New Hampsha' Bees

2010-05-16T22:22:00.003-04:00

I am trying a new (to me) blog software called Wordpress. To view the latest post please go to http://nhbees.wordpress.com/

Please let me know how you like the new version and thanks for reading.

John

Two Years of Lessons Learned

2010-03-06T19:48:00.009-05:00

I recently had the honor of becoming the VP of our local beekeeping club. One of the opportunities this presents is the chance to help teach this year's class of new beekeepers–the first class being what equipment they should purchase. Naturally, this makes me think about my original purchasing decisions and what I would do differently if I was starting fresh today. This chapter looks back at what I think I did right and wrong with my equipment choices. The findings are based solely on my experiences and do not reflect the results others may have had.

If you have been a reader of this blog, you are aware I chose to have 2 Beemax polystyrene hives (2 deeps and 3 mediums ea) with Pierco large cell frames in one and Mann Lake small cell plastic frames in the other. I also purchased 2 Beemax polystyrene top feeders and 2 packages of bees shipped from GA. While the Beemax hives have been excellent and my bees continue to survive the last 2 winters, I wish I had never bought the plastic frames. Compared to the wood and wax foundation I have used since then, I can only say that my bees prefer drawing comb on wax, not plastic. While plastic has several benefits over wax, i.e. easier to use and definitely more durable, I have never been able to get my bees to draw out all of the frames in a hive body. While I know other beeks who have great success with plastic, this Spring I will be moving all of my bees to wax. Besides, it makes better candles!

My primary mistake with the hives was to mix deeps and mediums. Michael Bush is spot on. While this is a traditional configuration for Langstoth hives, I have found during the past 2 years that I seem to always have honey, brood or comb on the wrong size frame for the task I need to address immediately. By this I mean I have extra medium frames of honey when I really need deeps–like last Fall. Earlier in the year, the exact opposite was true. To make my life easier and to be able to respond to whatever the bees needs are I am moving all of my hive bodies to mediums. This way I will always have the right size frame available as everything in my apiary will be consistent. Plus, the days of lifting 90 pound deeps are over, allowing me to continue beekeeping well into retirement. The only caveat is to keep my honey frames separate from the brood frames so that the honey can remain cleaner.

Speaking of frames and foundation, I believe there is something to be said for natural cell/small cell foundation. Two of my hives and the nuc are small cell while the other 2 hives are large. Too confusing... While I have not done a mite drop comparison to prove that small cell is better in my apiary, I believe it is from my inspections and I've decided to regress my 2 large cell hives to natural starting this Spring.

As for the feeders, in my apiary hundreds of bees have drowned in the polystyrene feeders over the past 2 years and I have quit using them. I really like the dual plastic tray feeders from Rossman Apiaries (G56 Hive Top Feeder). The screen the bees use for support is immensely safer for them to traverse as they feed vs the plastic sheet provided with the polystyrene. While I still have had bees drown using my new feeders, it is less than 2 dozen vs hundreds.

As I have mentioned above, the Beemax hives have performed well but, in reality, so has my wooden hive. As I get older I find more joy in working with natural materials and even tho' the Beemax have proven themselves, I will only be adding wooden hives to my apiary this year. Now that I have a complete woodworking shop I can easily make my own hives at the quality level I prefer. I'll still keep using the Beemax mediums until they give out.

A comment about "starter" kits–those kits provided by the sellers that contain "everything you need to start raising bees". Today, I would avoid purchasing starter kits and buy exactly what I need, not what a marketing/sales person wants to sell me. Why? First off, I NEVER use the beekeeper's gloves they provide. Being respectful to the bees while working their hive requires manual dexterity. On a scale of 1-10, those gloves reduce my dexterity to a 3. I only let visitors who are not going to be in the hives wear them so they feel protected. Secondly, I have not found a starter kit that allows me to just buy mediums. Third, the veil, the included book, the queen excluder and the feeder are useless to me. I would rather spend my dollars on an extra hive tool, a good veil/jacket combo and a feeder that works better. As for the book, buy the new edition of Kim Flottum's Backyard Beekeeper. It's the best book I've read for newbies.

Lastly, the bees. If you look at my early postings you will see that the first year I lost both queens and had to purchase a nuc to combine with Hive 1 so it would survive. The best way to start a a hive is from a nuc. A nuc from a reputable breeder has a laying queen that is already well accepted by the colony, a couple of frames of brood and, most often, has been raised locally and is suitable for your climate. I know so many beeks that have had the same distress I had the first year that I simply cannot recommend buying a package of bees that has been shipped 800 miles, been chemically treated and has a queen that may not even be the same race of bee. The trouble is that is what is most available to us and the way most new beeks have to start. It's actually how I will populate my top bar hive this year. Hopefully, it will be the last package I ever buy. Smart beekeeping means to be prepared in advance and know where you can purchase a local queen should yours come to an early demise.

So how did I do 2 years ago? Not that well. I spent the last half of my first season fighting to keep my hives alive, I spent a lot of money on things I did not ever need or use, bought hive bodies the wrong size and now have to replace them as well as all of my original frames. Meanwhile, my bees still did fine tho' possibly would have done better if I had not tried so many variables. The right things I did was buying a solar powered bear fence, reading, reading, reading and joining www.beesource.com. The absolute best part is I still have never chemically treated my bees and my hives continue to survive (said with crossed fingers which makes it really hard to type). I have learned what my bees seem to prefer and I have the wherewithal and desire to correct my mistakes. The top of this blog states that you will see the things I try and learn of my successes and failures. You've just met my failures. Meanwhile, I know other beeks who have had great success and swear by many the things I am changing. May their bees continue to prosper as I know my bees now will too.

A Recap of Year 2

2010-02-25T11:45:00.010-05:00

Seems strange to begin this year's blog immediately after plowing 15" of snow from the driveway but it's good to dream of warm summer days ahead. Last year's beekeeping ended with a thud. Gayla's dad suffered a massive stroke in September-just as work travel accelerated-leaving precious little time for tending to the bees. The best news is Dad is an obstinate ol' bird and refused to give in to the stroke and is recovering wonderfully! Now to the girls...

