Backyard Swammerdam

Benedictines and Bees

2011-12-17T10:38:00.000-08:00

While on retreat this summer in Minnesota, I was delighted to learn of the connection between Benedictines and bees. The abbey church features a wall of stained glass sectioned off into a honey comb pattern.

From the outside, the window resembles a giant Lite-Brite toy.

On the inside the color explodes, and it is easy to spend much of prayer time looking back at the bright liturgical colors.

For the men at St. John's the comb pattern takes on special meaning since honey was one of the things that constituted the diet of John the Baptist, for whom the abbey is named.

Meanwhile, a short drive away, the women's monastery also features the honey comb in their windows, but without the massive size and color. For the women of St. Benedict's, the honey comb pattern stands alone.

The symbolism is rich for the women as well...monks, like bees, do not live individualistic lives, but focus on community life. Most of the Rule of St. Benedict, the ancient guideline for Benedictine life, revolves around the ins and out of a spiritual life practiced in the context of the practical concerns of playing nicely together. The comb of the hive represents both home and sustenance.

My friends told the sisters at St. Benedict's that I was a beekeeper, and the two women who had kept the bees for many years insisted on giving me a tour of their hives.

It was great fun to swap bee stories, and to hear about the ways their bees have enriched their community sponsored agriculture (CSA) project. We broke one of the sacred rules and were late to evening prayer, but no one said a word about our late appearance. When beekeepers and gardeners get together, sometimes the schedule suffers a bit.

My favorite modern explanation of the Rule of St. Benedict is Joan Chittister's devotional book, "Wisdom Distilled from the Daily." It has helped me deal with the frustrations of working with ornery human beings and the complexities of trying to be community together. Good stuff. Not much on beekeeping, but one can't live by honey alone.

Bee Trees

2011-11-30T16:40:00.001-08:00

Left to their own devices, bees do not live in wooden boxes. They swarm, looking for a nice hollow tree. When the Europeans first brought honey bees to North America, the native people would find that the "white man's flies" arrived a few miles ahead of the colonies of the white men themselves. The swarming bees arrived first, with the swarming Europeans following behind.

Behind my friend Carl's house grows a majestic bee tree. You can see the ladder propped behind the tree. The ladder was useful in getting up close to the bee's main entrance.

Way up the trunk, where the branches all go in different directions, there is a large hole. Bees come in and go out as they have for years. Carl says one of his hives swarmed one day, and scout bees discovered a huge hollow in the tree. They've been there ever since.

They come and go from a couple different places. We debated for a while whether there is one colony of bees with two entrances, or two completely different colonies in different hollows of the tree. The bees know.

These days the bee trees in our country have been largely wiped out by mites and disease. But Carl's bees are perking along, year after year. Perhaps the surviving bees will soon begin to spread again, bringing their powers of pollination with them.

Tree Plantin' Time

2011-11-09T17:56:00.000-08:00

I hear that fall is an excellent time to plant new trees. If you are thinking about adding some tallish trees to your land, you might consider that here in Western North Carolina, trees provide most of our nectar for honey. In the spring you'll be wanting Black Locust trees and Tulip Poplars for June honey. Sourwood trees provide the most sought out local August honey.

Trees will also provide the bees with resin to make propolis, which the bees use as both glue and as an immune system for the hive.

Finally, I've also heard that it helps to plant a smallish tree with low branches not far from the front of your hives. That gives the girls a convenient low branch to land on when they swarm, making it easier for you to catch them and put them in a new hive. I don't know if it works or not. My bees seem to like to go to the very highest branch they can find.

Still in the Honey Business!

2011-08-20T17:56:00.000-07:00

The hive that had tracheal mites in the spring ended up thriving. Not only did we get five frames of honey from them in the spring, but today they gave us 18 frames today for a record harvest. We left them with one full super of honey.

Meanwhile, the hive that we split in two because it was swarming every day ended up as two healthy hives. They each have a full super of honey. The original hive, in the middle, has a second super that is about a third full. We didn't take any honey from them today, but may check back in later.

I don't know that I ever posted the pictures and jar count of the spring honey. It was tulip poplar honey this year, something we'd never actually gotten before. The honey was dark, characteristic of tulip poplar. The lighter honey we've gotten in the past in the June harvest probably came from black locust trees.

The August honey is beautiful. I'll post more pics after bottling. I've dug out the old "how to measure pints based on the level of honey in the bottling bucket formula." Will also report back on that.

Bees at the Kentucky Shaker Village

2011-06-07T04:54:00.000-07:00

On a recent trip in May to the lovely restored Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill in Kentucky, I observed all manner of livestock: chickens, goats, cattle, horses and donkeys. It occurred to me, as a beekeeper, to wonder if there were bees about.

Sure enough, during a morning stroll we found a couple hives in the apple orchard. One hive was dead and empty, but the other seemed to be perking along quite nicely.

I don't know if the original Shakers had hives next to these apple trees, but I would like to think that they did. I am fairly certain that someone kept bees there...for the honey to sweeten their food, and for the bees to pollinate their crops.

The Shaker's version of an assistant beekeeper, on the wall behind the hives.

Who Says You Can't Go Home Again?

2011-06-04T17:10:00.000-07:00

During my picnic lunch on the back porch today, I watched the hive on the right swarm for the third time in two weeks. Half the hive swarmed and departed, presumably with the original queen, two weeks ago Sunday. Another football sized cluster went up in the pine tree on Thursday of this week and then departed to their unknown destination.

Today's swarm spiraled happily while I ate lunch (sort of like a golden snow globe, or an insect tornado), spinning in the air a long time before settling in the way tippy top of a black locust tree up above the hive.

They are way, way up there in that tall tree to the left. No stress on me, since they were obviously too high for any rescue efforts.

So, I continued about my day, hanging out in the back yard working on projects, occasionally checking on the cluster. After three hours, I heard the sound of the swarm on the move. They spun around in the air, up in front of the pine tree, down closer to the yard, up around the pine tree, down closer to the yard. I was hoping they would just chose to move into the small, empty hive we'd chucked back in the corner for just that reason.

The little empty hive is there on the cart. The tall hive that produced the swarm is to the left.

More bees swirled in the yard, then more, until the whole swirl was down around the original hive. The assistant bee keeper suggested that they had changed their mind and were going home, and I, expert that I am, insisted that bees NEVER go back home when they swarm.

And just like that they started landing on the hive they'd left three hours earlier.

They clumped around the entrance and several started putting their little fannies in the air to release the "this is home" pheromone.

And then they marched right back in the hive.

Needless to say, this led to googling and internet research. We found many bewildered dialogues and conversations, all expressing the same slack jawed astonishment we felt. The expert bee keepers said, "Yes, this happens, and you'd better split that hive immediately or they'll swarm again tomorrow." The theory is that something happened to the young queen that accompanied them...or maybe she stayed home to do her nails. Anyway, without a queen, they gave it up.

**

We did split the hive. There are queen swarm cells in both the original hive and the new little hive. Hopefully they will just get a healthy queen going without feeling the need to go up in the trees. There are brood frames in both hives, and we have a super of uncapped honey on each.
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We also moved the empty super that had been at the bottom of the tall swarmy hive to the top to give them room for packing away more honey.
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Not wanting the "stay at home" hive on the left to feel left out, we poked around in it and robbed them of a super of honey. We extracted five frames of beautiful, dark honey. Pictures of the honey to follow.
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Still stunned and now rather sticky from the honey, but wow, what a day.

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A Sunday for Swarming

2011-06-03T15:26:00.000-07:00

I walked out the back door on my way to Sunday lunch a couple weeks ago, and the air around the right hive was full of bees. They were erupting out of the hive just as fast as they could go.

On the bright side, none of these thousands of bees had stinging on their minds, so I could walk right out in their midst and take pictures.

Unfortunately, it is somewhat like photographing the Grand Canyon. Pictures don't quite capture the scope of the thing.

I recommend clicking on these pics, particularly the green one above, for more of a view of the bees. All those brown dots are bees swarming.

After a while they pick a spot, this time in the black locust tree, and they begin to gather.

More and more bees collect, until the whole group that has moved out of the hive are clustered around their queen. They will stay here until the scout bees convince them to move on (or until the beekeepers come and either annoy them or convince them to be captured.)

At this point in the story, we were still hopeful of capture.

Here's the whole cluster...tens of thousands of my bees, up in a tree. We suited up, got all our stuff and shook them out of the tree, but instead of falling neatly on the blanket and marching into the hive, they dispersed in the air, reclustered on the branch, and then headed off without us.

There are still bees in the hive and a new young queen. This is how bees reproduce themselves on an organizational scale.

But it is a bummer for the beekeeper.
Click here for a more successful swarm story from a previous experience.

Spring Cleaning

2011-04-25T15:00:00.000-07:00

We sorted out the two hives today. Moved them from the wagons to their permanent locations on concrete blocks. We're smarter than we used to be...put cardboard under the blocks to prevent weeds and used a bubble balance on the blocks to get them level before putting the hives there.

The hive closest to the garden, our hive with tracheal mites, looks pretty good. There were five frames of capped brood in the top deep, nothing in the bottom and only honey in the super. We left the super on top, replaced some of the blacker comb in the empty deep and reversed the deeps so the queen can move up and lay more eggs.

The other hive was looking very strong. We've noticed that these girls propolize like it is going out of style, so we spend a lot of time getting the lid unglued and the frames dug out for inspection. They had brood in their top super, so we put it on the very bottom so they'll move up out of it. They had honey and brood in the top deep and not much in the bottom deep, so we also reversed their deeps. We put the mostly empty frames in a new deep box with better handles for easier portability. Later we plan to swap out the other deep box, as it likewise has shallow handles that are hard to grab.

We went ahead and added a super to the strong hive, as the tulip poplars and black locust trees are starting to bloom early this year. This hive will probably be our main source of honey this year. I can hardly wait to harvest.

It's a Wonder I Have Any Bees Alive at All

2011-03-21T12:10:00.000-07:00

Please disregard the pictures on the post below. I do not currently have a full pound of menthol on top of my bee hive. "Sigh."

