More queens, no mites (for now...)

Yesterday was our wedding anniversary so what better way to spend part of the day than in the apiary. The weather started out sunny, warm and humid but after 60 minutes with the girls, turned windy and threatened to rain so we ended the inspection a bit early.

First, a tip for this posting and then what we found in the order of inspection.

Tip:
It's really exciting to see the bees making supers full of honey (fig 1), especially as a new beekeeper, but you have to remember it's their food, not yours. It's bad hive management to take the honey the bees will need for winter and then try to make it up by feeding syrup. Syrup is best used to start a package or for emergency purposes only. It is not as nutritional as the honey the bees make from nectar and recent studies in Sweden have shown syrup actually changes the pH of the bee's honey stomach from 4 to 6. I have been told that is the same pH you would use in a lab to grow Nosema ceranae. When the bees have already produced enough honey to support themselves for winter, why risk loosing a hive just so you can have a bit of honey? Make sure you leave 2 deeps or 3 mediums full of bees, pollen and honey as we enter the cold months.

Nuc Inspection: Small cell, deep and medium wooden supers
The bees did their job (after killing the queen I gave them) and have raised a beautiful dark queen of their own (fig 2). She has been busy and has a laid a nice center pattern on both sides of a frame with the bees packing pollen and honey around the brood (fig 3). The bees are barely starting to draw out the wood and small cell wax frames in the top medium. They will get going now that they have a queen who will need some room. Figure 4 is a shot of her actually laying an egg.

Hive 4: Large cell, deep and a medium BeeMax supers
Last inspection revealed 23 emergency cells. This time all of the cells are empty with most having been removed by the workers. No eggs or brood were yet present but the timing is right for the new queen to be out on her mating flight. I absolutely expect to find the signs of her return when we next open the hives on Sep 3rd. If she is anything like her mother, this will be a very productive hive.

Hive 3: Small cell, deep and medium wooden supers
This hive, like the nuc, was a split from Hive 2 and was immediately requeened with one of Mike Palmer's Northern Hybrid queens. A very quick look at this hive showed the bees have drawn out the center frames of the medium, making a very bright yellow comb (fig 5). The queen has started laying in the medium. I will probably add another medium in September and give this hive some of the honey from hives 1 and/or 2.

Hive 2: Small cell, 2 deep and 3 medium BeeMax supers. Queen excluder on top of 2nd deep
This hive went queenless and has also raised a new matriarch who is laying in the 2nd deep. There are numerous drone cells but also several frames of worker brood. My first thought was I have a laying worker but the normal brood has me hopeful. The great part of this inspection was there are zero, nunca, nada, the null set, of Varroa in any of the drone cells, and I checked over 20 of them! The bottom deep was packed with pollen and honey on 8 frames but they still have not touched 2 of the Piercos in the bottom deep. I moved them to the center to see if that will help.



Actually, after inspecting the pictures Gayla took, I did not find any mites in any of the hive pictures. With 2 of the hives and the nuc requeening, we broke the mites' breeding cycle and have momentarily conquered the mite problem. Even queen-right Hive 3 looked clean!

Due to incoming weather, we never opened Hive 1. Our next inspection is Sep 3 with Ross Conrad leading a class in our apiary! Life is good...

Hi, sports fans and welcome to the "Now what the heck are they doing?" version of the blog. First, I must apologize for not keeping up with the observations. It's been about a month since I've added anything. A lot has happened, including harvesting 28 pounds of golden amber honey from 6 frames of Hive 1. The problem is, well not really because it's what I do, work is incredibly busy and is winning the competition for time. I will try to do better. I've also decided I want to add a tip with every installment I write. Here is the first.

Tip:
When inspecting your hives, always bring along a camera. It doesn't matter if it's a point and shoot or a high-end Nikon–just make sure it's at least 8megapixel so you can enlarge the image. Take pictures of several of the frames as you pull them. Get as close as you can or use the optical zoom on your digital camera. You can buy frame hangers that allow you to hang frames on the side of the hive or have a companion hold them for you. That evening, load the images onto your computer and take a careful look at every image. Many programs allow you to edit your images (i.e. iPhoto on a Mac). By going into the edit mode you can greatly greatly increase the mag as you scan every picture. You'll be amazed at what you missed when you were inspecting the hives! It's a great way to check for Varroa, catch interesting bee behavior or just study your bees. You can never see everything during an inspection. Having pictures for later really helps!