As I said, my getting the hives ready for winter was seriously cut short. When I left the hives in August, everything seemed to be going well. I had anywhere from 2-3 supers on all the hives and thought all would be fine. When I returned to the apiary in October, I was surprised to find the deeps were basically empty and the hives were very light. I immediately started feeding 2:1 syrup. Luckily it stayed warm enough for the girls to go through over 40 pounds of sugar before it became too cold.

I installed a bamboo reed windbreak on the North side of the the 3 main hives and piled evergreen boughs against the back of the other hive and nuc (pic 3). I still thought a couple of the hives were light so I decided to try the Mountain Camp Method of feeding. This is where you add a medium to the top of the hive, line it with 1 sheet of barely damp newspaper and pour in granulated sugar to provide food for the bees during the colder months (see pic 4). Make sure you lightly wet the edges of the sugar pile to help them start to take it. Replace your inner and telescoping covers back and cross your fingers. This will not only serve as a food source, it will also help reduce moisture in the hive as the sugar will absorb it. The bees will eat through the newspaper and hit the sugar as needed. I do believe this will be a mess come Spring and should only be used in a definite emergency. This pic is from a couple of weeks ago.

Since I have done this, I have learned that this technique may actually increase the chance of nosema, as pure sugar changes the pH of a honey bee's stomach, making it more susceptible. Hereis an excellent discussion about this started on Beesource.com by Michael Palmer www.beesource.com/forums/showthread.php?t=237506 It is definitely worth reading and is a big reason why I will not try this again and will pay A LOT more attention to my bees in August through October. Michael is a phenomenal beek with over 700 hives and nucs in northern VT. I have one of his queens and have 2 more already on order for my June splits.

Current Conditions:
This is the most dangerous time of the year for northern hives. The bees are getting low on stores and the queens are starting to want to lay. It's critical to make sure they have food or the hive simply will not make it until Spring.

As of last weekend, the ladies were out and buzzing in all hives and the nuc. I added a pollen patty to 3 of the hives late January (pic 4) and, except for Hive 1, they were definitely devouring them. All of the hives seem quite content. Hive 1 has a very small cluster and a fair amount of bee excrement on the front of the hive. As they are Buckfast, I am not worried about the cluster size. When I checked inside, the hive appeared clean so I'm not sure if I have a nosema problem or not. There is plenty of honey left which is not surprising for Buckfast honey bees. Again, I do not treat for any condition with the exception of starvation and if I manage my hives properly I will not have to worry about that either.

Plans for Spring:
Assuming they all continue to survive, this year I hope to be able to split 3 of the 4 hives and will definitely move the nuc into a new home. That will make 8 hives, 2 of which will be off site. I intend to also build a Kenyan top bar hive (TBH). I need to decide if I'm going to try to use my bees or buy one last package to get it started. No offense intended, however I hope to never again buy a package from down south. Many of the packages (forget the queens!) do not even make it to Fall, they increase the chance of importing Small Hive Beetles, mites and other parasites, as well as increases the chance of bringing Africanized genetics into our area. I am seriously trying to generate all of our bees from overwintered hives and nucs. More on this and TBH later.

Come on Spring!

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

2009-08-22T10:18:00.008-04:00

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...

2009-08-08T22:35:00.008-04:00

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

2009-07-12T16:50:00.004-04:00

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!

2009-07-06T19:01:00.005-04:00

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!

2009-07-01T14:02:00.007-04:00

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

2009-06-06T21:01:00.004-04:00

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

2009-05-30T20:00:00.005-04:00

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...

2009-05-26T16:02:00.006-04:00

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

2009-05-17T12:56:00.007-04:00

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

2009-04-27T11:41:00.011-04:00

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

2009-04-11T17:28:00.007-04:00

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!

2009-03-08T14:28:00.004-04:00

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!

We have brood, dude!

2008-10-04T17:57:00.006-04:00

Yeah, baby! All is right in the world of our bees! We've seen the queen in Hive 2 and Hive 1 has eggs and brood on 3 different frames. Ahhhh, life is good...

My mom and dad came from San Jose to visit us for a few days. They've enjoyed the blog so I knew they would both enjoy helping me work the bees. After getting Dad decked out in the bee suit we fired up the smoker and dove into Hive 2. Second frame in, there she was! A beautiful laying queen with half a frame of capped brood, young larvae and eggs (pic 2 Can you find the queen?). She has to have been raised by the hive. The queen cell on the frame we put in last week has not had time to hatch, breed and lay this much brood in a week. Now we have to feed, feed, feed to get more honey put away. I added another patty and put a gallon of 2:1 in the feeder.

Then it was on to Hive 1. Hive 1 has 2 deeps and a medium and is the hive in which we installed the nuc last week. We first looked at the medium and found zero brood and little honey. i added it to make sure they didn't swarm last weekend. On initial inspection of the 1st deep we found the first 3 frames loaded with honey. The 4th frame is from the nuc. There we found the first bit of brood. We struck pay dirt on the center side of the frame and continued for the next 2 frames. We never saw the queen but there was a lot of capped brood, larvae, and eggs. I'm amazed this queen made it withth e battles that were going on outside the hive. Compared to the light golden yellow capped brood the Italian queens have produced, this brood is much darker brown–telling me the Buckfast queen made it and is doing her thing. (pic 4) Again, a patty and 2:1 for all.

What a wonderful relief having both hives queen right heading into winter. Now they both have a chance to make it. I am not hedging my bets though as I have decided not to chemically treat for nosema or varroa. I sugared the bees, ran drone frames and closely visually inspected them all summer long. I've seen 1 mite and have had success with the drone frames. My initial plan was to raise the bees as holistically as possible and until I see signs of disease, I'm not going to treat. My only hesitance is not treating for nosema, however I've spoken with several local beeks who say they do not treat and have no problem. I've learned a lot of lessons this year the hard way. Time will tell if my bees will pay the price or reap the gains of this last, very major decision.

He's Ripping Our Roof Off, Again!

2008-09-28T08:22:00.005-04:00

Let's see... I slept in until 6:45 this morning and while brushing my teeth I took at glance out at the hives. The entire bottom deep of hive 1 was covered with bees. So I think to myself, hmm....it's been raining all night, it's really warm and muggy out, the bees are never awake right now and I just added 5 frames of bees to a full hive and took a medium off as I was instructed. Me thinks these ladies are either cooling their keesters outside or they really don't like the neighborhood we live in and are about to head back to Winchester. Soooo, I don a full bee suit, grab a bottle of HBH spray, a hive top feeder and off I go a calling.