Before putting it on yesterday afternoon, I read the packaging carefully. It stated that the net weight was 1.8 ounces and that a whole package was a dose. Then, overnight, I got to thinking about what I had paid for this package of menthol, and this morning I dug out the shipping order. The invoice stated that I had purchased a pound bag. After digging the package back out of the trash, I again read 1.8 ounce, net weight.

Freaked, I went out and scooped most of the menthol off the screen and then called Brushy Mountain, the supply company, to inquire. The very helpful woman explained that a 1.8 treatment would be a couple of tablespoons, and that I indeed had a pound bag.

Poor bees. No wonder they hummed in irritation. It made my eyes water a bit when I took it off the hive.

So...further research on the internet indicated that the menthol should go in a mesh bag above the brood nest and below their honey supply. That, for the moment, cannot be helped.

The surplus menthol is going in a package in the fridge for the moment. I'm going to make my own bags out of screen, I think, rather than pay for shipping. I'll work on that later.

Jimmy cricket, I feel terrible about dumping all that menthol on the hive. That's where reading directions will sometimes take you. Too bad the common sense took a few hours to kick in.

Forgive me, bees. I was just trying to help.

Diagnosis and treatment

2011-03-20T12:35:00.000-07:00

We finally received some info back from the bees we sent to the test lab in January. Received the following email this week from our state bee inspector:

Congratulations, you were absolutely correct. Some of the newer members weren’t keeping bees when tracheal mites were a problem. Did you recognize the symptoms from experience or reading? Again, good eye. Menthol, formic acid, and grease patties are all good treatments, but requeening with a resistant stock is probably best, especially if the hive isn’t doing well.

Jack

***My email address has changed to Jack.Hanel@ncagr.gov - please update your records.

So, tracheal mites it is. These tiny mites live in the respiratory system of bees and can decimate a hive. Jack initially did not think we had tracheal mites because they had not been prevalent in our area for a while. Since the symptoms had matched the description of this type of mite when we researched back in January, we had gone ahead and put grease patties on top of the hive. I also ordered some menthol, but waited until I heard a diagnosis before adding the menthol to the hive that had the crawling bees.

Both hives still had most of their initial grease patties when I peeked in today. I left them right where they were, but didn't add any more. You can see the white patties through the screen inner cover, pictured above. The red around the edge of the screen and the yellow in the middle are both where the bees have added propolis to the screen to close it off some. Propolis is part of their own immune system, so I love that the screen encourages them to put some around.

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PICTURE WARNING: DOSAGE PICTURED IS WRONGEDY WRONG WRONG WRONG! SEE NEXT POST FOR CORRECT INFORMATION. DO NOT TRY PHOTOGRAPHED TREATMENT AT HOME. POOR BEES!
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The screen was also handy for adding the menthol. I put it directly on the screen over the center cluster of bees. I suspect the grease patties are now in the wrong place....I read today that they are supposed to be on the top bars of the brood box, but for now, this is our situation. Since I only ordered one package of menthol, we just treated the one hive today. I'll order a couple more packages and hit both hives with a dose in a few weeks. Spring is optimal menthol treatment time, particularly on warmer days. We'll want the menthol off four weeks before the early summer honey flow.

The bees acknowledged the dumping of the menthol on their screen with an enthusiastic "vvvvvvvvvvvvv." They were still buzzing loudly when I came back in the house.

The girls have been flying more with the warmer weather this year. I've been seeing them come into the hive with pollen on their legs. Will try to get a good pollen shot later.

Follow Up Inspection and Sample Collection

2011-01-30T11:36:00.000-08:00

As per directions from Jack, our bee inspector, we took a pickle jar full of rubbing alcohol out to the area where the bees were crawling in the grass and collected around 100 bees. We'll soak them overnight, pour off the alcohol and send them to the bee lab for analysis.

We then cracked open both hives. The hive on the right (not pictured) had few bees in the top box, but that top super was chock full of honey. We believe the cluster in that hive is in the top deep and has not yet moved up. We popped a couple grease patties on the top bars and closed it up. Then we cracked open the left hive (pictured above and below) to see how they looked. (This is the hive with bees crawling in the grass as described in yesterday's blog entry.)

There seemed to be a lot of bees in the top super, ready to greet us.

We checked their honey supply, and found that some of the frames were empty, so we gave them two frames of honey that we'd had stored in the freezer. Still, they had many frames of honey, having had a great fall harvest.

We had made the grease patties last night when our top theory was tracheal mites. One part Crisco, two parts granulated sugar, one good squeeze of honey. We've heard today that tracheal mites have not been prevalent in our area, but decided to go ahead and slap the grease patties up there for good measure, since they didn't strike us as terribly toxic. We'll see what the lab says.

Response from our bee inspector

2011-01-30T10:18:00.000-08:00

Friend Janet forwarded my question about the bees (see yesterday's post) to our bee inspector, Jack Hanel. Here is his response:

Hi, Janet, Tracheal mites is a good guess, but we haven’t been seeing them as much of a problem lately. Nosema and varroa (viruses) sometimes cause the same symptoms. The best thing to do is send a sample to: Bee Disease Diagnosis

Bee Research Laboratory

Bldg. 476 Room 20

Beltsville Agricultural Research Center-East

Beltsville , Md. 20705

To prepare the sample, collect about 100 of the sick bees in rubbing alcohol. Let them soak overnight. Drain off the alcohol. Put them in a ziplok bag. Put the bag in a small cardboard box so the samples won’t get crushed. Put your name and address in the box so they know where to send the results to, and a brief description of the problem. Jack

Bad News Bees

2011-01-29T14:28:00.000-08:00

The weather hit the 50's today, and the bees came out to fly about and poop and stretch their wings.
Soon, the assistant beekeeper raised the alarm. "Something is terribly wrong with the hive on the left!"

The grass to the left of the hive was full of bees. Individual bees, little balls of bees, far too many bees, just sitting around, huddling, not moving or making any sign of returning to the hive for the night.

We have two main theories. 1) Starvation. We plan to go into the hive tomorrow with some extra frames of honey at hand in case they have somehow gotten low on honey supply. We doubt this is the case, since we left them with what we considered to be a LOT of honey. 2) Tracheal mites. Not sure we can treat this time of year. Terrifying to think we might lose the hive, and so sad to watch them come out to die in such numbers.

We'll keep you posted. Beekeepers in this area lost about 50% of their hives last winter. That could easily be the case for us as well this year. If one hive survives, we might split the surviving hive or catch a swarm and rebuild our stock.

Keep Bees, Crack Nuts

2011-01-22T14:13:00.000-08:00

When deciding to keep bees, one should realize that this hobby will impact not only the gifts you give (honey, chapstick, candles) but also the gifts you receive. Just got this excellent nutcracker from my sister-in-law in Wisconsin.

He has fine tools including a hat with a veil, an old fashioned skep hive and a bee the relative size of a falcon, plus the small decorative bee on his hat. I presume the pipe is for smoking the bees.

He also has the traditional handle in the back for operating his nutcracking jaw. Nuts are good with honey, I think. Welcome to the house, little beekeeper.

Bees Above Freezing

2011-01-16T17:16:00.000-08:00

After weeks of snow
and temperatures below freezing,
the sun came out today.
So did the bees.

As the temperatures rose into the 40's,
the bees flew merrily out...
to poo, to stretch, to see the world.

There were bees strolling on the white icy snow,
bees on the front of the hive,
bees in the air.

Tonight they are back in their cluster
in the warmth of their community shivers
tucked safe and sound in the hive.
I hope they feel better for the break.

Christmas Bees

2010-12-26T08:20:00.001-08:00

Only a couple days ago the bees were out and about for a "warmer weather than usual" flight. Today they are clustered in their hives, shivering and eating honey, staying warm together.

Creamed Honey

2010-11-20T16:05:00.000-08:00

Had an interesting accidental discovery this fall. A friend had a beehive that died. She took her honey frames from that hive and put them in the freezer for over a year. Then we offered to process her honey (with the help of a class of students learning about beekeeping). Gave her most of the honey back, but kept the cappings honey, which is pictured above.

The honey was a bit of a mess, as the comb was brittle after freezing, and the honey was not warm enough to process easily. It was thick, very dark honey from the start.

The honey did not stay liquid, but instead solidified into an almost jelly-like consistency. Great for spreading on bread. Tastes like honey, but a different consistency. We used a spoon today to move the creamed honey from the bottling bucket to these mason jars.

Creamed honey is a product in which the honey has been carefully manipulated (usually) to produce very fine crystalization. We just lucked into it. Creamed honey is usually almost white, but since this was incredibly dark honey at the start, ours is this pretty golden color.

A fun, spreadible accident in honey processing.

More on creamed honey.

Moving Bees and Chickens

2010-10-10T11:57:00.000-07:00

How hard can it be to move a hive a few feet across the yard?

Harder than one might think. If you move bees more than three miles, you can put them wherever you want. If you move them less than three miles, you can't move them more than a few feet a day, or they can't find their hive again.

As we move into some new projects in the yard, it has become necessary to move the hive. In order to move their heavy selves a few feet a day, the bees have been relocated to a cart so that they can inch their way from location A to location B.

Patience and equipment.

Oddly, chickens are also a pain to move. Past experience has shown that if we carry the little coop from the yard to the garden, the chickens will dance along merrily behind us, go in the coop and eat a snack, and then at bedtime return to the original location and circle in increasing panic because they can't find their bed.

Having had to catch the chickens after past moves, the people have gotten smarter. Someone needed to. We now move the coop and then throw snacks in there close to bedtime. When the chickens go after the snack, we slam the door shut before they can wander off in search of the "lost" coop.

Arts and Crafts Fesival at the Arboretum

2010-09-29T05:54:00.001-07:00

We ran an exhibit last weekend at the Arts and Crafts Festival at the Arboretum. The observation hive, above, was the huge hit and crowd pleaser. Folks of all ages peered through the glass trying to find the queen bee.

The lattice poster display was awesome but dangerous. When the wind picked up later in the afternoon on Saturday, it turned into a human scale fly-swatter. No one was squished, but we had a close call.
I'm also a fan of fake beekeeper man. Except when you have to move him. He is a heavy dude. He's next to the Buncombe County Bee Club's small honey extractor.

