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...