Sure enough, all the bees on the outside are Buckfast–not an Italian to be seen. Naturally, I left my smoker open next to the hives and it is soaked. I really sucked as a Boy Scout and used to leave my dad's rusty ol' tools wherever I last used them (I wonder if that's why they looked rusty and old) but now pride myself on usually not doing such a stupid thing. Without the benefit f smoke, I take off the telescoping cover and inner cover. The bees are fairly cool about it, tho' I've never seen more bees between the 2 covers before. I replace the medium I was told to take off when I installed the nuc and throw a feeder on top. I balance the inner cover against the front landing of the hive and an empty deep I keep nearby to put boxes on when working the hives and remove the mouse guard to open up the entrance so the "March of the Bees" can proceed unhindered (pic 1 shows final result). Just for good measure, I sprayed the Buckfast with HBH to make them happier.

As hoped, the 1500+ bees on the inner cover start marching right back into the hive. Even the Buckfast join the parade tho' there are a few skirmishes.

I'll go out and pick up the mess later. Trouble is, I KNEW I should have left that medium on the hive. Time to start believing in myself more. The life of an inexperienced beekeeper...

Now where's my morning coffee?

Queenless in Westmoreland

2008-09-26T20:39:00.006-04:00

A very busy month at work has meant not enough time in the apiary.
Unfortunately at just the wrong time.

After adding our Russian queen in late August, all seemed to be going well. The 1st time I opened Hive 1, there were eggs and new brood. I thought had balanced the hive, again. Wrong-o, Johnny! A week later, I opened the hive just before heading to Germany. No eggs, 4-5 day old larvae and absolutely no sign of the Russian matriarch. Possibly my bees thought their ancestors were from the other Georgia and off-ed her. None-the-less, she was gone and I headed to a plane.

Ten days later I return home hoping to open the hives and see that they're making cells to replace the queens. I looked at every frame in Hive 1 and found no queen cells but instead 20 frames almost completely filled with mostly capped honey. Remember the medium I had on the bottom that had been partially filled with honey. It had been suggested by a beek on Beesource to put it on the bottom and let the bees bring the honey up into the deeps. Sure enough, absolutely cleaned out and empty. Nice call... As all the frames in the deeps are packed with honey, I moved the medium to the top and hoped that would stimulate them to make queen cells. Mouse guards were added to both hives to help keep critters from finding a winter home.

Hive 2 as you may recall swarmed 2x in 3 days in early September (see pic 1 for 2nd swarm). Many of the bees left and the numbers in this hive make me think that it's toast unless I combine it with Hive 1. Upon opening it, I found a couple of poorly formed queen cells but they didn't look like the bees were serious about raising a queen. I started feeding them 2:1 syrup and a patty.

After seeing the lack luster efforts by the bees, I decided to try and find a queen. I finally purchased a nuc (pic 2) from Black Cat Honey in Winchester, NH and was assured by Rich that the queen was prolific and laying like crazy. I was concerned that putting 5 frames of Buckfast bees (pic 3) and a queen in the middle of the Italians would start a war. Rich assured me it wouldn't as long as the 5 frames were together. So off I went to install the nuc.

I removed the 5 best frames of honey from the upper deep of Hive 1 to make room for the new bees and queen(pic 4). Upon looking at the nuc, I found very little brood, some larvae and a few eggs. The rest of the frames were sporadically empty or had some honey. Two of the frames had supercedure cells ready to hatch. Gayla thought we should put one of the frames with a queen cell into Hive 2 and see if we could save the hive. After brushing the bees off of the frame, I did replace a frame of honey with the new frame, added a patty and closed it up, hoping the cell would hatch and just maybe we could get a queen fertilized prior to winter. Let's just say the odds are rather long...

After spraying a sugar and Honey Bee Healthy (HBH) mix all over the remaining frames in Hive 1, I placed the remaining 4 frames into the deep. I never saw a queen, though I did look hard. The bees seemed OK with each other so I fed them a pollen patty, sprayed some more HBH on the bees and dumped the rest of the bees from the nuc into the hive. it was after closing the hive that I noticed the fun going on at the main entrance of the hive. Numerous battles were ongoing between the old and new bees trying to get in the entrance. So much for détente! I sprayed them down with HBH, which helped, but battles went on for a while. As it was getting dark I'm hoping they all finally gathered around the queen singing "Give Peace a Chance" and that the queen was not a casualty...

Varroa

2008-09-01T19:53:00.003-04:00

There are a lot of theories as to the cause of Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). Is it pesticides, over medication, increased stress from transporting bees, mites, all of the above or something else? There isn't a definitive answer but we do know each spell trouble for Apis mellifera or the honey bee. This is why I choose to raise my bees as holistically as possible and why I chose to end the use of chemicals on my yard 5 years ago. My lawn is still nice and green, it just has more clover and crabgrass mixed in.

Of all of the possibilities for CCD, the one topic that seems to get the most airplay is the Varroa destructor mite (pic 1, red dot on back of bee). Introduced in 1987, this mite has essentially wiped out 98% of the feral or wild honey bee population across the US and has the largest econimic impact on the beekeeping industry of any parasite. Known as an external parasite, V. destructor can only breed in a honey bee colony. The female mite lays eggs in drone or worker brood which attach to the larva and emerge with the bee when it hatches. The mite sucks the hemolymph of the bee resulting in Deformed Wing Disease, weakens the bee and can finally kill it.

There are chemical, mechanical and biological treatments to keep the mite population in check. I'd like to discuss what I am doing to try to minimize Varroa in my hives.

I've mentioned numerous times in the blog that I "sugar" the bees (pic 2). This is the practice of dusting the bees with confectionary sugar. The theory is it causes the mite to loose its grip on the bee and fall off. Since I use a screened bottom board (the board the hive rests on has a large screen mesh for its center), the mite falls out of the hive onto the ground. Unless the mite can attach itself to another bee, it will remain there and die.