It was fun to run the booth. There were lots of questions, again from folks of all ages. I think we converted another couple innocent people into future beekeepers.

The August Honey Harvest

2010-08-30T19:03:00.000-07:00

We took the super off the hive on the right (the previously weaker hive, also known as the combined several times hive) on 8/7, and spun out four frames of honey with our young apprentice beekeepers.

Harvesting is a great time for friends to come and play.

Even more fun can be had on bottling day (8/8), when you can pull out some jars from previous harvests and have taste tests of the varied vintages.

Yesterday we (the original two beekeepers) took the supers off the left hive (the stronger hive at the beginning of the summer...also known as the hive we started from a nuc in 2009), and also harvested four frames of honey from that hive.

We've left both hives with two deeps and one super full of honey and nectar. There are a couple supers on the party porch with varied stages of uncapped nectar that the bees are cleaning out prior to storage for the winter in the garage.

Sticky Board Test

2010-08-08T16:35:00.000-07:00

We just attended the short course at the Eastern Apicultural Society Conference in Boone, NC. We came home with several plans of action...one of which was to test our bees regularly for varroa mites. The sticky board test is one of the easier methods, especially with our hive design.

I gooped a bunch of petroleum jelly on a sticky board, and then we stuck the boards in the bottom of the hives for 24 hours.

This ended up being a five person project as good friends were visiting. After 24 hours we all peered together at the boards and counted the tiny mites. You can see them with the naked eye, but it is easier with a magnifying glass. The good news...both hives had a low enough count that no treatment is needed right now. We plan to do a monthly check.

The bad news...I'm starting to find small hive beetles in the hives, one here and there. When I took the sticky board off the smaller hive, there were three beetles on the board skuttling around. Time to research small hive beetles.

Exploring the Bottom Deep

2010-08-06T11:05:00.000-07:00

We wanted to check back in on the tall hive (formerly our stronger hive, now our weaker hive on the left....the hive that was started in spring '09 from a nuc). We had looked in the supers and in the top deep, but were wondering if the bottom deep was empty, as sometimes happens as the bees move up.

Having found brood and the queen in the top deep last week, we had no idea what was going in down below.

Today we took off the supers and covered them with a towel to keep them calm and prevent robbing. Then we took off the top deep and put it off to another side, also with a towel.

The bees were a little pissy because it was thundering and about to rain, but no one got stung.

We found frames of honey and pollen in the bottom deep. We decided to switch out the deeps so the brood was below and the honey was up top. Not sure if that was called for or not, but it seemed a good idea at the time.

The frame pictured up top is from the bottom deep. You can see honey, some of it capped and both workers and drones, back in the hive to avoid bad weather.

The safety reminder of the day...always make sure your jacket and hood are completely zipped. I had a girl walking around on my zipper heads trying to find her way in today. Had I left even a small gap, she would have gone straight for my throat. Eep.

Reversals of Fate and Biodiversity

2010-08-01T12:28:00.001-07:00

The hive that was booming in the spring is now limping along, with fewer bees dancing outside and spotty brood pattern within. No more of the beautiful "peanut butter smear" of brood and frames simply covered with bees. ABK believes this hive swarmed, despite our efforts in helping them feel less crowded.
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The picture below is kind of fun because you can see several caps in process as they tuck in the larva for them to go through their pupal stage.

Regardless, they do have brood, and they do have a queen. ABK spotted her in the top deep as we were poking around.
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Meanwhile, in the ubercombined hive that was mostly dead in spring, things are going swimmingly. Lots of bees doing lots of work.
We noted that the bees in this hive are highly varied in appearance. We think that the queen who finally took over mated with a diversity of drones. You can see some bees on the cover, below, that are our more traditional golden bee, but some that are longer and almost solid black.

We'll continue to monitor the progress. Soon we'll harvest any excess honey and get the hives reduced down for winter.
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Current debate and research goes to whether to take the bottom deep out entirely or to just switch the places of the deeps if there are no brood and stores in the bottom deep. Time to get the books out.

In the Jar

2010-07-03T14:16:00.000-07:00

Another pretty crop of bee juice, bottled and waiting to bring joy to the lucky few. This time we used all larger bottles. If we harvest in August, which is looking hopeful, we'll probably fill a lot of little bottles for wider sample distribution.

The honey bear is cute. Perhaps next time I'll order bears for greater honey kitsch.

I also put lots of wax cappings in the chest freezer. Got enough for some candles and chapstick.

Checking and Robbing the Hives

2010-06-26T11:10:00.001-07:00

Here is the Assistant Beekeeper pulling a frame out of the super on the little hive to see if they had any capped honey. They have drawn out honey comb in this super and filled it with nectar, but so far very few caps. Still, we're just pleased and proud to see them flourishing. After we process honey from the other hive, we're going to give them one of the supers so they have room to expand. We'll also pop in a queen excluder so they don't put any brood in the supers.

We then proceeded to the super duper tall hive. We checked the four supers, rearranged a bit and popped a fume board on the top (pictured below) to get the bees out of two supers of capped honey.

The bottom super had capped honey with brood along the bottom of the frames. We left that for them, and put a queen excluder on top of that super. We moved the very top super on top of the excluder, since it was full of nectar but not capped honey.

The two middle supers were chock full of capped honey, so they were moved to the top, emptied mostly of bees and popped in the wheelbarrow for transport to the house. The lovely towels prevent us picking up hitchhikers on the way.

So the tall hive now consists of two deeps, one shallow super with honey and a little brood, a queen excluder and one shallow super filled with nectar. The Assistant Bee Keeper is hollering at me to get moving so we can process some honey. More on that later!

Much Ado about Robbing

2010-05-29T18:03:00.000-07:00

We left the hive on the sidewalk overnight, and this morning there were bees flying in and out. By the sunny part of the day there were a good twenty or more bees coming in and out of the entrance. We got all optimistic about the belief that we were hosting a swarm, but figured we needed to pop that top deep box off and put a feeder on top.

So we took off the top box...peeked in the bottom box...and there were maybe ten bees sitting on frames hanging out.

We have a new theory. One bee flew into the garage, found the old deep and frames sitting there and found a little something left in a few of the cells on the frames that she thought was worth collecting. She went back to the hive, recruited some of her sisters with a little dance and brought them back to the garage.

Just then, ABK and teenagers came to get in the car. ABK moved the hive outside and the bees continued to rob those small portions of whatever was still in the hive. (We had left it out on the open air porch for a month or more for the bees to clean out prior to storage.)

So...robbing, not swarming.

We went ahead and moved the hive out to the middle of the yard, where they can rob it to their little hearts' delight....and where, if they feel a need to swarm this week, they can move in. But probably not.

Hello, What?

2010-05-28T15:26:00.000-07:00

Imagine my surprise when I come home, bags of groceries in hand, only to discover a hive on the sidewalk leading up to the back door of the house. What what?

Not just a hive, but a hive with bees going in and out.

What?

I was home for lunch, and this was definitely not here then. It is my hive...I recognize the paint.

So I'm still standing there, groceries in hand, when the Assistant BeeKeeper returns from her voyage to return the visiting loaner teenagers to their parents. It turns out that when they went to get in the car the garage door had been up a while, and there were BEES everywhere in the garage. They were mostly concentrated on the unused hive box that was just sitting in the corner, minding its own business.

ABK grabbed the hive, plopped it on the sidewalk on a bottom board, threw on a cover and hit the road.

So...we peeked in just now when we put on an inner cover, and there doesn't seem to be a whole swarm in there. We think these are mostly scouts, and that the swarm is hanging out in a nearby tree somewhere.

Now we wait and see. If they move in, then we start slowly moving the hive a few feet at a time to a more optimal location.

ABK points out that it was Memorial Day weekend or thereabouts last year when we caught a swarm next door.

This reminds me of when our friend Greg, a professional beekeeper, used to keep an empty hive on the back of his truck in case he needed it in a hurry to catch a swarm. One day he went out to his truck and saw bees going in and out of the hive. He peeked under the cover and a swarm had moved in without his assistance, right there in the bed of his truck. They were completely moved in and setting up housekeeping.

You just never know. The girls are very resourceful.

May 22 check on honey supers

2010-05-22T11:42:00.000-07:00

Took a peek inside the supers we added to each hive. In the little hive (pictured above and below) the bees are beginning to draw out beautiful white comb on two or three of the frames. This hive has been looking good lately, with happy afternoon dances of bees around the hive.
In the enormously tall hive, we peeked in the top two supers. The newest frames on top are a similar story...the bees are just beginning to draw out comb. In the super just below, the frames are all full of nectar and the top cells are capped on each frame.

In other news, got a call from my cousins Rhonda and Kathy, and Rhonda's husband Steve this morning. They described a swarm of bees hanging on a low branch behind my aunt's old house. I advised them to find a local beekeeper...and wished they lived close by, so that I could capture that low hanging swarm myself.

Adding Supers

2010-05-08T13:52:00.001-07:00

We made a field trip to Saluda, NC today to buy some more shallow frames and foundation. Peeked in the big mama hive and found they were busily filling the shallow box I added last week with nectar, so popped yet another super on top. This one had five frames with wax already drawn out and four frames of foundation (flat pieces of wax upon which the bees will build honey comb). I put the foundation frames in the middle in the hopes that they will start their work from the inside out.

A peek in the little hive showed a lot of bees and some beautiful new white wax in the top deep. Encouraged by their obvious progress, we popped a shallow super with ten frames of just foundation on top of them. If I'd anticipated this, I would have given them the drawn out comb, but as it was, I had to jog to the garage to get the super to top them off.

It is great to see both the blooms on the trees and the obvious signs of the bees working.

Using Bees to Keep Elephants Out of Your Garden

2010-05-08T05:52:00.001-07:00

This news just in:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100505/ap_on_re_af/af_kenya_elephants_and_the_bees

A Quick Peek

2010-05-04T12:40:00.001-07:00

You would be so proud, really. I went into both hives today and inspected all the frames in the top box of each ALL BY MYSELF. No ABK (Assistant Bee Keeper) to do all the work and talk me through it. I was cool as a cucumber, and oddly, so were the bees. (Lucy and Ethel, the chickens, did not help. They just showed up for the photo session afterwards.)