Today:
Looking at the colonies today was remarkable. What a beautiful day to be in an apiary. Gayla joined me and we had a wonderful time going through all 4 hives and the nuc. Here's what we found, in order of inspection.

Nuc:
Since the previous post, I discovered the bees offed the queen I installed. Not very considerate of them since she cost $20 and lasted about 10 days. A couple of weeks ago, I opened the hive expecting to see her laying away, only to find 13 emergency cells. Today, still no eggs or brood, the cells are gone and hopefully the queen is out on her mating flight. The bees were very calm, making lots-o-honey and just starting to draw out the small cell wax in the medium I put on them last week. I will leave them alone for another 10 days and see if there is a new queen in the house.

Hive 4:
This was a split from Hive 1 as I have really been impressed with the queen and wanted them to raise another. The split was 3 partial frames of eggs/brood and several of honey and pollen. It's a large cell hive which I intend to eventually change over to small cell. The split kept Hive 1 from swarming.

Last weekend I inspected this hive and found all of the eggs and brood had already hatched, the bees never made any queen cells and there were only mature bees in the hive. I tried unsuccesfully to find a queen this week and planned to do a paper combine today with Hive 3 (go to www.Beesource .com and do a search). I opened 3, put the newspaper in place across th etop of the hive and placed another wooden deep on the paper. I then opened Hive 4 and started to onspect each frame as I put it in the new deep on Hive 3. After moving 2 frames of honey, I was surprised to find a frame that had 13 queen cells on 1 side and at least 10 on the other! (Figure 1 and 3) I have no idea how they did this as I swear there was no brood or cells last week. Inside every queen cell was a larva floating in royal jelly! (figure 2) You could have knocked me over with the hive tool. (not shown...) I took a quick look at the rest of the frames but this one was the only one with cells. I quickly retrieved the 2 frames of honey from the combine and closed the hive. I will probably not check this for at least 2 weeks to give them time to hatch a queen, let her harden and then mate. Incredible...

Hive 3:
This is also a split but from Hive 2. I added a queen from Michael Palmer to this split and she is laying like there is no tomorrow. I added a medium to this last week and hope to eventually have this hive become all mediums. It's small cell and doing great!

Hive 2:
Now this was a surprise. Queenless...No idea what happened to her but there wasn't a bit of brood anywhere in the hive. They are pounding out the honey in the 3 mediums on top of the 2 deeps. Oddly, several of the Mann Lake 100 frames sitting in the deeps all year still are not drawn out. I moved them into the center of the boxes and closed them up. I do not remember seeing many queen cells in the hive but there were a few. As I mentioned, I was very surprised to find this. They had already made a queen this year. Evidently they were not impressed! I'll open this up in 2 weeks and hopefully I will be...

Hive 1:
Now this is a star hive! Two medium honey supers on top of 2 deeps and another medium for the brood. This is a large cell Buckafast hive and this queen ROCKS! The 2 supers are almost filled with honey , albeit, the comb building is very crazy in one of them. The really impressive thing was seeing capped brood, eggs and larvae in all 3 boxes below the excluder! (Figure 4) We never saw the queen which did not surprise me since we used smoke to move the bees away from the excluder when we took it off. I think we probably drove her into the lower deep. None the less, new eggs, larvae and capped in the medium and repeated down below. Most of the outer frames all filled with nectar, pollen and/or honey. I pulled 5 or 6 drones out of their drone cells and checked them for mites. Two had them, 4 did not. A very good sign! This is the stellar hive!

All in all, not a bad day. Two queen right hives, 2 hives and a nuc doing what they do by making their own queen. I wish they were all queen right but it's bee keeping and it's never about what I want. And I actually like it that way.

And Then There Were Four

Well, 4 1/2...

