And Then There Were Four

Well, 4 1/2...

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

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

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

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

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

New Matriarchs!

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Delicious Solution!

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



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

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

Bring on the new queens!

Beauty and the Beast

Or the Tale of 2 Hives...

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



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



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

The Bait Hive

Written May 25th.

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

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

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

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



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

Oh, oh...

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

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

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

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

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

Joining the 21st Century

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

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

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




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



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