In the ubercombined hive the bees had eaten through all the newspaper between deeps as if it had never been there, except to make that nice decorative skirting on the outside. There was a little bit of honey and some capped brood on several frames. I saw no uncapped brood, but hoped there was some down below. The brood, which took up about a quarter of several central frames, appeared to be mostly worker brood.

Since it takes 21 days for worker brood to develop, this brood could have been eggs or young larva when we transferred the deep from the other hive.

The far right two frames in that top deep still had just foundation, but there were bees who looked like they were all set up and prepped to draw it out. I'm hopeful about this little hive. I was curious about the bottom deep, but not set for heavy lifting and bee ticking off today.

In super happy hive, I peeked in the top shallow super (there were two deeps and two shallows when I started). The top shallow was absolutely full of lovely uncapped nectar, soon to be honey. So I popped another shallow on top, full of drawn out honey comb, ready to fill.

Next order of business is to buy some more shallow frames to allow continuing expansion. I've already got some shallow hive boxes and five frames of drawn out comb, but would need at least four more frames to add another shallow to the hive.

I used the frame grips so I could keep the smoker or hive tool in one hand while I held a frame with the other. Worked just fine.

I'm feeling ready for my practical (hands on) test for the certified bee keeper exam on June 5. I passed the written, so full steam ahead!

Teaching the Fourth Grade

2010-04-26T09:18:00.000-07:00

Today I had the privilege to teach all the fourth graders at Marlow Elementary about beekeeping. We met in their auditorium and I took an empty hive, my smoker, hive tool and jacket with hood. I also had a power point with lots of pictures from the Backyard Swammerdam blog.

When they saw the first picture of a frame covered in bees, they said, "Whoa!"

They asked great questions. A lot of our conversation focused on the difference between bees and wasps, and the fact that it kills a honey bee to sting you (because the stinger and the back part of the bee tears off).

I showed them pictures of the things bees keep in their hive...pollen, babies (brood) and honey. We talked about how you harvest the honey, and how I've made chapstick from the wax. I also showed them pictures of the swarm we caught and told the story of pulling the swarm of bees out of the tree.

All in all, I think a good time was had by all.

Glenn C. Marlowe Elementary School

Happy Clouds of Bees

2010-04-18T13:29:00.000-07:00

When the sun shines brightly on the hive in the afternoon, dozens of bees swirl around in what looks like a happy dance. Probably orientation flights, as bees learn their way around the hive. Possibly even just a short bathroom flight outside. Regardless, it makes a hive look happy and healthy to have a lot of bees swirling around.

The little hive has some swirling, too, just fewer bees. Could it be that they are on their way to health and wholeness?

In Which I Finally Get Stung

2010-04-17T13:04:00.000-07:00

After messing with the bees three weeks in a row, the bees are fed up. We ripped the big hive apart again...they also were probably perturbed by the strong breeze and the fact that they are bringing in a lot of nectar.

We did some poking around, the Assistant Bee Keeper (ABK) got a sting on the finger and a sting on the wrist. I got a hot poker to the left ankle. It hurt like fire for a few minutes and then just stopped.

ABK took a Benedryl. I applied a poultice (a wet paper towel with a pile of meat tenderizer, tied to my ankle with a bandana). Orally I took a smashed Oreo cookie covered with melty Cookies and Cream ice cream. Not medicine, but hey, I feel better.

Oh, and I think I've mentioned before how much I like a big glass of iced tea after working with the bees.

So, for the record, what we did today:

Reversed the big hive. Top deep to the bottom, bottom deep to the top of that. Put the super that had been rotated down on top of the deeps. Didn't look in it, because it was full of bees and we'd been stung by that point. Capped it off with another super full of drawn comb that we brought out from storage.

We took off the middle deep that we had added a couple weeks ago and added it to the little hive with a sheet of newspaper in between, as if we were combining. Why? Well, at that point we wanted to bring the big hive back down to two deeps, we were stung and not feeling like shaking off a bunch of ticked off bees, if the small hive survives they will be needing more space, and we thought, why not?

So...the plan now is to LEAVE THEM ALONE for the next two weeks.

After that we'll see. But they are in some basic good order, we think, for the moment.

I'm really wanting to try top bar hives...I'm starting to feel bad about all the messing with the girls. It would be nice to be able to inspect them without all the smoke and disruption.

More on that later.

What Are You Doing? No Idea.

2010-04-11T12:43:00.000-07:00

Still making this whole beekeeping thing up as we go along.

The plan, and we did we have one, was to dig through the big hive to see how much brood we had. If we had enough uncapped brood we intended to either work on a split or take a couple frames over to the Patheticus hive.

We found the bottom deep full of capped brood. The middle box, which we added last week, had some pollen and nectar, and the bees were drawing out the frames that just had foundation. The top deep, oddly, had capped brood with some uncapped brood around the edges. The queen appears to be laying her more recent babies up top.

A little bewildered, we decided just to reassemble and take a couple frames of brood with younger uncapped brood on it from the top box. We did this, replacing the frames we stole with some drawn out but unused frames we had in storage.

The new, empty frames went beside the hive wall.

We next went into the sad little hive. The top box had a whole lot of nothing in it, so we shook off bees and took it to the porch for bees to clean out. The bottom box had several frames of honey, a frame with capped brood (from last week's donation, we presume). We took out two frames that had a lot of drone brood and replaced it with the worker and uncapped brood from the other hive.

Then, as we were reassembling and closing up, I had a bad thought. The hive we were working had ten frames. We were adding frames from a hive that had nine frames per box. Blast! What if we crunched up the bee space with oversized comb?? (Yet another reason you should never put nine frame dividers in a hive body.)

We went to the porch where we happened to have a hive body with nine frame dividers, COMPLETELY dismantled the hive and put nine frames in a the new deep body, taking out a frame that had a small amount of honey.

Here's the thing. As we were putting the cover back on the little hive, we found a queen bee in the cover!! What the heck? She plopped down on the inner cover and scurried into the hive, but we both saw her.

Theories?

She could have been our good functional queen from the other hive. If so, she would have had to stow away on the frame even after we tried to shake all the bees off. The bees in the bad hive could be balling her up and murdering her even as we speak.

Or they could accept her and the big hive could make a new queen for themselves.

More likely, she was already in that little mess of a hive. She could be shooting blanks and laying only unfertilized eggs, either because she she is a dud or because she never did the whole mating flight thing, or because she hadn't yet got her groove on.

I just don't know.

Nothing was what I expected today.

So...now what?

Pray the weather is good next week to go in and mess with them again.

We need to get the strong hive worked down to two hive bodies with honey supers.

We need to monitor the progress of the weak hive and possibly add more brood? They'll need at least a shallow in a week or so for honey storage.

I just don't know. For now I'll drink ice tea and take a shower.

Oh, and assistant bee keeper got her second sting, again on the leg, but this time by a bee outside the pants leg. So far it doesn't seem like as bad a sting.

Boom and Bust--April 3 hive check--BOOM hive

2010-04-03T12:10:00.001-07:00

The left hive is as healthy as the Droneville hive is pathetic. There have been great clouds of worker bees bringing in nectar and pollen. Our concern with this hive is that they will get too crowded and swarm.
Sure enough, we had a hive full of bees, brood and honey. We had left the hive with a honey super on top. It still had lots of honey (it was HEAVY) and it had some capped brood in the middle of it. We rotated this super down to the bottom of the hive after checking it carefully to make sure we didn't trap the queen down at the bottom, since queens don't like to walk across honey.
The picture above, shows what capped brood SHOULD look like...beautiful coverage, smooth tops!!

We found the queen, although she quickly ducked out of sight. The very top picture in this post is me trying to catch her in a picture right as she scurried away.

There were no swarm cells, but the bees were indeed all packed in with no place to go. There was very little open brood, which we think was a result of running out of open cells in which to lay eggs. We added a deep, and put a three frames of drawn out but empty comb in the middle of the main brood box, and then put two of the frames of brood in the new empty deep, and one frame of brood in the Droneville hive (see Bust post, below).

This will give them room to expand, and should slow down any inclination to swarm for a while. In the long run, we still plan to split this hive. Probably next week, when we hope to have lots of uncapped brood. At the very least, we'll keep transferring brood over to the Droneville hive for a while to see if we can get their act together.

We reversed the hive bodies, too....so from bottom to top we have the shallow super, the main hive body with brood, the new hive body with mostly empty frames and some frames with just foundation, the deep that had been on the bottom that now has pollen and nectar.

One last note....I was much, much, much more comfortable working the bees than I have been in the past. Practice makes perfect. We inspected almost every frame in both hives.

Kept the smoker going, too.

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Boom and Bust--April 3 hive check--Bust hive

2010-04-03T11:52:00.000-07:00

We'll start with the bust: the hive on the right, which is the sum of our two original hives combined the first year, and then the swarm hive that we combined with the combined hive last year. Following me so far?

It has been looking puny, with not a lot of worker bee action. Today we went in and found what is pictured above and below. The picture above shows a whole frame of drone brood. Drones, you remember, are male bees that do nothing but eat honey and pick up chicks. They don't keep the hive running. To find a whole frame of drone brood is total badness. Either the worker bees are laying eggs, or there is a really, really bad queen. I vote for laying workers.

The picture below shows a spotty brood pattern from the same hive, with the caps being built up into the characteristic bullet shaped dome of drone brood. We've got no workers being born in this hive, and no fertilized eggs for them to make a new queen.

So, we reversed the hive bodies and went on the to then next hive while we worked on a strategy. The top box had the drone brood, the bottom had pollen and nectar. We went ahead and flipped them, which might have made more sense with healthy hive, but what the heck. On the bright side, Droneville had several frames of capped honey, so they've got something to eat for a while.

After checking the other hive (BOOM!), we came in the house, did some research and had lunch. We found that one of the recommended suggestions for getting a laying worker to produce a queen is to start putting a frame of uncapped brood in their hive every week. We didn't have a lot of uncapped brood (see report on other hive), but we did give them a frame of mostly capped worker brood. It had a few uncapped cells. We figure this will at least give them some more workers. We also took out a frame full of drone cells that we will freeze, since the world just doesn't need that many drones. Then we plan to put a frame of uncapped brood in once a week until they start making a queen cell or until we give up and try something else.