Looks like we've finally been deemed worthy of good weather! Last week I assembled a new Beemax hive from Betterbee and painted it to match the other 2. I had just enough time Friday afternoon to make a new hive stand from pressure treated lumber. I built it to match my original stand so I guess I will be adding 2 more hives next year. Once I have 6, I think I'll manage the hives to produce a few nucs and additional queens to sell each year.

I was out in the apiary early Saturday morning before the bees were very active. I wanted to position the new stand before they were really out and about. The ground (better known as mud...) is not very level and full of tree roots. Once I had the stand positioned, I chopped the roots out and leveled the stand by digging holes for the right side legs to sit in. Once the stand was level left to right, I made sure it was slightly lower in the front. By level bubble, it's about 1/2" lower. This allows any water from rain or snow melt to easily flow away from the front of the hive. Once I placed the new hive body (now called Hive 4, catchy name, eh?) and the nuc, it was time to split Hive 1 (fig. 1).

Last week, I noticed Hive 1 was teeming with bees and had started 3 swarm cells. I removed the cells and added a medium to try to give them something else to do for a week and yesterday revealed they had already started to draw out comb in the super. Looking through the top deep showed 4 more swarm cells, 5 frames of capped brood, larvae and eggs, a couple frames of pollen and 3 frames of nectar with a little capped honey. The bottom deep had 3 frames of brood, another of pollen and a couple more of nectar, the rest was open comb from recently hatched bees. I never found the queen but she had obviously been busy! After cutting out the swarm cells I moved 3 frames of brood, 1 of pollen and another of nectar to Hive 4. I filled the empty slots in both hives with new large cell, black Piercos and sprayed them with HBH to entice the workers, added a feeder to Hive 4 and closed up the hives. I do not know if the queen is in Hive 1 or 4 and do not really care. I want the queenless hive to make a new queen which is why I made sure both hives had a lot of eggs, larvae and capped brood. I should know which has the queen within a couple of days by the hive's behavior.

Since I had moved workers and nurse bees into the new hive but did not move the hive more than 2 miles away (more like 14'), I decided to place a tree branch immediately in front of the entrance reducer (again, Fig.1). The nurse bees have never been out of the hive so do not know where their hive is located. Not true with the worker bees. They know exactly where Hive 1 is and if I do not make them re-orient immediately upon leaving this new hive, they will eventually return to Hive 1. By making them re-orient, most of them will now return to Hive 4 and my population will remain high. This is exactly what they did when they started to venture out. I'll post a video here in the tnext couple of days to show this happening.

Meanwhile, this past week has worked well for Hive 3 and the nuc. I checked the queens on Monday and ended up letting them out of their cages and watched them disappear into the hives. I started feeders on both and have given Hive 3 two gallons of 1:1 syrup this week. I took a quick look at both yesterday to see if I could find the marked queens. As you can see from figures 2 and 3, Mike did a great job marking them and they are very easy to find (green is the color for 2009). Both queens are well accepted and should be laying eggs when I check next week.

New Matriarchs!

The queens from Michael Palmer arrived just as he promised on Friday. Many thanks to Theresa, our mail carrier, for delivering them to me!

I added one queen to the new split and was scratching my head about what to do about the other. I had planned on putting her in Hive 2–the hive I had recently split. Hive 2 has had an abnormal amount of drone cells and I was afraid I had a laying worker. Instead, when I opened up the hive to inspect it before adding the new queen, out walks a long, slender, dark colored queen! The overall brood pattern was much better and no drone cells north of the excluder in the the honey supers. Hooray! They had enough and made their own! I sort of expected to find a new queen when I opened the hive. Last Tuesday, the bees quit bearding and everyone was back inside the hive. While not a sure sign, it made me suspect a mated queen was in residence.

As great a find as that was, it left me with a dilema as to what to
do with the 2nd queen from Mike. These are daughters of hybrid queens that have already survived northern Vermont winters and are treatment free. I'm thrilled to add these genetics to the bee yard! Combined with the Buckfast and Russians I already have, these queens will further expand the gene pool of my local drones when I try to start raising queens next year. Out of deeps, I finally took another couple of partial brood frames from Hive 2, added a frame of pollen and placed 2 frames of honey in a deep nuc. I placed the queen cage between the 2 frames of brood candy plug up with the screen perpendicular to the brood frames to allow the bees to feed her, sprayed the frames with HBH and added a boardman feeder with 1:1. To say that the bees in the hives were instantaneously drawn to the queen cages is an understatement. There were bees on the cages before I could even get close to installing them.