Hive 2 uses a "small cell" plastic frame made by Mann Lake. The diameter of the cell imprinted on the frame is 4.9mm as compared to most frames which are 5.4mm. When bees are allowed to make whatever size comb they want they usually make a smaller size 4.6 - 5.2mm cell. Michael Bush calls this "Natural Cell Size". Years ago, foundation manufacturers thought it would be a good idea to make larger honey bees so they would make more honey. By increasing the cell size the egg is laid in, they reasoned a larger bee would result–which it did. Now introduce Varroa which only replicates in honey bee cells. Larger cells means more room for more mites. More mites, more problems. Regress the bees to their natural cell size and you limit the amount of mites that can grow in the cell. The truth be told, this hive has had problems all season and I wonder if it is the cell size. Package bees and queens are not raised on small cell and it takes them quite a while to regress to that size.

Which brings us to drone frames (pic 3). Drone cells are naturally larger, up to 6.4mm, as the drone bees are larger than workers. V.destructor prefers to lay her eggs in drone cells because there is so much room. Today you can buy drone frames which are green plastic for easy identification. The are imprinted with a 6.4mm cell size and after the bees draw out the comb, the queen lays mainly drones in the cells. Now you have a frame of bees that you really don't need that the mites will love. Once you find capped drone cells on the frame you have 21 days (incubation time of a drone bee) to remove the frame and freeze it, thereby killing the drones and the mites before they hatch. You need 2 drone frames per hive to rotate frames between freezer and hive. Picture 4 shows three V.destructor mites that were on larvae when I froze this frame. I opened about 40-50 cells this evening and found 5 mites. I'm going to do a roll test soon to determne the mite population in the hives–but more on that later. Suffice it to say there are holistic ways to control this predator and I plan to try all of them before I use chemical intervention in my hives.

"John, I think we have a swarm!"

2008-08-31T19:56:00.014-04:00

Now these are not the words I thought I would
hear today. I'm minding my own business staining the barn when I hear Gayla's alert. My first thought was it must be from someone else's hive but Hive 2 was a bit frentic early this morning. It's just that I requeened Hive 1 earlier this week and Hive 2 is making new queens. Both hives have plenty of space, are getting pollen patties and 2:1 syrup. What's up?

Sure enough, there is a swarm 25 - 30' up in a hemlock on the edge of the woods (pic 1). Not having been a very good Boy Scout, I do not own a nuc box. With the condition of both hives being marginal for honey stores, there is no way I can capture this hive and make a nuc using existing stores anyway. These bees never should have swarmed and are doomed...

After unsuccessfully emailing one beek and calling another, I decide this is a job for Super Dolt (pic 2).

Using a pole saw and a big cardboard box, I plan to cut off the limb, let it fall and then put the swarm in the box (pic 3). This all went according to plan, tho' as one is climbing a ladder to saw off a branch full of bees while dressed like a technician on an Apollo moon launch, one does
pause to wonder just when was the moment that you passed over to certifiably insane.

Once the bees were on the ground (pic 4) I found the queen and put her in a cage (pic 5). I sprayed her with syrup and added a couple of attendants while Gayla ran into the house to make a sugar plug. Once plugged, I put the cage and about 5 more attendants into a paper bag and put the bag in a warm spot inside. I then shook the bees into the box and placed the box back in front of Hive 2. The march of the bees began and in about a hour the box was empty and the bees were back in the hive. Several hundred bees remained on the ground where the branch fell. I think these may be nurse bees who have never been out of the hive and can't find their way
home. I put the now empty box upside down over the mass of bees. I think they will move into the top of the box and I will be able to shake them in front of the hive tomorrow.

Now what to do with the queen...

Приветствуйте российскую Королеву

2008-08-28T21:59:00.002-04:00

or
Welcome the Russian Queen!

Keeping the string alive of never meeting a beekeeper I didn't like, on Wednesday I visited Warm Colors Apiary (see website list) and met a wonderful beekeeper, Dan Conlon. Dan has been keeping bees for 40 years and, with his wife, Bonita, has a very nice apiary and store at their home in South Deerfield, MA. I emailed Dan about purchasing a queen to replace the one I just lost in Hive 1. Even tho' he did not have any raised queens for sale, he offered to sell me a queen out of one of his nucs since I was in a jam. Getting a new queen was worth the ride but the best part was the education I received while speaking with Dan. Our conversation covered everything from Russian vs Italian bees, treating the 2 strains of nosema, the efficacy of sugaring bees to prevent mites (do it only on days over 90º), the importance of knowing the environment in which you are raising your bees, how to place the new queen in the hive and, well, you get my drift. I was very grateful for the queen but the conversation will be what I remember–which is one of the things I like best about beekeeping. The experienced beeks never hesitate to help the newbies. It's a great community...

The new queen is a locally raised Russian. The Russian strain tends to winter better, build up faster in the spring, be more tolerant of verroa but will be less docile than the Italians and will tend to swarm. Nowhere in nature does a community (like a beehive) that is so related have such a dramatic change in genetics as when a new queen is introduced to an existing hive. Often, the bees that are getting the queen will reject her and attack her in her cage, especially if there are attendant bees in the cage with her. To help prevent this, Dan caught the queen, marked her and put her in a single hole cage with a sugar plug (pic 1). To keep her happy, he put her in a paper bag and added a few bees to attend to her until I put her in her new home.

Prior to introducing her, I did a final check for eggs. Though I didn't see any, I did see they had started several supersedure cells and had actually capped one already. This really makes me wonder if the queen had become trapped in the queen excluder prior to Sunday and maybe I didn't accidentally kill her but simply found her. Who knows...In order to help her be accepted by my bees, I placed her cage in the top deep between 2 frames of capped brood. The nurse bees are young and tend to be more willing to accept the queen more than the older field bees. It was amazing to watch! As soon as I put her in position bees immediately came to her–not aggressively–but in a care taking fashion (pic 2-3).
After placing a pollen patty, I closed up the hive. I'll open it on Saturday to see if the bees have released her. If they have, I'll leave everything alone for a couple of weeks and then check for eggs and capped brood. If that's what I see, the hive is happy. If not, I'll have to combine the hives...

