Didn't make it...

Well, some sad news - the little white nucleus that I made didn't make it.

I haven't seen any bees flying in and out for a couple of days. Each week I checked it, there were fewer and fewer bees; and last Saturday I didn't see a queen. No queen = certain death.

Yesterday I went out and opened it up, and all the bees were dead in the bottom of the nuc. Additionally, about 20 large black ants scattered like ... well, ants. I had seen the ants over the past couple of weeks, and knew that didn't forebode well. A healthy hive has no problems keeping out ants and other interlopers.

When I took the hive apart, I saw a few bees dead on the comb frame. A couple had their heads in the comb, a few were head-out (which meant they died trying to be born). There were a lot of drone cells which didn't "hatch" (probably didn't keep warm enough with no nurse bees around). When I pulled a couple of them open, I saw a couple of mites; so that tells me that I'm going to have to treat for mites. The frame which had honey/syrup on it was also bone dry - either the ants or other bees stole that. So I'm going to have to watch for ants and my other hive.

So now I have an empty spot on my hive stand; a newly painted hive in the garage (thanks to help from my boys); and no nuc to put into the hive. What to do, what to do...

I called up Janina (who helped me a couple of weeks ago) and told her I was in need of a nuc! She's going to make me one (actually the bees will do the making) and in a couple of weeks, I'll have new tenants! This is kind of late in the season, but if I feed feed feed, the hive will probably be strong enough to get through the winter.

Home Improvement

As indicated in previous posts, there's a chance I will end up with more than one beehive. If this is the case, I want to do something more than just sit them on cinder blocks - that's OK for one hive, but it's a little bit too white trash for my liking.

So I decided to do something more. I built a bee bench - a framework to hold the hive(s). Here it is:


It's made out of pressure-treated 2x4's, and is five feet wide and 17" deep. I chose those dimensions to be able to fit a couple of hives and 1 nuc on it, if need be. It sits up about 14 inches from the ground.

So here's the before shot:


and here's the after shot:


Much nicer!

I felt sorry for the bees a little. I spent 45 minutes poking around in their hive for the inspection. Then a couple of hours later, I mess with them more to move them on their new bench. In order to do that, I had to take apart the hive (layer by layer) and move it out into the yard. Then I placed the bench (I didn't have to do much to find a flat spot, good thing). Then I reassembled the hive layer by layer. Some of the bees were starting to get agitated, so I'll leave them be for a while!

As a side note, I wanted to clear out a mound of grass clippings that I had piled up to the right of the hives (this was before I had bees). So earlier this morning I put on my bee suit and started digging up the mess of weeds and grass clippings. I had the suit on just in case, but the bees had no desire to bother me (I wasn't too close to their hive, and I didn't have anything noisy and objectionable).

Inspection 7-11-09

It's Saturday and that means it's time to inspect the beehive!

I started with the full hive. We had a queen last week, and I was interested in finding her and/or seeing evidence of her activity. Since last week she would have had to go on a mating flight, so I wasn't sure if she were ready to start laying eggs yet.

As I inspected the hive, I saw lots of pollen and nectar/sugar syrup. I suspect it is the syrup since I have been feeding them. But when I put the most recent jar on, they haven't been taking much; bees will choose nectar over sugar syrup, so that means that there must be enough nectar.

I was looking at the top layer, and I didn't see any eggs. Oh well, maybe on the bottom. I got though about 1/2 of the bottom frames, and still nothing - I was getting worried. Then on one of the frames I saw a patch of newly laid eggs! Yippie - I have a queen! I never saw here, but new eggs are just as good as seeing here as far as proof goes.

Here's another shot of the bottom box from above. The bees were very clumpy in the lower corner; so much so I had to give 'em a dose of smoke to get them to break up so I could put the frame back in!



I also noticed that some of the new frames we had added weren't drawn out to comb yet. I am hoping that is because there wasn't a laying queen yet to need to fill them up. Maybe now that she is laying eggs, she'll kick into high gear and the bees will get, well... busy! I kept the jar of syrup on for them to finish up.

Then I moved on to the smaller Nuc (nucleus) hive. I noticed that they hive has been consuming the sugar syrup like gangbusters, almost too fast that I feared a leak. I was worried I was going to open the hive and see a lump of sugar syrup on the frames! Well, I opened it up, and it was dry as normal. But the bees weren't very active. Here's a shot:


The frames looked pretty empty (due to the brood which was there having been born) and I didn't see any new eggs or a queen. I saw the queen cells on the bottom still there, so there is hope that a new queen may be born. But it could be that this little hive may die out. I don't know if I want to buy a new queen and start a full hive or not. We'll see how mother nature works things out.

One thing I suspect happened is that there was robbing going on. There were some frames of stored honey/syrup in the nuc, but not enough to account for the 2 jars the bees appeared to have consumed. I think other bees (maybe from the hive next to it) came in and robbed the syrup. The house bees don't like it when this goes on, and it could have upset the virgin queen that was there and something happened to her.

In any case, I'm going to let things go for another week and see how things progress.

A ways to go...

My bee yard:



Another's bee yard: *



Do you think I have a way to go?

At least I don't have the job of a commercial beekeeper. Look at the following video at what they have to deal with (these are people who take hives to fields specifically for pollination. Look at the flatbed truck full of hives in the background!)



* The guy in the second picture lives in Oklahoma and is a queen bee breeder. The tiny hives are queen nucs, which are used to hold a queen and a few bees so she can mate and start laying. Check out his pictures - pretty neat!

