Growing the Apiary

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.