Queens...kill all you want, we'll make more

2008-08-25T20:22:00.005-04:00

What a weekend! I inspected Hive 1 on Friday. It looked pretty good with 2 almost complete frames of capped honey, some stored pollen, various stages of capped brood, larvae and eggs in the upper deep, no eggs but more pollen and honey in the lower (pics 1-3). Seemed like the queen wasn't laying enough for the time of year, tho'. Every frame in the medium super was half built out and filled with uncapped honey. Ive been feeding 1:1 syrup trying to get them to build more comb and I'm sure most of the honey was from the syrup. I ended up reversing the order of the deeps to try to get some more brood started. I put the hive back together, forgot to sugar the deeps, did sugar the super and called it a day.

Saturday was just as beautiful as Friday so I decided to check on the supersedure cells in Hive 2 and, since the hive had become so mellow, fully expected to find a new queen happily filling cells. Wrong! There were 15 supersedure cells, 6 of which were already capped and 2 possible swarm cells (I'll post again soon on the difference)! Yikes! Absolutely no eggs, some mid-stage larvae and a fair amount of honey in the super but hardly any in the deeps. After closing everything back up, I decided I needed to take off the medium super, start feeding 2:1 syrup (helps make the bees want to build comb and store honey) and feed them a pollen patty to build up stores. When a hive goes queenless it tends to keep the brood nest open so the new queen will have a lot of available room to lay her eggs. In this case, that means no bees and no food in the deeps. With winter coming soon this hive is in serious trouble.

To confirm I had a solid plan, I emailed the good folks at Beesource.com and my fellow beek, Keith, and asked them what they thought of my plan. They approved it with one gent suggesting I put the super on the bottom of the stack and let the bees bring the honey up into the deeps. My plan included moving the frames of honey to the other side of the yard and let the bees go there to get it. This would also keep other bees and insects away from the hive rather than just leaving the frames adjacent to to it as an attractant. This became my mission for Sunday...

Continuing the phenomenal late August weather, Sunday dawned with gorgeous blue skies and a high of 81. The ladies in both hives were back to normal after my excursions through their homes the previous 2 days. The first setback was finding my pollen patties infested with moths. An entire case of Global patties looked like the hallowed breeding grounds of several hundred pantry moths. Back to Beesource to see if I could still use them if I trimmed off the damaged area and froze the patties before using them. As I figured, no...(tho' Global later told me yes) so I made 3 gallons of 2:1 syrup (20 pounds granulated sugar in 10 pints of boiling water) added 1 tsp Honey-B-Healthy per quart of syrup to the mix (lemon grass oil and spearmint oil to help calm the bees and induce them to build comb) and out to the hives I went.

Hive 2 went very well. I smoked the entrance and under the inner cover, popped off the super, moved the 2 deeps off of the screened bottom board, put the super in place , pu the deeps n top of the super, removed the queen excluder, added a feeder and closed them up. Totally time was 10-15 minutes. The bees were not too pleased to be bothered 2 days in a row but no apitherapy injections so I was pleased. The joy was with Hive 1...

After waiting about 10 minutes for Hive 2 to settle down, I repeated the process. Let me state that picking up 2 hive bodies open at the bottom and top with 30,000-40,000 bees in them did make me wonder just what the heck I was doing. Bees were everywhere!

Everything started smoothly. I put the deeps on top of the super and smoked the top of the queen excluder to drive the bees down into the hive. Needing to be careful that I didn't drop the queen during all of the moving, I was extremely cognizant of my movements and making sure she didn't get left behind. After smoking the excluder I used a bee brush to gently remove a couple of bees still on the top of the excluder and removed it. Naturally there were 100 or so bees on the brood side so I brushed them off into the hive, laid it on the stand and replaced the inner cover and hive top. That's when I noticed a rather large bee stuck in the excluder. Sure enough, closer inspection showed me I had just wiped out the queen! Just lovely...

Not having 28 days for them to raise a queen, have her harden, mate and return to the hive, I ordered a locally raised queen from Warm Color Apiaries in South Deerfield, MA. Dan was very kind to promise me one of his Italian hybrid queens that I'll pick up on Wednesday and install in the hive. I still can't believe it. The queen should have run from the light and the smoke. I certainly didn't see her when I brushed off the other bees. Maybe she was already stuck in the excluder but I think I'm the assassin.

Hive notes:
Hive 1 will have just a slight setback until the new queen is released. I didn't think the hive had enough stores for winter which is why I reversed the super on this hive, too. In hind site, I'd still reverse the super. The number of bees seems good in this hive, no signs of verroa, good activity and it seems like they are putting away a good amount of pollen. I do not plan on any chemical intervention with either hive and think this hive has a good chance this winter. I will start feeding 2:1 this week and will add HBH to the mix.

Hive 2 should have a mated queen in residence within the next 14-18 days. I'm going to keep my grocer happy and keep feeding 2:1, as well as put a patty between the 2 deeps. Each hive needs about 80 pounds of honey to make it through the winter. This hive has to hurry. It may be I have to combine the 2 but I'm going to give this a shot. And try not to kill any more queens...

Back to normal?

2008-08-22T17:40:00.005-04:00

Eleven days ago I opened Hive 2 to try and see what was going on. More and more bees were bearding and the hive just appeared to be "off" when compared to the look and activity of Hive 1. Lots of activity but the bees were really hanging around the outside of the hive. What I found made me think it was a queenless hive. The drone comb that had been completely untouched about 3 weeks prior was now almost completely drawn out and lots of eggs were on it. There was still some capped brood in the rest of the hive but not what I would expect and there were not any other eggs. The supersedure cells I found last time were not there and 2 others were in their place. With the rain, I kept feeding them.

I came home Wednesday from a quick trip and what a difference in the hive! No bearding, tons of activity, lots of bees loaded with pollen coming home and a very peaceful sounding buzz coming from the hives. The apiary even smells great! Me thinks the ladies have a new leader of whom they are quite fond. I wish we did!

Pass the Royal Jelly Please!

2008-07-26T18:57:00.004-04:00

Today was a picture perfect day for checking the hives only to find treachery is running amok in the hives. Both hives have built supercedure queen cells. I'm not surprised Hive 2 is not pleased with their royal highness (Pic 1). The hive has been behind since the beginning but recently seemed to catch up. Inspecting the hive today, we quickly found the queen. However, tho' there was capped brood, there didn't seem to be many larvae and I couldn't find any eggs, tho' it is often hard to see them against the white MannLake PF100 frames. Off with her head and let's get a queen who wants to build some brood! Unfortunately, this will mean a lull while the new queen goes on her mating flight and finally gets back to work. Not sure what happened but this queen is on her way out...Ciao, baby!