The general idea is that the bees will pick up the pheromones from the uncapped brood and get their act together.

http://www.bushfarms.com/beeslayingworkers.htm

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February Peek

2010-02-20T09:54:00.001-08:00

An unusual day in Asheville area beekeeping. Warm enough for the bees to fly about, but with snow still on the ground. It has been a strange winter. We've had snow on the ground every day since December 18, 2009.
The sun has finally come out after a long cold spell. The bees seemed estatic to come out and buzz around a bit. We decided to peek in the top of both hives and check to see how things looked.
The hive next to the garden fence (the one with snow in the background) is the hive we started from a nuc last spring. When we looked in, there was a nice cluster of bees (pictured above) on the top honey super. From what I could see without lifting any frames, they still have plenty of honey for the moment in this top super. Plus, this hive smelled FABULOUS...like wax and honey. One of my favorite things about keeping bees is the smell of a healthy hive.

The second hive is our ultra-combined hive. In 2008 we combined our original two hives, and then last year we combined again with the swarm hive we caught in 2009. There are far fewer bees flying out around the entrance, so I was surprised when I popped the top to find a good sized gathering of bees, pictured immediately above. We're feeding this hive bottles of honey from our own bees through the mason jar feeder. We'll do that until our honey runs out and then feed them with sugar water. It looks like they just might make it.

Body Structures of the Honey Bee I. A. 2.

2010-01-12T07:55:00.000-08:00

The best source for drawings and details about the anatomy of the honey bee is a book called "The Beekeeper's Handbook" by Diana Sammataro and Alphonse Avitabile: a book worth having for someone who wishes to become certified and to move on towards being a Master Beekeeper.

I also draw from WNC Bee School notes from a lecture by Greg Clements in 2008.

Questions (I. A. 2.): What are the three main body structures of an adult bee? What are their respective functions? What primary organs are contained in each?

HEAD
Contains sensory organs: the eyes, tongue, antennae
The jaws/mandible
Brain/neural systems
Food and pheromone producing glands
Glands for production of royal jelly
Five eyes: 2 compound and 3 tiny ocelli
(The Drone bee, or male bee has huge compound eyes)
The proboscis

THORAX
Center of locomotion, where legs and wings attach
Contains muscles for wings and legs and some muscles for breathing
2 pair of wings that interlock (with something like velcro for strength)
3 pairs of legs
Legs have pollen collecting structures--pollen combs, press and basket
(The thorax is longer in the queen and drone bees)

ABDOMEN
Reproductive organs
Sting (in female bees)
Digestive System
Wax glands (in female bees)
Scent glands
Circulatory system
Spiracles for respiration
(The drone has a rounded butt, the queen has a very long abdomen)

Link on anatomy from "How Stuff Works"

Also of interest: the bees attract pollen on their body with a static electric charge and then use their legs to pack it up for transport.

Kingdom: Animal
Phylum: Arthropoda (segmented insect with a chitanous membrane)
Class: Hexapoda (six legs)
Order: Hymenoptera (can lock their wings together)
Family: Apidae
Genus: Apis
Species: Mellifera (the European/Western honey bee)

Stages of Bee Development I. A. 1.

2010-01-12T07:03:00.000-08:00

I'm studying for the NC Master Beekeeping Program Certified Level written exam, so I thought I would blog my study guide.

Question I. A. 1. What are the four stages of honey bee development? How are they different? What is the purpose of each stage?

Above is my best picture of varied stages of development in one of my hives. The bee start out as a tiny white egg, laid by the queen bee in the bottom of each cell. They are long and skinny. You can see a few eggs in the bottom left hand corner of the picture if you blow it up to full size by clicking on the photo. The egg stays in the cell for three days, then hatches out into a larva.

The larvae are the white worm looking things. The larval stage is the eating and growing in size portion of a bee's life. There is some good size variation in the photo. The larvae are initially fed royal jelly, a substance that is produced from a gland in the worker bees' heads. Bees that will grow up to be queen get royal jelly for much longer. Regular worker bees and drones get a few days of royal jelly, then the nurse bees switch them over to a diet of pollen and honey.

The bees then cap the cell with the brown caps in the lower right hand portion of the picture. A queen is capped on day 7 1/2, a worker bee is capped on day 9, and a drone is capped on day 10. Capped brood become pupae, the stage in which the white worm becomes a white bee, and finally becomes a full grown bee. If you pull of the cap, you will find a bee in this process of transformation. (Photo on Wikipedia of pupal changes)

The bee finally emerges from its cell as an adult bee, ready to go to work, fully developed.

It takes 16 days to grow a queen bee, 21 days to grow a worker, and 24 to grow a male drone.

Snow Bees

2009-12-19T13:27:00.000-08:00

Eleven inches of snow this weekend, much more than we usually get. The bees are snug in their hives, snuggled in a cluster of bees, shivering to maintain the constant temperature of the hive, eating honey.
Nothing really to do except clear the entrance of snow.

We also knocked that nice mound of snow off the top of each hive, but it looked good while it was there.

The view from the hive back toward the house.

Treating Varroa Mites in the Old/Combined Hive

2009-09-06T14:46:00.001-07:00

We decided to test our hives to see if our varroa mites were at levels that required intervention. We did this by placing our plastic board under the screened bottom board for 24 hours. It was a sticky board test. The board was sticky due to a coat of vaseline. One of the bottom boards is pictured above, covered in pollen, tiny pieces of newspaper from combining the hives, and varroa mites.

The varroa mites are the little brown football shaped critters. I have a video of a couple of them walking around at the end of this post. The mites lay eggs in brood cells before they are capped and then treat the pupae in the capped cells like giant milkshakes, which needless to say, is not good for the baby bees. I took both the picture and the video through a magnifying glass.
The new hive had a low mite count, so we left it alone. The old/combined hive had more than 200 mites on the sticky board, so we decided to treat. First, we took off the top two boxes...the honey super and the top deep, using the black topped fume board and Bee Quick spray. The honey super had two frames with some honey, which I froze to give back to them later. The top deep was basically empty. All the action is in the bottom two deeps.
We're treating with Apiguard, a thymol gel that comes in little aluminum trays. I think thymol is considered a "soft" chemical treatment. Probably more than the "natural" beekeepers would use, but not one of the nastier chemical treatments.
We opened the tray and added a spacer so the bees will have room to access the gel. They will distribute it throughout the hive.
Then we popped our feeder back on top. We're down to two deeps, a spacer and a feeder for the old/combined hive. The top deep looked full of bees and honey. The newspaper that had been between the old hive and the swarm hive was completely gone, except for tiny little crumbs of it that we found on our sticky board. Watch the video below to see varroa mites tooling around.

Meanwhile, we took the plastic feeder off the new hive and replaced it with a mason jar feeder, more conducive to cold weather feeding.

For more info and more video, look at the varroa mite page at wncbees.org: http://www.wncbees.org/Pests/Varroa.cfm

Happy September!

Combine the Hives, Hope for the Best

2009-08-16T15:00:00.001-07:00

From left to right: "New Hive," started this spring, "Old Hive," the combined hives from last year, and "Swarm Hive," also known as "Dying Hive with Two Queen Bees."

Having explored Old Hive yesterday and found it booming with bees, honey, pollen and capped brood...but showing no signs of a queen, uncapped brood or eggs, and having found TWO QUEENs in the poorly populated and poorly stocked Swarm Hive, we decided to combine the two hives and let them work it out.
So...here is Old Hive with a carefully chosen piece of newspaper (selected for interesting story and picture) topped with Swarm Hive. There is a honey super on top that we stole from Old Hive yesterday, hoping that its couple frames of honey would keep Swarm Hive from starving while we worked out a plan. (We poked pin holes through the newspaper so they can start getting to know each other by scent while they think about eating through the paper.)

We'll get things down to two deeps before winter. Goodness only knows if this is the best plan, but Swarm Hive was definitely not going to make it through the winter without reinforcements.
*
Oh, here's a bad thought. What if the youngest queen had not yet taken her mating flight?? Who knows? I'm always just happy to not get stung. Best wishes, Combined Hive.
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[Combined hive=Rachel + Sylvia + Swarm]
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Saw Bee Hatch, One Hive with TWO Queens!!??!!

2009-08-15T11:23:00.000-07:00

****Old Hive****

Did a thorough inventory of the hive today. Capped brood and pollen in the bottom deep. Capped brood in the middle of the top deep. We actually SAW A BEE EMERGING from it's capped cell, all grown up and ready to work. Several frames of honey on either side of the top deep, and corners of honey in the brood frames in the top deep.

We used the fume board, took off the empty super. The empty super is on the party porch, for the bees to clean out before we store it for the winter.

We took off the super that had a couple frames of honey and gave it (without the bees) to the swarm hive.

****New Hive****

We've been feeding them with the plastic top feeder since we swapped the deeps and took off the supers. The plastic top feeder is great for summer, because you can dump a gallon of sugar water in, and they can access it quickly. We will go to a central mason jar feeder when the weather gets cooler. We did not bother them today, but have fed them over a gallon of sugar water in the last week or so.

****Swarm Hive****

Breaking news--we saw TWO QUEENS in that half-assed hive today. That hive is a mystery a minute. It is still looking pathetic, with no honey, very little capped worker brood, too many drone brood cells and a lot of empty frames. But there were TWO QUEENS, on the same frame. We decided to start feeding them with gusto and see what happens.

I bought half gallon mason jars this morning and am going to go to the hardware store later today to get some boards cut to make mason jar feeders that fit the wide mouthed jars.

Early August Adjustments

2009-08-03T17:13:00.000-07:00

We inspected the hives today, and moved stuff around. Here are before and after diagrams. I'm not sure our logic would make sense to someone else, but it made sense to us while we were working in angry clouds of bees.

"X" means that we plan to remove the marked boxes later.

