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!