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...
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