First, the oldest hive, which has some honey we can harvest:

Then the "new" hive that we started this spring:

Then the "swarm" hive, also known as the "mostly dead" hive:

Ultimately we plan to combine the two weakest hives, the new and swarm hives:

We will use the fume board to get the bees out of the honey super and out of the deep that we're going to remove from the new hive, insert a piece of newspaper and stack the rest all back together.

Chapstick, Success!

2009-07-17T05:13:00.000-07:00

Made a double boiler with a pot of water and a pyrex measuring cup. Then added one part beeswax (with some honey still included) and, if memory serves, three parts olive oil. Then added the fluid from some vitamin E tablets for a preservative.

I've saved small tins for a couple years. Cleaned them up and poured in the hot mix.

The chapstick is very smooth. I'll try different types of oil in the future. I also need to buy some tins, as the Altoid tins are now all dispersed to the guinea pig friends who wanted to try the chapstick first. So far no complaints.

Honey drained from the Wax Cappings

2009-07-01T05:47:00.000-07:00

The new decapping tray, pictured at harvest time, was fabulous. They say that the honey drained from the wax cappings (the wax you cut off the frame before extracting the honey) is the very best honey. We got almost four whole pints of honey from the decapping collector. Two freezer containers of wax cappings for later wax projects, currently stored in the freezer.

The cappings honey is not strained, so it has little bits of wax floating in it. It is kind of like chewing gum, munching on the wax.

Calculating Pints of Honey

2009-06-21T17:25:00.001-07:00

For the record, this is how the math teacher determines how many pints are in the bottling bucket.

The volume of a cylinder: volume =Pi * radius squared * height.

Volume answer is in cubic inches...google for table of "cubic inches to pints" conversion.

The radius of our bottling bucket is 5.5 inches.

Another measurement of this harvest: the bees filled their top deep and two supers with honey. We harvested from the two supers (small boxes): five frames from one, six frames from the other.

We put the supers back on the hives, including five partially filled frames. At least a couple of the frames we returned to the bees had capped honey on one side and uncapped honey on the other side.

23 pints and some new tools

2009-06-21T13:42:00.000-07:00

Postscript on DRAT

2009-06-20T13:52:00.000-07:00

I'm to report that the assistant bee keeper "is NOT limping." She says that makes her sound like a wuss. Actually, you can barely see where she was stung, so that is a good thing.

We had further thoughts on the new hive. It could be that this hive was the source of the swarm, and that instead of having no queen, they may just have a NEW queen, who hasn't gotten her egg laying groove on yet. We're hopeful. But we're also trying to find someplace to buy a queen, just in case. If we can be sure of a queen in that hive, we may recombine it with the swarm hive, which we believe to be completely a queenless mess.

Poor bees. We just figure it all out as we go along.

Well, drat all around.

2009-06-20T09:16:00.000-07:00

A problematic day in beekeeping.

1. The good news: I have still not been stung. The bad news: the assistant beekeeper suffered our first sting. We made it over a year with no injuries. Today a bee crawled up her pants' leg and got squashed and gave its life and its stinger. The ABK is limping around with a baking soda poultice on her leg.

2. The good news: The swarm hive has drawn out frame throughout their box. The bad news: they are looking suspiciously queenless. Not much uncapped brood, too many drone cells and drones hanging out. Could we have another laying worker hive?

3. The good news: The original hive is chock full of honey. We put on a bee escape to see if we can harvest honey from the two supers on Monday. The bees should go out of the bee escape into the rest of the hive and not be able to get back up into the supers, so we should be able to just lift the supers off and take them in the house in a couple days. Their top deep is also chock full of honey. The uneasy news: we couldn't get into the bottom deep to check on things there. The top deep was REALLY HEAVY, and seemed to have frames stuck to the bottom box, so we gave up without fully assessing the situation of the hive. We are hopeful that the bottom box is not full of honey and that there is a queen and brood and a normal situation down there. We should have harvested honey a week or two ago, but have been out of town and unavailable.

4. The good news: well, heck, let's just skip to the worries of the hive that we started this spring. "The new hive," not to be confused with "the swarm hive." We didn't find a remarkable lot of brood or honey in the new hive's box. The bottom deep box had lots of bees in it, but not much of anything in the cells. The top deep box had honey around the top edges, but we didn't see much evidence of a queen. Could we be losing both of our two newest hives?

Drat. I took a couple pictures of the swarm hive frames, but was having trouble with the blogging program, so I'll maybe post those separately.

Swarm

2009-05-31T04:39:00.001-07:00

So yesterday, I'm sitting in my living room drinking my morning coffee, enjoying the peace and quiet of the morning, when my next door neighbor comes over and rings the doorbell. "I think I've got something of yours," she says.

We trudge next door and she points to a small pile of bees on the ground, probably fifty or so bees, a pile the size of a small hand. "Huh," I said. "That's not a swarm. There's not enough bees. Plus, swarms usually aren't sitting on the ground. They're up in a clump in a tree." I pointed upward, vaguely. We all looked up. My neighbor took a few involuntary steps back toward her house. There, up in the tree, was a swarm, tens of thousands of bees clinging together. We all paused for a quick think. Then I launched into reassurances. "Hey, wow. No problem. Swarms are not looking to sting anyone. They just want a home. We can call a local beekeeper, and they'll be glad to come get them. Free bees!

We would have thought about getting them ourselves, but they were twenty feet up, and we didn't have any equipment...no swarm catching bucket on a pole, no big ladder, no hive. We called our friend who keeps bees professionally. He was on his way out the door to go camping with his family, but said he would call someone. By the time we got a call back, it was too late. We had a plan.
*We made some sugar water and put some of it in a spray bottle. We got the cardboard nuc (small box holding five frames of bees) that our latest bees came in. We put on our bee suits. We went in one of our hives and stole a frame of drawn out comb full of baby bees (see below) and put it in the nuc, along with four brand new frames with wax foundation. We grabbed an old white bedspread, a small ladder, and the tree trimming extension pole that has a hook on the end.

The assistant bee keeper climbed up the small ladder with the pole. I held the ladder and helped with the pole. We hooked the branch, looked at each other and counted to three. On three we gave the branch a huge jerk. KERFLUMP! Down came the bees, mostly on the blanket.

We hit the bees with fast squirts of sugar water. We figured they were hungry, and bees licking sugar water off themselves are usually too busy and happy to sting you. Then we picked up the bedspread and dumped a bunch of bees in the cardboard nuc onto the frames.

The bees figured out that they had arrived, and that there were BABY BEES that needed their care. The old beekeepers in the area tell me that if you hive a swarm with baby bees, they will almost always stay put and not swarm out again. Sure enough, they had hardly hit the box when some of the bees put their tail ends in the air to send out pheromones indicating that this was home and everyone else should come.

We put the top on the box, leaving the little round entrance open. Pretty soon the vast majority of the swarm was in or on the box. Then we went home to wait a spell.

When we returned around four, most everybody was inside the box. We corked the entrance and took them to the backyard.

(Meanwhile, I had spent some frantic time on the phone trying to find a hive. Many thanks to Orr Bee Supply in Old Fort, North Carolina, for opening on a Saturday to help me deal with my emergency.)

We transferred the five frames into the new hive, spraying everybody with sugar water as we went. We dumped the bees out of the bottom of the box into the hive, put a sugar water feeder on top, and left the box near the entrance for any stragglers to find their way home.

I just checked the neighbor's tree. The morning after there is a fist sized clump of bees hanging there. They were the bees that were out and about gathering and hunting when we moved the cardboard nuc. I'm sad about them, but these things happen. For a hive, it is not the loss of the individual bees, but the survival of the hive. This hive has a happy new home.

*I'm not sure how my neighbor feels about the remaining small clump of bees, but I'm sure this is preferable to tens of thousands.

Chapstick Postponed

2009-05-25T06:13:00.000-07:00

I saved the wax cappings that we cut off of the honey comb last year, and they spent the year in the freezer. One package from each honey harvest. Recently, I got all motivated to MAKE CHAPSTICK.

We thawed the cappings, then I put them on the strainers in the bottling bucket and ran water over them to rinse out some of the excess honey that was still stuck to them. I left them to drip dry.

During a house cleaning that week for company, someone (probably me) put the lid on the bucket and moved it to the basement out of the way.

I went to find it last night and discovered that the wax cappings had turned to a pile of science project looking mildewed mess. I did not take a picture. I just threw out the mess, strainers and all.

Here's what I've figured out. Honey keeps forever, but if you add water, it ferments. We fermented those cappings and then closed them up and grew some wicked mildew.

I'm eventually going to try again with either the cappings in the freezer or the new ones when we collect honey in the next couple weeks. But I'll consult with some experts first about how to avoid this mess.

I put in an order last night for metal strainers. The bucket is fine, polished clean and ready to go. I also ordered a fancy uncapping tray that will be a little easier to use than last year's frying pan arrangement, and will allow the honey to drip through a built in strainer below. The honey from the cappings is reported to be the best honey, so we'll be able to bottle it separately.

I'll stick with Burt's Bees for now.

May 12, Two Honey Supers on Each Hive

2009-05-15T04:17:00.000-07:00

For my own records: The Junior Hive bottom super has nine frames of drawn out honey comb from last year, with one frame of capped honey that was in the freezer all winter. The Junior Hive also has a queen excluder below the bottom honey super. The top honey super on the Junior Hive has six new frames of foundation only and three frames of drawn out honey comb from last year.

The bottom super of the Senior Hive (pictured in a previous blog) has all new foundation except for the one frame of capped honey from last year. There were bees all over the frame with honey, but not much going on with the foundation frames, so we removed the queen excluder on this hive. The top honey super, added on May 12, has four frames of new foundation and five drawn out frames from last year.

Honey Flow

2009-05-10T11:14:00.000-07:00

The Tulip Poplars and the Honey Locust trees are in full bloom, as are the blackberries...all present in our neighborhood and quickly turning to honey in the hives. The Poplars and Locust have both been in bloom all week. Here is a link to a page with our local bee flowers....

Western Carolina Flower Sources

The senior hive had still not moved much into the super we put on top this week, and it was evident without much poking around that the top of the frames of the top deep were full of honey. We removed the queen excluder and added a second shallow on top, which had several frames of drawn out comb and a few frames with just foundation. The drawn out comb will definitely hasten the process since it takes large amounts of nectar for the bees to create comb.