Today being day 3, I came home and looked in to see if the queens were released yet. Finding both queens still in the cages but surrounded by relaxed bees, I released the queens into their new homes. Both immediately dove into the middle of the hive and disappeared. I'll check them out in about a week and see if they've truly been accepted and are laying eggs.

The other good news is Hive 1 has exploded with honey and brood. They've started swarm cells, so I added a medium of undrawn Pierco frames to give them something to do until my new Beemax hive arrives from Betterbee. I'll split the hive this weekend and let them raise a daughter of the existing queen. She is a phenomenal producer and I want to keep her genes in the yard.

With so much to do during this hive inspection and queen installation I did not shoot many pics. Figure 1 is a bad shot of one of the marked queens. Green is the color for 2009. Figure 2 is one of the girls working the spirea this past weekend and Figure 3 is the new layout of the apiary. The tan box in the background is for storage so I do not have to cart everything out to the yard every time.

A Delicious Solution!

The bees continue to beard on Hive 2. As I expect 2 new queens to arrive Friday, I decided to split the hive last Saturday to prepare them for a new queen before they swarm. I moved 2 frames with brood and eggs, 3 frames of honey and added 5 new Pierco frames sprayed with Honey-B-Healthy and 1:1 to a cypress deep. I shook some more bees into the deep but I doubt they will stay as I am not moving the new colony out of the bee yard. Instead, I'm hoping the hive makes it with the nurse bees that were on the brood frames and the new queen I'll add Friday or Saturday. I left 2 frames of brood in the original hive and replaced the 2 I took for the split with 2 new Piercos sprayed with HbH. This removed bees from the original hive and allowed me to place empty frames in as well. I then rotated the deeps and harvested 5 frames of beautifully capped honey from one of the medium supers (fig 1 and 2). My hope is all of this will keep the hive from swarming.



After emailing Mike Palmer (the Vermont queen breeder who is sending me the new queens) I learned I did the split too soon. I should have done it the day before putting in the new queens so the bees did not start building emergency cells when they realize they are queenless. Now 'll have to go through the hive and cut out any emergency cells I find so they do not kill the new queen. Lovely...

The delicious part about this "solution" is the 14 pounds of honey Gayla and I extracted from the 5 medium wood/wax frames we harvested! Using our new Maxant 3100H (fig 3) was easy and once I realized you need to gradually start spinning the frames or you'll destroy the foundation (oops) the process went smoothly. We let the honey sit in a honey bucket overnight and bottled the honey the next day (fig 4). Measuring the water content with a refractometer, the honey is 17% water. I've read 16% is optimal but as honey is hygroscopic and we are currently living in a rain forest (5.5"of rain in June...) I'm happy. They've made plenty of honey and I could easily harvest another 30 pounds from Hive 2 but with the wet weather, I'd rather leave it for them.

Bring on the new queens!

Beauty and the Beast

Or the Tale of 2 Hives...

Opened both hives today and they could not have been more different. Hive 1 has exploded in population! This was the hive that was working vertically. Not now! Bees cover all of the frames, have drawn all the frames in the first honey super and have filled it with nectar. Honey, nectar, pollen and brood is now in the upper deep (pic 1-3) and the lower deep has some nectar
but is definitely open for her to come back and fill it with brood. There wasn't a drone cell in sight.
he bees were incredibly gentle and easy going and the hive was an absolute pleasure to work. What a great hive this has been this season! I hope it keeps up! After dusting the bottom 3 supers with powdered sugar, I replaced the 4th super on top and sprayed all of the frames with Honey-B-Healthy to try and get the bees to hurry and draw out these frames as well.



Hive 2 is confusing me. Looking at the the top honey super shows bees drawing comb across all 9 frames (I usually 9 frames for honey, 10 for brood). The next honey super is the small cell wax foundation in wooden frames. I think I added this super 3 or 4 weeks ago. Now it is fully drawn and loaded with nectar and some capped honey (pic 4). There are a couple of drone cells on one of the frames.