Honey Bee...

Thanks Jane!

Special Guest Inspection 7-4-09

One of the benefits of being a member of a beekeeping club is that I know people I can call. I met Jim and Anita Hickey at the last couple of bee meetings. They also live in Dudley. They have been keeping bees for about 3 years. Earlier this week I called them to see if they could come over on Saturday (today) to go through my hive and give me some advice and pointers. They said they'd contact their mentor, Janina Antos, who has had bees for 20 years or so (also in Dudley). They all came over today to go through my hive.

A side note: you can tell how long a person has been a beekeeper based on how much (or little) beekeeping protective gear they wear. I am fully covered; look at Janina (in the blue shirt above) - she only brought a veil, and she was wearing sandals! I actually got brave enough to go without my gloves for the first time. Janina said that if you get stung, it's usually because of something you did (moving too fast, dropping a frame, or squishing a bee, etc.) It was a little funny feeling the bees with my bare fingers!

Anyway, when we were going through my hive, I got a lot of compliments about how well my hive is being run. She said that I had things very much under control, which is great for a first year beekeeper.

One of the things we noticed in the hive was that yes indeed, there was a queen or two in there. So in order to let her have the best chance, we started pulling off the queen cells. Janina looked at each of them and pulled them apart; some of them had queens which were not developed (a little rotten, in fact). She said that the workers hadn't tended to those bees well. But we found some queens that were about to come out! As Janina was holding one of the frames, we saw a queen being born. Look at the following picture - I circled the queen, and she had just come from the queen cell pointed to by the arrow.


Talk about fascinating! As we were going through the frames, we removed the queen cells. Some of them were very close to hatching, and Janina had some queen cages and we put those queens in there. I was holding onto the cages, plus some of the queen cells. The next thing I knew, I felt a bee crawling in my hand - one of the queens had been born right in my hand! That was really a neat experience.

Janina said that with all these queens, I should start a nuc. Well, I just happened to have build a Nuc early in June, so I grabbed that and we put some frames of brood and honey in it (to get some nurse bees in there), and put one of the frames with queen cells in it. We also put the queen that was born in my hand in it, so there may be a battle later to see who comes out on top. So now I have a 2nd nucleus hive started. I'm not sure what I am going to do with it, but my wife is open to the possibility of having a 2nd hive back there. Or I could sell it to make some extra money. The queens I have are all virgins, so it'll take a week or so for them to start laying (after mating first). Here's the hive and the nuc:



I guess I now have a "bee yard!"

We also moved some frames around to encourage the bees to build up more comb. With the swarm(s) happening and all the rain, she suggested I keep feeding for about a week. The jar of sugar syrup I put on the hive yesterday was half gone, so they are definitely taking the syrup!

After removing queen cells and capturing queens, we ended up with a Nuc with 1 or 2 queens in it; 3 virgin queens captured in queen cages; and about 3 queen cells which weren't quite ready to hatch:

(you can really see the queen in the queen cage on the left) Janina took them to her place to use.

All in all it was a pretty fun time. I learned more about the hobby; we met some new friends (and had cookies and lemonade after working the hives - thanks Tracy); and I feel more confident about my (now 2) hives. I still don't know what I'm going to do with the second one.

Since Tracy took a bunch of pictures, I'll just post some below.

Inspection 7-3-09

Given the mini-swarm of yesterday, I decided to look in the hive today. I didn't see much change from last time, except that more brood had been born (look at the frame above - it has a lot of empty cells, indicitave of not having a laying queen). I counted 13 queen cells along the bottom edges of some of the frames (like above).

But then I saw something which caught my eye - I thought I saw a queen! Look at the picture below (click for a larger image). The top part is what I think is a queen (her longer body is somewhat obscured by the worker bees. Darn those bees - they don't hold still for pictures!). The bottom very fuzzy shows the queen, you can see her solid pale color (you see why I am not a wildlife photographer?). I also heard what sounded like a high pitched beeping. I think it was the queen "piping." It's how queen communicate to other queens.



So this is very confusing to me! But good news - tomorrow I have a couple of seasoned beekeepers scheduled to come out and we'll go through my hive.

I also put on a jar of sugar syrup to feed the bees (since I took off the honey super).

Stay tuned!

Mini Swarm? I'm Confused...

OK, it's official - I'm very confused.

This morning we finally had some good weather - it was actually sunny! Around 9:30AM I noticed a large fog of bees around the front of the hive. I thought it may have been another saved up orientation flight (since they couldn't do it in the rain). But about an hour later there were almost no bees in front of the hive.

I put on my boots (since the back yard has about 2 inches of water standing on it due to the recent rains) and as I walked toward the backyard, I heard back up in the trees the definite sound of a swarm of bees! It looks like my hive swarmed AGAIN! I couldn't see anything due to the leaves, and about an hour later the sound was gone (so they had either settled or moved on).

But this occurrence raises a lot of questions for me. Is it possible they swarmed again? By my calculation, they couldn't have had a queen born yet. But I could be wrong. What causes them to do this?

I'm going to go into the hive today (a day earlier than I planned) to check things out.

Weird!!!

Swarm Capture Video

Here's another neat video I found of someone capturing a swarm. If my swarm were so easily accessible, I would have done the same!

How bees find a new home

In light of my recent swarm, I came across this video of how bees go about finding a new home.