I am very surprised about Hive 1 developing a new queen. She has been a dependable layer and there are new eggs and larvae. This has always been the strong hive and I'm disappointed to see something is not pleasing the ladies. I almost crushed the cell but thought the bees know better than I and it would be best to let them decide. I hope there is enough time for the new queens to get established and build up some more numbers before it gets cold.

Hive Notes:
Now that the bees are not pleased with her, we FINALLY saw the queen in Hive 1. This is the first time I've seen her since May when I hung the cage and installed the package. There were lots of bees in the new super but hardly and comb was drawn. I inspected the upper deep and there was about a 50/50 mix of brood and honey on 7 frames. Having seen the queen, I decided to move the empty frames to the center, sugared the upper deep and put everything back as it was. I'll continue to feed them to try to stimulate building comb in the super.

Hive 2 was very similar to Hive 1–just a slight amount of comb in the super and about half of the upper deep was filled with honey (Pic 2). The problem was there is a lot of empty cells and not a lot of capped brood. The bottom deep still had 3 frames untouched with hardly any bees on them. The drone cell frame was as clean as when I 1st put it in in May. leaving the drone frame in place, I moved the other empty frames to the center and then reversed the deeps, putting the upper in the bottom position. My hope is the bees will draw out comb on the empty frames and the queen will move up and start laying in the older cells.

Lastly, I've noticed lot of bearding occurring on this hive (bees standing on the outside of the hive near the entrance).

Plan:
Keep feeding and check the hives in the next 5-7 days to see if the supercedure cells are sealed. I'll also do a better job checking for eggs.

Building an Ark...

2008-07-24T14:43:00.004-04:00

Okay, enough already! We've had 6 straight days of hard rain, the corn is laying on it's side and I'm on vacation. The only good parts about this are I'm not at work, I've added new shelves, organized and cleaned the barn and shed and fertilized the lawn (organically, of course).

The bees cannot be pleased so this morning I fed them. They immediately started to take the syrup so it was worth getting soaked. I really need to inspect the hives but I didn't think they'd like me removing their roof in a rain storm. They have been congregating on the front of the hives the last 2 evenings during breaks in the storm and I'd like to see how they are doing with the super I added to each hive.

While I was sitting on the front porch this afternoon, we had a 20 minute lull in the rain. I noticed a couple of the ladies hanging out on one of the hostas. Watching them, I realized it wasn't just 2 bees but more like 20 coming to drink and then heading back to the hive while others came in to take their place. None of the other plants had a bee on them–just the hosta. Here are a couple of pics of the bees drinking...

Did I Say No Honey?

2008-07-11T19:54:00.002-04:00

After a quick trip to Germany, I'm a week late posting the progress as of last weekend.

In the previous post I wondered about the lack of honey and pollen stores. There was lots of brood but nothing to keep 'em going. They must have heard me! They've gone into serious honey production and both hives have frames of just capped honey as well as frames mixed with brood. We added mediums with excluders to both hives as the top deeps had 7 frames mostly filled out. We have continued to feed and will do so until they are building comb in the new supers. We used a lot less smoke this time and I was stung 3 times on the left hand. Made for an itchy and puffy left hand for about 3 days.

The best part of the inspection was watching 2 bees hatch (pics 2 & 3). While watching the 1st one start to come out another started breaking through the cap. Based on the activity of each hive, LOTS of bees are hatching! I'd estimate 40-45,000 bees are now in residence in each hive. Busy queens!

Hive Notes:

Hive One has a lot of activity happening in the top deep. I put the 2nd deep on when the 1st had 5-6 frames filled out. I was leaving for Hong Kong for 10 days and I thought it would be smart to add it so they had room. As it worked out, it seems all they did was move upstairs. There are 4 empty frames (including the drone frame) in the bottom so I exchanged 2 frames of brood from the top with 2 empties from the bottom. We still have never seen the queen in this hive. She must be small and similarly colored as the workers but she is definitely a prolific layer. It appeared the bees were building a queen cell in this hive. I scraped it off since I moved 2 empty frames up and added the super. If they were building the cell because of space, I've hopefully solved the problem. If I see another this weekend, I'm going to leave it and assume they know something is up with the current queen and let them superceed her. Definitely makes me wonder what's up because she's laying. I sugared the bees for mites and filled the feeder. They've hardly touched it this week.

Hive 2 is definitely taking syrup. Now that the supers are on, Gayla made 1:1 syrup without Honey-Be-Healthy so not to contaminate the honey. Overall, this hive has come on strong and is now almost even with Hive One. The bees do seem more relaxed in this hive. sugared the bees in this hive, as well.

After not opening the hives for 2 weeks, it was very difficult to pull the frames out of the top deeps because the bees built burr comb between the bottom of the frames in the top deep and the top of the frames in the bottom deep. Using my hive tool, I was able to pry the frames loose. I scraped off the burr comb, leaving half of it for them and taking the other half for us to eventually use to make candles.

Lots of brood, no honey

2008-06-21T20:20:00.006-04:00

What a beautiful day to be a beekeeper! High 70's, sunny with nice cloud breaks and no wind. Simply gorgeous!

It's been 3 weeks since we opened Hive 1 and 2 weeks since we opened Hive 2. Man, are there a lot of bees in there (pic 1)! Both hives have lots of capped brood but less than 1/2 frame of honey or pollen between them. Three weeks ago I took the top feeder off Hive 1, 2 weeks ago for Hive 2. Seems the queens have been busy laying eggs and the bees are doing a great job raising them but the field bees don't seem to be putting any stores away.

Off to Beesource.com; asking if this is
normal and should I put the feeders back on. Five minutes and I had an answer! What an incredible resource. Yes, put the feeders on as there aren't enough stores to feed the bees if there's a dearth but not to worry as at this point you want lots of brood, not honey. Soooooo, tomorrow on go the feeders.