The remaining 2 supers are the deeps. These have brood but are still loaded with drones cells. I destroyed many of the drone cells and (not surprisingly) found them loaded with mites. I still haven't seen the queen but there is brood and the bees have started several supercedure cells and several swarm cells. I dusted the bottom 2 deeps and put a queen excluder on top of the 2nd deep. I replaced the 2 honey supers and decided to add a 3rd, moving a couple of frames from the 2nd honey super into the new box, again spraying HBH on the new frames to help motivate them to draw comb. I have 2 new queens coming July 1st from Vermont queen breeder Michael Palmer. I can't wait to get one of those into this hive.

The Bait Hive

Written May 25th.

As I mentioned, Hive 2 has been a problem with numerous drone cells, an invisible queen, a couple of now gone supercedure cells and finally some swarm cells. About 2 hours after closing up the hive I noticed a lot of bearding on the front of the hive (pic 1). As I am writing this at 37,000 feet over the Atlantic on my way to a site survey in Barcelona, I was immediately concerned that the bees may swarm while I’m away. The only thing I could think of was to put out a couple of bait hives.

A bait hive is just what it sounds like. It is intended to attract scout bees looking for a place to relocate a swarm. Usually, it’s best to take an old hive or nuc, put in some drawn comb that has previously had brood in it, add swarm lure and place it 10’-15’up on a tree about 50 yards from the hive. When a hive prepares to swarm, scouts are sent out to find a new home for the queen so they can quickly re-establish the colony. As they tend to like areas about 1 cubic foot, a nuc box is great to use.

In my case, I only have 2 new nuc boxes, a medium and a deep, 5 frames of half drawn medium frames and some new deep frames. I prepared the 2 boxes, adding 2 drops of lemongrass oil to each frame and a couple of additional drops at the entrance. I put the medium on our pool deck fence about 12’ off the ground (pic 2). The deep I put out next to the woods on an old stump (pic 3). Within minutes, each had a honeybee checking it out!

The bees stayed out on their front porch all evening, even after it really cooled off. After really looking at the pictures I took, I noticed the bees were not all facing the entrance so maybe they aren’t thinking about swarming. But this is my Russian hive that swarmed last year and I just want to make sure I have a good chance of catching the swarm if it happens while I’m drinking sangria and eating tapas in Spain. Oh, yeah. And doing the site survey!



Update: Just got back and the bees did not swarm. It was rainy and cold until today and the bees seemed to have mellowed out. BTW, even tho’ the sangria was good, the piaya was excellent and working with friends was the best! Thanks to Lara, Stefan, Gaby and Frank for a great trip!

Oh, oh...

Memorial Day Weekend was exquisite! The weather was perfect and Monday proved to be a great day to open up the hives. Being fairly lazy and getting tired of acting like a Sherpa bringing my bee toolkit, smoker fuel, an unused medium super (upon which I place the supers I remove from the hives during inspections) sugar for treatments, cameras, etc. back and forth from the basement to the apiary, I first installed my new storage unit (pic 1) behind the hives. Now everything can just stay out there (sans cameras) and I can make 1 trip instead of 3 or 4.

From the outside, both hives have appeared quite calm and the bees have simply been doing their thing. Hive 2 continues to have significantly more bees than Hive 1 and is much more active. Opening up Hive 1 showed a very relaxed and extremely busy colony. If there isn’t brood, pollen (pic 2) or capped honey in the bottom 3 boxes there is nectar. They have yet to start to draw out the plastic in the top medium but I think that will soon change. There were 3 frames of brood in the 2 deeps, which I spread out a bit by placing a frame of honey in the middle of the brood frames so they move it and use it for more brood. They are still very vertical. I also moved the green drone frame from frame 1 to frame 3 to see if the queen would start laying on it. As mentioned in an earlier post, it is a great way to reduce the mite load of a hive.

After sifting 1 cup of sugar over the bees, I closed them up. They remained incredibly calm the entire inspection.

