determine what I will do.
• Grey Nuc - no queen, I moved a frame of eggs and brood from the Brown Hive to give it a boost.

Green Hive

The green hive has a ton of bees in it! The super on top is well on the way to being filled with honey. Here are some shots:

Still need to wait until more is capped.

While inspecting the hive, I accidentally caused some honey to spill on the top of some of the frames. I think it's real cute to watch the bees recover the spilled honey. They don't let anything go to waste!

Good brood pattern as well:

As I said,this hive has a ton of bees. This is after I was inspecting a couple of frames, and there were a bunch of bees on the frames. Made it a challenge to move things around.

Since the weather has been hot, the bees have taken to hanging out on the front porch each evening, and into the night.

Pink Hive

Opened up the Pink hive, and this is what I found - uh oh!!!

Another case of the dreaded Laying Worker! (*sigh*) I can't get a break. This is a different case than the swarm I captured in the white nuc - I didn't have much time/effort invested in that hive, so I wasn't worried about laying workers. But this is a full size hive. I decided to take Michael Bush's advice and add a frame of eggs and brood from another hive each week for a few weeks, and see if the hive would right itself.

Brown Hive

Earlier I had noticed that the Brown Hive had superceded her queen - either by a swarm or just supercedure, I am not sure. Well today I was able to find and mark the queen with her own yellow dot!

Lots of bees and good pattern in this hive, but to date they haven't touched the honey super.