The junior hive has moved up into the second deep that we added last week. They are also storing honey in it for their own uses. We did put on a queen excluder (which I may take off later) and gave them a shallow with a mix of drawn out comb and frames with new foundation as well. I put dates on the frames so I'll know which frames are which as time goes on.

The queen excluder is supposed to keep the queen out of the honey supers, since you don't want baby bees in your honey, but we think it was slowing down the senior hive. We did fine without excluders last year, and there was enough honey at the top of the upper deep to keep the queen down below.

My fourth super box was in use until today as a box around the mason jar feeder. I'll add it to the new hive soon, so there will be two honey supers on each hive. We'll check their progress from week to week. If this is a big honey year, I might have to add even more supers. Hope springs eternal.

No pictures today...I wanted to be more of a beekeeper and less of a photographer. Still, while we had intended to pull frames out of the deeps, it was evident that the honey flow was on, so we went with the basic rule of "don't mess with the bees any more than you have to when the honey flow is on."

Go bees, go.

New bees' new wax and new deep

2009-05-03T17:53:00.001-07:00

We took a peek in the new hive. They have branched out from their original five frames. The two outside frames still have just foundation, but they've built gorgeous new wax on the others. Here is a frame of bees that was one of the new frames...it is now covered with drawn out comb and busy bees.

It won't stay this white. As they track their dirty little bee feet over it, it will go from bright white to black.

They are also busy making babies. This solid brown below is capped brood...babies almost ready to hatch out as working adult bees. I'm thinking the new bottom board must give them a little extra room at the bottom, because they've stretched out their comb below the frame.

Since they had almost filled their deep box, we added a second story. The deep we put on has all drawn out comb. It is the deep box we took off the bottom of the leaning tower of bees last fall. I kept the frames in the freezer part of the fall and then stored them with chemicals to deter moths the rest of the winter. They've aired out and are ready for occupation and use.

When I went out to put a new bottle of sugar water on this hive, the bees had already moved up into the new deep. They looked happy to be there.

We also checked on the older hive. They have not moved up into the new super, despite me hanging a frame of honey right smack in the middle of it. We'll keep an eye on it over the next week or so. If they continue to balk, I might take out the queen excluder. I suspect they just haven't needed it yet.

Adding a Shallow Super

2009-04-25T13:10:00.000-07:00

The senior hive is bursting at the seams, so we stopped feeding them, and I went ahead and added a shallow super (a short box full of frames) for them to start storing honey. The metal grate, above, is called a queen excluder. It went just below the super to keep the queen out of the honey box. Plenty of room for her to lay eggs down below. Most folks don't want baby bees floating about in their honey.

Eight of the frames are new ones with a sheet of foundation for them to build their own honey comb. The middle frame is a frame from last year with one side full of honey that we collected last year and kept in the freezer all winter. The honey on that middle frame will entice them up through the excluder and get them moving on the rest of the frames. Before you know it we'll be harvesting honey.

The feeder board and mason jar go into storage. The hive is now topped with an inner cover and the usual outer cover and rock.

Find the Queen Bee

2009-04-24T16:29:00.001-07:00

Click on the picture above and see if you can find the queen. She's big and beautiful. And sort of beige.

See her now? This is the queen in the new hive, as photographed during transfer to the hive last Saturday.

Move to the New Hive...last Saturday

2009-04-24T04:32:00.000-07:00

After bringing the cardboard nuc of bees home from the 4H camp, we popped the yellow cork and let them fly around for a couple hours. Confined bees are cranky bees, and we wanted them more mellow for transfer.

There were five frames in the nuc box...four fairly well developed frames and one they were just beginning to draw out into comb.

Aren't they lovely bees?

Easy peasy to just move the frames from the nuc box to the hive, where we had four more frames with just foundation waiting for them to build.

After taking out the last frame, there were a few bees in the box. Bees that went foraging when we first opened the yellow cork came home to the empty box. They had legs covered with pollen and bellies full of flower nectar for the hive. The bees in the hive started sending the "this is home" chemical signal, and within a few hours, all the bees had vacated the box and moved into the new hive.

We've been feeding the new hive sugar water, about a quart every two days. The old hive got their last quart of medicated sugar water on Sunday, sucked it down in two days...and we cut them off. They are getting way strong and are now on their own. We'll add honey supers this week for them to start collecting honey for us.

New hive in front...last year's combined hive in the background. Go bees, go!

NEW BEES!!

2009-04-18T18:22:00.000-07:00

Back out to the 4-H camp today, a little over a year after picking up my first two hives. Same truck, same long line of excited bee keepers, but a year of experience under my belt. The bees came from Statesville in stacks of cardboard boxes secured with rubber bands. You just never know who you are following on the interstate, you know.

The girls have been safely transferred from box to hive. I'll share pictures of that later, including a photo of the queen of the hive!

Sugar Water, Sugar Water

2009-04-17T18:10:00.000-07:00

A busy night of watering. I went and added rain water to the very popular little plastic tub next to the hive. It was full of little bathing beauties, there to gather for the family.
*
Then back to the house for an evening of sugar water preparation. Two quart mason jars of sugar water in a 1:1 ratio. (Boiled first, then sugar added. Stirred, not shaken.)
*
Medicine in one quart for the senior hive's last round of medication of the spring.
*
No medicine in the other quart. That food will go on the top of the NEW HIVE. We pick up five frames of bees in a cardboard box tomorrow, from the same nice fellow who trucked in our original two hives last year from Statesville. He told me last night that he only lost 5% of his hives over the winter. That may sound like a lot of losses, but many Asheville area folks had losses of around 50%. Makes me feel better about only making it through the year with one of the two hives with which I started.
*
Also stuck a cup of water in the microwave for two minutes, added a quarter cup of sugar and dug out the hummingbird feeder. I'm a few days late, but hopefully my cute little bird friends won't begrudge me.
*
Meanwhile, the two bushes on either side of the back door were abuzz with all sorts of bees, wasps and flies this afternoon. If you look at the earliest posts on this blog, you'll see that this bee buffet was blooming just prior to bee pickup last year as well.
*
Thus we come full cycle and end year one. And it was good.

Photo and Video of Bees Drinking from Chicken's Water

2009-04-12T17:52:00.000-07:00

( On this still photo, above, you can see the tongue of the second bee from the bottom.)

The chickens enjoy drinking out of the bee's water source. It seems that turn about is fair play.

The New IPM Screened Bottom Board

2009-04-06T06:59:00.001-07:00

On March 21st, I took the hive off the solid wood bottom board that had served as the hive bottom for the first year, and replaced it with a fancy "Country Rubes" screened IPM bottom board. IPM stands for Integrated Pest Management, and indicates that this is a natural way of helping control the mite population. The mites fall through the screen and have a hard time getting back into the hive.

Also, there is a plastic sheet that can be used to either close up the hive a bit or to count the mite population. To do a count, you make it a sticky board by putting some sticky substance on it, put it under the hive for a couple days and then count the number of mites per square inch that are adhered to the surface.

I haven't used it as a sticky board, but I did leave the plastic sheet in from March 21 to April 5. When I took it out, it was mostly covered with pollen.

There were also a few Varroa mites strolling around on the board amidst the pollen, my first face to face encounter with them. They are not much bigger than the period at the end of this sentence, little brown spots that can wreak havoc in a hive if their population gets too high.

I'm leaving the plastic sheet out for a while to improve air circulation, which should help with the general health of the hive.

One thing I enjoyed when I opened up the little slot to take the plastic sheet out of the bottom board...the wonderful smell of beeswax and honey that came out of the hive. MMmmm.

Swapping out the Sugar Water

2009-04-05T13:18:00.001-07:00

We gave the bees their third quart of medicated sugar water today. They will get up to one more quart to treat their Nosema prior to the beginning of the honey collecting season. The assistant beekeeper is pictured actually making the swap.

**You may have noticed by now that in most of the blog, the so called "assistant" is doing most of the work. This is a little trick I learned from watching Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom as a child. I always remember the older man's voice saying things like, "And here is my assistant wrestling a boa constrictor on the edge of the swamp. A matter of life and death as he tries to avoid being squashed by the mighty constrictor or drowned in the process."

Drinking

2009-04-05T13:11:00.000-07:00

The bees have to have a water source. If you don't provide one close to the hive, they'll go right to your neighbor's kiddie pool, which the neighbors tend to find a bother.
My little bee pond is simply a plastic bucket with some rocks in it. The rocks provide a landing strip to prevent drowning. With the recent rains, the water in the bucket had gotten pretty deep, so I did have a few drowning victims this week.

I went out after taking these pictures and cleaned out the water bucket and put in fresh water. The bees are making good use of their little mini-pond today, with sometimes four or five bees at a time collecting water to take back to the hive.

According to the scientists who study these things, water collecting bees just collect water. Some members of the hive will focus on harvesting nectar and pollen, others will just bring back water to share. Today is a big water collecting day, with the temperature outside a little over 70 degrees F.

Switching the Hive Bodies, New Bottom Board

2009-03-21T14:17:00.001-07:00

Before: After:

(1) Come spring, if you have two deeps (two hive bodies, or two boxes), the bees will have mostly moved up into the top box. We switched the top and bottom boxes to give them upwards room to grow. The queen's job in spring is to make lots of baby bees to do the work of the active season. (I'm not counting the very top box in this account, since it is a feeder rather than a hive body.)

(2) There were still two frames full of honey on the outside of the inhabited box...one on either side. Since the bees still cluster in the middle when it is cold, they can't get to the honey if it is outside the cluster, so we took those frames and switched them with the two center frames of the emptyish box, which puts them now right above the cluster of bees. Top and center, ready to eat.

(3) We replaced the solid wood bottom board with a fancy screened bottom board. The screen will allow more ventilation, and will also help with reducing pests in the hive and doing studies to see how many mites and beetles and such are in the hive to begin with.

Bugs and Babies

2009-03-07T14:06:00.001-08:00

Good news and bad news in the bee yard. First the bad news. I think my bees have Nosema, a stomach bug common in spring. Bees get it when they've been cooped up in their hive during cold spells. The brown smudges around the entrance indicate they might have upset tummies. The first good news...I have medicine for them. I mixed in 1/4 teaspoon of Fumagilin-B with their next bottle of sugar water, so they'll take it with their food. We put this bottle of medicated food on this afternoon.