Hive 2 has completely drawn out the wax in the first medium and now has most of it filled with nectar with 3 or 4 of the frames having a significant amount of drone cells. Bees are in the 2nd medium and are starting to fill the older frames with nectar while leaving the newer Piercos alone. Going into the 2 bottom deeps showed some brood and more drone cells. I have not seen the queen in weeks and looking for eggs on white frames is not easy (note to self: use only black frames in the brood box and white in the honey supers). There is some larvae but I’m starting to wonder if I have laying workers which only lay unfertilized (drone) eggs. The supercedure cells are gone from 2 weeks ago and several swarm cells–tho’ empty–are present. Hopefully, I have a new queen on a mating flight. The swarm cells concern me, especially since I have already reversed the hives and added another super. I did observe lot of bees doing late afternoon orientation flights around this week (see slow mo video) as new bees are starting to venture out and are first familiarizing themselves with the hive location. As this opened up previously occupied cells, I’ll check next week to see what is going into those spaces. I’m wondering if the queen is spreading drones across the cells so I swapped a frame of capped honey for a green drone frame. Hopefully, she’ll fill this up and leave the remaining frames for brood. Meanwhile, I did a crush and strain collection of some absolutely delicious fresh honey! This is the first honey we’ve taken and it’s fantastic!

During the inspection, I destroyed many of the drone cells. As I pulled them out, I found numerous mites on the larvae. After sifting a bit more than 1 cup of powdered sugar over the frames, I closed up the hive. It was about 2 hours later that I became more concerned about swarming…

Joining the 21st Century

Note:
As one who has produced digital video since 1990, it's time we add video to this blog. To see larger windows of the video go to our new website, www.MorningDewApiary.com and look at the Media section. The video will not only be larger, it will look better than this software allows.

Friday was upper 70's and gorgeous so I decided it was time to put Hive 1 in the right super order and see how Hive 2 was building out the new wooden medium frames with small cell wax foundation I added 2 weeks ago.

The Buckfast girls of Hive 1 (pic 1) were quite a calm group as I put the supers in the correct order of 2 deeps on the bottom and 2 mediums on top.While happy to observe the queen is doing her thing, I also noticed the colony is building vertically and only using the leftmost 5 frames (when viewed from the rear of the hive). The queen has laid 2 full frames of brood in both deeps and even some in the medium with the workers packing pollen and honey around them but the 5 frames on the right have not been touched since winter. In fact, there are still dead bees in a few of the cells from winter. So much for good housekeeping habits... After consulting with my fellow beeks on BeeSource, I will start to put 1 or 2 of the empty frames into the middle of the brood to get the queen to start laying more of the frames. You can see the queen being cared for by her attendants in the first video clip.




Hive 2 was quite loud the other night when I walked by. Usually you need to be next to
the hives to hear the melodious buzz of the bees working. On that night, it sounded like a saw mill was in the hive. As they have been extremely busy (and they are Russian bees) I was afraid they may be getting ready to swarm so I added another medium of undrawn Pierco frames to keep them occupied (we don't have wireless out there so their computers don't work). They hadn't started on the new medium but they had already drawn out the wood/wax medium (pic 2)and the queen already had brood going (see video 2 for the nurse
bees feeding the larvae).



Once I took off the mediums, the farther into the hive I went, the more aggressive they became. I found a lot of drone cells on the edge of every frame in the deeps, regardless of whether any other brood was on the frame. The aggressiveness (3 stings from lifting out frames), the amount of drone cells and the loudness from the other night kept me looking at every frame until I finally found what I thought I might. Six frames into the bottom deep were 2 supercedure cells, one was capped, the other open with a future queen floating in royal jelly. Looks like we're about to have a new royal highness. Maybe I'll do a split and use both new queens...

Growing the Apiary

Oh, oh...The bee yard is growing! On the 19th I decided to rake the leaves and remove the winter mess from around the hives. That led to a check up on the electric fence which finally ended up as, "Let's take the fence down and make room for more hives". Two hours later, presto! The apiary doubled in size (fig 1).

