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.