I examined every frame today as a fellow new beek and email buddy, Keith, has a queen cell in one of his hives (pic 2 courtesy of Keith). We both bought our packages from BetterBee and installed them on the same day. Odd to already have a queen cell so I really wanted to check to see if I had the same. No problem, just LOTS of burr comb and many more bees.
In fact, almost all of our bees are now New Hampshire natives. Of course, unless your relatives came over on the Mayflower and immediately settled here, you'll never be a NH native!

Hive Notes
Hive 1: The bees did not draw out the outer 2 frames on either side of the lower deep but moved straight up to the 2nd deep I put on 3 weeks ago where they've drawn 3 1/2 frames. As mentioned, there are a LOT of bees in this hive! It was a bit unnerving when I looked in and knew I was going to pick up each frame. To help start getting the bees to draw out more frames, I moved 2 of the outer frames toward the center. Still haven't seen the queen but she's doing a great job (pic 1 and 3)!

Hive 2 now has drawn 6 frames with lots of capped brood, larvae and some eggs. Didn't see the queen today but the number of bees in this hive has increased dramatically (pic 4). As I will be unable to open them for a couple of weeks, I added a 2nd deep after spraying the frames with 1:1 syrup with Honey-B-Healthy added to the syrup. Didn't see the queen today.

For mite control, I sugared all of the bees. The ladies were very relaxed and let us work them without a problem. One of the girls stung me on the forefinger after I accidentally pinched her. Ten minutes after leaving the apiary they were out and about like we were never there.

Drifting, anyone?

2008-06-15T19:50:00.005-04:00

I've been wondering why Hive 1 is so far ahead of Hive 2. The beeks at beesource.com (a must website for any aspiring beekeeper) have addressed this a couple of times and I believe Hive 2 may be a victim of drifting. Drifting is when you install 2 or more packages at the same time and the bees from one hive move into the other hive before everyone gets settled. This makes great sense to me as Hive 2 has been behind from the beginning.

Hive Notes:
I've left Hive 1 alone for the past 2 weeks and plan to visit it next week. I did open Hive 2 last weekend and found most of 4 frames built out (1st picture). I took the top feeder off and installed an inner cover. I opted to leave the hives alone this week, tho' I did raise the rear of the telescoping top on each hive to help with circulation.

Really looking forward to getting into the hives next weekend to see if I can add a super.

On a personal note, we lost our beautiful German Shepherd, Luke, to cancer last week. Very few things have brought us the joy this phenomenal dog did. We'll cherish our memories of him forever.

What a Mess!

2008-06-01T17:44:00.005-04:00

Another lesson learned. I should not have placed a spacer between the hive top feeder and the hive box. I did it to make room for the pollen patty I put on top of the frames in each hive when I installed the packages. Guess what...bees don't like empty space and fill it with comb (look under feeder in 1st pic). What a waste of the bees' time and what a major mess it made when I opened the hives today. They had drawn out a large area of comb and had been storing honey in it. Gayla scraped it off as I held the feeder and our friend Stephon took the pictures. We ended up scraping it onto the top of the frames, Mistake 1 as it coated numerous bees and trapped them in the honey. Mistake 2 was not leaving it in the hive box for them to clean up. We took it thinking we'd melt the wax. We were amazed at how much honey was in it. Very light in color and taste. I thought it might be from the syrup but I haven't seen bees drinking it this week. Both hives built the comb on the bottom of the feeders. Don't know...

Hive Notes:
Both hives are building comb corner to corner on the plastic frames.

Hive One has built out 4+ frames on the black Piercos (Pic 2). There are all stages of bee larvae (Pic 3, nice shot Stephon!) and many capped cells. There seems to be 2x the number of bees in Hive One when compared to Hive 2. No comb was drawn on the drone frame or any of the 4 outer most frames. I rotated one of the outer frames into the center. I left the last 1/3 of the pollen patty in the hive, did a sugar treatment, removed the hive top feeder and placed a 2nd hive body on top with an inner cover and the telescoping top. I want to leave them alone for 2 weeks and thought it best to add the 2nd hive body. We still haven't seen the queen, though it is obvious she's quite busy.

Hive Two still has a hive top feeder on it though I did remove the pollen patty and spacer. They didn't seem too interested in the patty. There are 3 frames well drawn out on the white small cell Mann Lake 100s, lots of various stages of larvae, the queen was easy to identify. Overall, there is less action in this hive. The comb attached to the feeder was much larger in this hive compared to Hive One. Nothing was on any of the outer 6 frames. Tho' there is not a spacer, I may open this one next week to see if they are still trying to build on the feeder.

They know what to do

2008-05-25T14:58:00.006-04:00

Today was perfect for checking the hives. It was quite a well attended event with all of our NH family (except our white water loving son) here to see the bees. I went out early today and practiced the various steps to try and get it right. Overall, tho' rather nervous opening my first hive as the "beekeeper", it was a fantastic experience!

The bees proved they definitely know what they're doing. Both queens were released and laying eggs. The workers were drawing out comb and packing away pollen. Both hives were extremely relaxed with hardly any smoke needed for the 2nd hive. In the photos above, you can see 1 day old eggs in some of the cells centrally and some pollen and nectar being stored in the bottom right on the black Pierco frame. The 2nd picture is the queen in hive 2. Click on the photos to enlarge.

Hive notes:
The bees in Hive one are drawing significantly more comb and storing more pollen. The central 4 frames have bees drawing comb. Hive 1 has a greater numbers of bees and the pollen patty is approximately 1/2 eaten. I never found the queen but the eggs tell me she is there.

Hive 2 is active, the queen is laying eggs but the bees have drawn less comb and hardly touched the pollen patty. They have drawn a lot of comb on the bottom of the hive top feeder.

I used confectioner's sugar on hive one and forgot to apply it to hive 2. I placed the remains of both pollen patties in the respective hives and closed them up. They immediately went back to normal operation and seem quite relaxed and content. Just like me now that I know we're off and running.

Windy day

2008-05-24T17:00:00.007-04:00

I wanted to open the hives today to check the queens and see if they're laying but the wind didn't cooperate. The bees were definitely busy, tho'. Lots of dark orange pollen and yellow pollen is being gathered which makes me think things must be going fairly well inside the hives. The oaks, pines and bleeding hearts are thick with pollen right now and the bees are always darting off for more.