Friday, April 24th was the first 70º+ day of the year. Absolutely fantastic and a great opportunity to take an in depth look at the hives. Hive 1 has been very slow and not taking any syrup while Hive 2 has been booming and taking 1 gal/week. It was time to find out what's up...

Hive 1 is configured as a medium with 2 deeps above. When I reversed the hives a week ago, there was brood in the medium which is why I put it on the bottom. Friday, the top deep was populated on the right side only with less that a dozen bees on the left. Surprisingly, there was a lot of nectar being stored. I expected lots of pollen but the nectar was great to see. Some was even being capped!

The middle deep was even better–eggs, various stages of larve (fig 2) and a full frame of capped brood (Note: at this magnification, to have sharp focus on the eggs there isn't sufficient depth of field to keep the workers in focus, too.) After a really close look, her highness even decided to show herself (fig 3).


The lesson I learned from this is you need to really inspect your hives if you suspect something is wrong. I was convinced I may have a hive in trouble of CCD. Many of the signs were there. Lack of feeding, low numbers of bees flying, no dead bees in the vicinity of the hive and a spotty brood pattern the last time I looked. Instead, Hive 1 is Buckfast and is slow building up. Looking inside showed me the hive appears healthy. As they are not feeding on syrup but on their honey stores, I removed the feeder, added an inner cover configured as a top entrance and closed them up.

Hive 2 I expected to be booming. This small cell hive was a new medium of wooden frames with small cell wax foundation inserted last week between the 2 deeps. My plan is to get the bees to draw out comb for a future split. I put the medium between the deeps last week because the brood in the bottom deep made me think that was where the queen was. There I go thinking again...When I opened up the hive, I picked the 2 supers off of the top together to first inspect the bottom deep. What I found was a bit of a mess of drone cells and spotty brood. It looked lie they might be in the process of making a supercedure cell, as well. Not a good surprise. Luckily, further inspection showed me why. When I looked at the new medium, nothing had changed. No work had been started on the new foundation and very few bees were in the super. When I looked at what had been the top deep everything looked wonderful! Lots of eggs, capped brood, great pattern, pollen, nectar–the whole enchilada! (Fig4) That's when I realized what happened and what an idiot I had been.

When inserting the medium, I thought the bees would cross over the new foundation to get to the honey and syrup above. This would make them draw out the comb. Instead, by assuming the queen was in the bottom when she was really in the upper deep, I created a barrier and I think, in essence, inadvertently created a split. The bottom hive didn't cross the barrier and the upper hive had the queen and was thriving. So much for my ideas...Now the colony is configured with the 2 deeps on the bottom, the medium on top of them and a feeder on the very top. Lesson learned...

I made a couple of other interesting observations during the inspections but as I'm sitting in Mass General for the 3rd day with a son with a broken ankle, I'll wait until we're home to continue.

1st Inspection

Sunny and 60º leads a beek to check out his hives. After raking the grass all Friday morning, it was time for a relaxing afternoon with the bees. My plan was to reverse the order of the hives, put on top feeders, close the top entrance and open the bottom entrance. I didn't realize I had a surprise coming...

Starting with Hive 2, everything went according to plan. The ladies were very relaxed. The main cluster was in the top left when viewed from the rear (never work your bees from the front as you are standing in the flight path and more likely to receive a dose of apitherapy). Inspecting the top deep revealed lots-o-bees, some spotty brood pattern spread over a couple of frames (something to watch..) and at least 4 frames of honey remaining from last fall. Somehow, they are starting to bring in some pollen. It has to be from trees as nothing is even close to blooming yet. The bottom deep was similar with the empty comb directly under the cluster on the top deep and honey in the frames to the right. I took both deeps off the bottom board and cleaned out several handfuls of winter kill. After reversing the order of the deeps, putting the top on the bottom and the bottom on top, I put on a top feeder and poured in 1/2 gal of syrup, forgetting it was 2:1 from last winter. This morning, it was already gone and I added a fresh gallon of 1:1 with Honey-B-Healthy (essential oils). There were lots of bees feeding so I'll check them tomorrow afternoon. I opened the vent hole in the top deep and reduced the bottom entrance by 1/2 until they really get going.

The surprise was waiting in Hive 1. This hive consists of 2 deeps with a medium on top. The bees were in the same position as in Hive 2 (fig 1) but there were fewer of them. Still 4 frames of honey in the top. The bees were relaxed and as my smoker was almost dead, I kept going without it. (fig 2) The queen is definitely doing her job as evidenced by the amount of capped brood, larvae and eggs on 2 frames.

After taking off the medium, the top deep started me wondering. There were several hundred dead bees in the middle of the deep. Again, lots of honey remained in frame 7-10. Most of the rest of the honey was gone. Closer inspection showed many of the bees starved! Another hundred bees died head first in the comb trying to get the last bit of nourishment from the cells (fig 3). Oddly, bees were dead at one end of the frame with honey remaining at the other end! There was also a lot of small wax particles spread throughout the hive, tho' I am unsure of the significance of this. If any readers happen to know about this, please comment...

After removing the bottom deep, I dumped the winter kill off the bottom board and reversed the order putting the medium on the bottom. There was only 1 bee at the feeder this morning and less than a dozen when I added the fresh syrup this afternoon. I reduced the bottom entrance by half and opened the ventilation hole in the top deep.

Hive Notes:
Many believe there is no benefit to reversing the hive order in Spring, while others like to start with the queen in the bottom box as she has a tendency to move up. It is incredibly time consuming. If I had more than 3 or 4 hives, I doubt I'd do it.

Also, with all of the honey in each hive, you may wonder why I was intent on feeding syrup. Excellent question! As I do not treat with chemicals, I'm really trying to get some of the essential oils to the bees–the thought being spearmint and lemon grass oils help improve the bees' immune system and reduce the prevalence of nosema and chalk brood while helping to stimulate the queen.

We're back!

I hate quoting Manny Ramierez but here's to starting the 2009 beekeeping season! After a long cold winter in New Hampshire, we finally have had 2 back to back days above 50º and the ladies have been grateful for the opportunity to get out.

Yesterday, I did a lift test to see how heavy the top super was on each hive. They each felt pretty heavy but I really wanted to make sure as late Feb-early March is a prime time for colonies that made it through the worst of winter to end up dying due to starvation. I decided to leave them alone and let them do their cleansing flights–after 4 months, they deserve it! Today was the day to open 'em up and take a look.

As you can see from the number of bees in fig 1 and 2, we've done very well with our hives this winter. The decision not to chemically treat for varroa or nosemea last fall and to stay true to raising the bees as naturally as possible worked out this time. No promises it will always work but after requeening in late summer, I thought I had 2 strong hives in October. I left hive 1 with almost a full deep of honey and added 2/3 of a medium for safety. Hive 2 had fewer bees and I left a full deep for them. That left me with 5 frames of honey. I put them in the freezer for 48 hours to kill anything on them and then stored the frames in an extra deep in the basement. I'll feed it back to them this Spring.

So how did we do? Well, the patty I snuck into each hive in January was still intact in Hive 1 but has almost gone in Hive 2 and each hive still has 1/2 super full of honey. I had planned on doing a feeding of dry sugar to help them through but by not being greedy and taking the honey from the last year, I didn't have to feed them at all today. If you check your bees and decide to do a feeding of dry sugar, make sure you only use granulated sugar and put it through a food processor to make it real fine. They will handle it a lot better, especially if you slightly wet the edges of the sugar mound where it sits on the newspaper.

In Hive 1, I did move frame 5 to position 10 and shifted the other frames over to get the honey closer to the bees. After all, it is only March 8th and we're getting more snow tonight. Getting that food next to them will keep 'em happy.

Admitedly, I'm quite pleased with the way the bees came through their first winter. Keeping bees is a challenge and by asking questions, doing a lot of reading, keeping good records and observing your hives you can help improve the health of your colonies. Figure 3 and 4 are random close-ups of each hive. I saw no signs of of nosema in the hives and these ladies look pretty healthy. I do not see any mites and their wings look healthy. As Gayla's dad says, "Good Lord willing and if the creek don't rise" we're on our way to another summer of learning, swearing, puzzlement, wonderment and hopefully adding 2 more hives. Oh, yeah...and a few more bee stings. Come on Spring!