As I mentioned, I am trying to raise these bees as holistically as possible. I cannot say organically for 2 basic reasons; polystyrene hives and plastic frames and foundation. Why did I choose these? Added insulation in winter and mite and hive beetle control. Last winter we had record snows–over 200" (60" is normal) and it stayed white from before Christmas until mid-March. I know of numerous local beeks that lost colonies last winter and I hope the extra insulation provided by the BeeMax polystyrene hive will help keep my bees sufficiently warm. The plastic frames and foundation was really recommended to me by Better Bee (www.betterbee.com). The plastic helps with hive beetles and mice damage versus wood and wax. The question is whether the bees like it. There are numerous posts on beesource.com about plastic, both good and bad. I decided to try it tho' it may be the first thing I decide to change for next year. I did paint all of the foundation with beeswax to help make the ladies want to draw out more comb. If the weather cooperates tomorrow, I'll get my first chance to see how I did.

Other differences between hives:
Hive one is large cell, black Pierco frames/foundation, painted with wax (see image above). I sprayed each frame with a 1:1 syrup mix with 4tsp of Honey-Bee-Healthy per quart to help entice the bees. As I closed each hive I added a Global pollen patty and a 4"x 5" piece of paper towel soaked in vegetable oil to help with Varroa mite control.

Hive two is is the same except the frames are white Mann Lake 100 small cell foundation and I sprinkled powered sugar on the bees when I hived them for mite control. Tho' a good way to knock mites off of the bees, overall, this probably was a bad idea as I had also sprayed the bees just prior to hiving and they were wet. Hive one was considerably more active days 1 - 3 compared to hive 2. On day 8, they appear fairly equal and I attribute the early difference to sugar coated bees don't fly...Pretty stupid on my part. I'm sure it won't be the last dumb thing I do as a bee landlord.

Hungry bees

2008-05-22T07:56:00.006-04:00

After being out of town for a couple of days I went out this morning to check on the hive top feeders. I purchased 2 polystyrene feeders with my BeeMax hives and had added 2 gal of 1:1 syrup when I hived them on Saturday. Hardly any syrup had been taken up on Monday but today showed the bees feeding and more than half the syrup consumed in each hive. I'll feed more syrup when I open them on Saturday to check on queen release and see if they're building out any frames.

Only problem was a fair amount of drowned bees. I had used some sandpaper to rough up the plastic bee guard to give the ladies better traction but still have more than 40 drowned bees in each feeder.

Overall, my wife and fellow beek, Gayla, says the hives have been active while I've been gone and the bleeding hearts have seen lots of activity. Hive 1 still seems more active than hive 2. I'll explain the differences in my next post.

The Ladies are in Residence!

2008-05-17T19:01:00.002-04:00

I have been looking forward to this day as if it is Christmas! We drove 2 hours this morning to Better Bee and picked up 7 packages (2 are ours) of Italian bees with new queens. After dropping off 5 packages to other members of the Monadnock Beekeepers Association it was time to hit the books for a quick review.

After watching videos and reading about installing packages for 3 months, it's now time. Amazing how book knowledge is rarely as beneficial as practical experience. After assembling almost (an important word...) all of the tools, sprays and food, I practiced all of the steps I was going to do before donning a pullover jacket and veil. I sprayed the bees with a 1:1 syrup solution with 4tsp/qt of Honey-B-Good mixed in. It immediately calmed the bees (really made it so they weren't fanning) and I smacked the bottom of the first package on the hive frame to move the bees to the bottom. After prying the cover off the top, the queen cage and sugar can came right out of the package. Knowing I was supposed to pull the cork out of the cage, I proceeded to push the cork at the bottom of the cage in towards the queen. Okay, so I was nervous. No harm, no foul and luckily no injured queen! I think...

So now, I take off the metal disk covering the sugar plug (no book EVER mentioned a metal disk) and it dawns on me that the only thing I forgot was a way to hang the cage between the frames (see almost...). After a quick panic in the basement looking for nails (every size but the one I needed) I cut some wire from a spool I use to support the raspberries and placed it through the staples on the cage. Hopefully, I did a good job supporting it.

After, again, spraying the bees and knocking them to the bottom of the package, I poured 1/2 of the bees over the queen's cage and the rest into the empty space where I previously took out 5 frames to make room for the ladies. Though I had previously wondered what would make a relatively sane man do this, it was easier than I thought and the bees stayed calm through the entire adventure. After replacing 4 frames (the 5th goes in next week after the queen leaves her cage) I placed a 5" square paper towel soaked in vegetable oil (makes it harder for Varroa mites to stick to the bees) placed a pollen patty on the top of the frames, put on a top feeder and filled it with 2 gal of 1:1 sugar syrup with 1 tsp of HBH/qt mixed in. I positioned the telescoping outer cover and repeated everything again for the 2nd package (except I was prepared for placing the 2nd queen cage). I'm not sure about the bees but I was exhausted!

The bees in the 2nd package were VERY active during the entire process, much more so than the 1st package. Now that they are hived, the bees in hive 1 are out and active–fanning and starting orientation flights. Hive 2 seems much quieter. I did put entrance reducers on both hives, turned on the electric fence and was eaten by black flies while I sat back and enjoyed the show my bees put on as they get used to their new home. I'm actually now a beekeeper.

The Calm Before the Storm

2008-05-16T22:48:00.003-04:00

Thirty years ago, I wanted to raise honey bees. Three months ago, I finally did something about it. This is very unlike me. Normally, if I want to do something I rush in and start it. Maybe it was because we were still moving around the country, establishing my career, starting a business, raising kids or any number of other excuses. Whatever the reason for the delay, the fun starts tomorrow. Actually, the fun started last February when my wife, Gayla, and I decided we wanted to add honey bees to our yard. Since then, it's been reading everything we can about bees –including countless hours on beesource.com– painting one polystyrene hive then deciding to add another, taking bee classes (an absolute must if you want to do this), deciding to try one hive small cell on Mann Lake PF100s and another on Pierco waxed deeps, building a platform to help the ladies defend themselves against critters, choosing a site that will work for the bees AND our yard, adding a solar electric fence to keep out our local 400lb bear and today, making 6 gallons of 1:1 syrup. I must admit, I have not enjoyed getting ready for anything as much as I have preparing for tomorrow. I just hope I don't let down the 25,000 bees we pick up in the morning. Tomorrow the fun really begins!