Better news...while we were out there, we inspected inside the hive and found many good things. The picture below shows the nursery...with shiny white larvae and tiny white eggs and brown capped brood. Plus nurse bees attending the babies. The eggs and larvae indicate that the queen is alive and well....but there was also a brief queen spotting. She ducked down in the hive before we could take her picture, but she is definitely in there!

More good news...the bees have lots of stored pollen (the bright yellow patches, below) and honey. The honey on this picture is the dark brown to the right.

This is the top of the assistant bee keeper's head, and a whole frame of honey.

Soon we will go back out and switch the hive bodies, putting the now empty lower box on top and the active top box on bottom. Bees like to move UP. We'll also switch out the solid wood bottom board for a fancy screened bottom board. More on that later.

March 1 snow

2009-03-02T14:25:00.000-08:00

The bees are snuggled in their hive...hopefully 92 degrees in their cluster. We went out once last night and once today to poke the snow out of their entrance hole. Last night there were two bees frozen in the slush at the entrance.

Bees and Trains

2009-02-24T15:59:00.000-08:00

The train track runs immediately behind the back fence. We were curious starting out whether this would disrupt the bees. As far as we can tell, the bees could care less about the quiet rumbling of the freight train. It doesn't generally bother the resident people, either, and small visiting children think the back yard train is the COOLEST thing.

(Picture from June 2008...drought evident on the lawn.)

Bee School Two

2009-02-15T15:51:00.001-08:00

Just finished the second week of this year's bee school, which I attended this year as a volunteer. Learned some new things, but mostly celebrated how far I've come in a year. It was fun to be able to answer questions that the new students asked...and knowing that if nothing else, I'm a lot more confident about the bees than I was last year. Last year as school ended and I was ordering my bees I was completely terrified.

One Quart in One Week

2009-02-15T15:40:00.000-08:00

The girls sucked down a whole quart of their own honey in a week's time. We have a couple frames of honey in the freezer that we'll put on in the spring. For now, we took the empty bottle off and added a bottle of sugar water (2 parts sugar to 1 part water). We'll probably use a 1:1 ratio next time. The bees have moved up in the hive over the winter, so they are clustered directly below the feeder now. You can see bees sitting on top of the frames in the picture below.

Here's the new sugar water with a few bees who leaked out the top. We took a stick and relocated them towards the front of the hive so they could go back home. No bee suit, smoker or fancy gear for this operation. Just a quick change of bottles and a little bee relocation.

We put the old honey jar in front of the hive for the last couple hitchhikers to go back in the entrance. Which they did.

I like the holes on these new caps. Smaller holes and more of them. Obviously a happy size for the bees, since they went through the honey so quickly. I can hardly wait for it to get warmer to peek in the hive. At this point, just trying to keep the girls from starving...the single largest threat this time of year.

POLLEN POSTSCRIPT: On warmer days there are bees flying into the hive with pollen on their legs...providing some protein that the queen will need for producing spring brood (babies). A couple trees are providing pollen right now...willows for one. Soon the maple trees will provide a huge burst of pollen.

Winter Feeding Update

2009-02-07T03:26:00.000-08:00

Yesterday got warm enough that I peeked in, took the old mason jar of sugar water off the feeder and plopped on a big jar of their own honey. The sugar water was completely untouched and they had sealed up the holes. Hopefully, they have plenty to eat within the hive, but I'm wanting to be sure.

A friend's hive starved to death this winter...at least that is what the forensic evidence suggests. They had a jar of sugar water that they completely disregarded, too.

Hoping the honey is a better option for these cold days.

On the whole, still just leaving the hive alone as they huddle inside in their clump of bees, shivering to keep their inside hive temperature warm. They fly out on sunny days like yesterday, so there is still life in the hive!

Consumer Beware

2009-01-07T15:53:00.000-08:00

Since not everyone can keep bees, and honey occasionally must come from the store, here's a little free advice. Read the label. Don't buy honey if it claims to originate on three different continents. Some grocery store honey proudly boasts a heritage of multiple countries and mulitple quadrants of the globe. Scary.

Buy honey from one place....ideally from one beekeeper.

If you buy honey from your own region, it might even help your local pollen allergies. Plus, it puts a little money in the pocket of a local keeper...and you can be more sure that it is really all honey in that jar.

The Hive in Winter

2008-12-11T06:48:00.000-08:00

The bees are clustered in their hive,
quietly humming and maintaining a warm inside temperature,
living off their honey reserves.

I hope.

The opening of the hive is at its smallest setting.

We'll know in the spring
how they fared through the winter.

Are they under attack by virus or parasite?
Are they getting adequate ventilation?
How's the honey holding out?

I hope things are going well in there.

We've put in an order for a nuc...
five frames of bees to start a second hive
in April.

But now, we wait.

Today in the Bee Yard

2008-11-06T08:24:00.000-08:00

Storing the Honey Comb

2008-10-14T09:11:00.000-07:00

I'm packing up the shallow supers, the boxes that the bees used to store their honey. The comb is clean and empty, the honey is in jars, and the comb will wait for another summer of honey production. To keep the comb free of pests, it spent a few days in the chest freezer to kill any current buggy inhabitants. Then I put the supers in a stack on top of some newspaper, and at the top of the frames put a plate on which I spooned some "Para-Moth" crystals. Moth balls to keep the wax moths away. I'll also store the unused deep and its frames of comb in the same fashion. More important for the black comb of the deep, because wax moths particularly like dark comb that has been used for raising brood.

For my own record keeping...the bottom super in the pile has all drawn out comb. The second box up has drawn out comb on most of the frames, but two frames with new foundation.

Examining Rachel's Bottom Box

2008-10-07T18:01:00.001-07:00

In order to reduce the hive from three deeps to two, we took the least utilized frames out. Since we had slacked for over a month, the bees had moved up in the hive and the entire bottom box was mostly empty, making frame selection quite easy. We just took the whole freakin' box.
You can see some honey at the top of the frame above. It has been capped for winter storage with white wax. Pretty much all the honey in the bottom box is pictured here. You can also tell that this is a new frame, added this year. The comb is still lovely cream color. As time goes by and bajillions of little bee feet tromp over the comb, it gradually turns black.

Much of what was in the bottom box looked like the frame above. Sort of a "lite bright" image of yellows and oranges and browns against a black background. The material stored here is pollen. Bees collect from one type of flower at a time and store the pollen from that type flower in the same cell. So...different color pollen comes from different flowers. Pollen is the bee's protein, an important part of their food source. One can't live off honey alone. Pollen is vital for the production of brood.

Finally, a little burr comb (comb not hanging neatly on the frame) that demonstrates how very dark the comb can get. Or illustrates what a very white woman I am. Or both.
*

We froze the frames in our chest freezer for a few days. Freezing kills moths, mites and other problem critters. We've decided to put the box of frames on the back porch for the bees to raid...and to allow them to recoup some of their honey and pollen.

We'll freeze it all again once they've emptied it.

Feeding the Bees

2008-10-05T11:25:00.000-07:00

Since we took so much of the bee's winter food (honey), and since there was a drought this summer, we've been feeding the bees to ensure they have provisions for the cool of the year. Our feeder is a thick board with a mason jar lid-sized hole. We've been heating water and combining two parts sugar to one part water and putting this syrup in the mason jar.

The bees get their syrup through the tiny nail holes in the lid. This week we're skipping the sugar syrup and just returning some of their own honey to the hive. I wouldn't give them store bought honey since it comes (according to the jar) from three countries and goodness only knows how many different hives.

But we still have plenty of their own honey. Here I'm just draining the honey from a pint jar into the larger jar I'm using as a feeder. The peanut butter is part of my own winter reserve.

Getting Down to Winter Size

2008-10-04T13:33:00.000-07:00

You may remember that we combined the two hives a while back because one hive had gone queenless and had a laying worker bee. That hive was down to a bunch of useless drones hanging out and eating honey.

When we combined the two hives using the newspaper method, we ended up with a hive three deep boxes tall. A whole lot of hive. We were supposed to go out a week or two later and reduce it back down to two boxes, which we did not do.

With winter coming, we felt a need today to get it in gear and correct the situation. So...went out and took off the feeder, took off the top deep and the middle deeps and put them to one side. So far, so good. The top deeps were heavy, so they presumably were full of honey and brood. They also appeared chock full of bees. Since we didn't start pulling frames out, those two boxes were full of mellow, somewhat happy bees.

Then we went into the bottom box and started yanking out frames, which produced the cloud of angry bees I'm coming to know and love. After figuring out that the frames in the bottom box were basically empty of useful bee stuff, we just moved the whole bottom section. We put down a new bottom board and then put the top two deeps back.

We put the bottom deep on the top, used some "bee quick" that we use in honey collection to push the cranky bees down into the hive, and took the now empty box back off to store.

I took it into the basement to freeze the frames. Upon inspection, the frames from the bottom deep had some pollen, a tiny amount of honey, and no brood. They were basically light, airy and empty.

So...the hive is down to two deeps for winter. Yippee skippee. Will continue to feed the bees.

Here's an odd thing I've learned. After ticking off the bees, four or five bees will continue to buzz around your head as you walk away from the hive. I've found that walking into my garage leaves them behind. For some reason, they won't come in the garage. (They will come into the kitchen if I go right into the house.)

Today I went in the side door of the garage and then out the front door. The bees were still hanging out near the side door waiting for me.

No Mowing Today

2008-10-03T12:07:00.001-07:00

I went out to mow the back yard on this sunny fall day, but soon quit, as the back yard is covered with blooming clover, and the clover is covered with happy bees and other pollinators.

Reducing the Entrance

2008-10-03T11:52:00.001-07:00

This morning the temperature was 38 degrees Fahrenheit when I woke up. The bees were not stirring, but were huddled inside their warm hive. A few nights ago we added an entrance reducer. This both helps keep the hive warm and gives the dropping population less to guard. We put the opening at the top. If some bees should die there in the entrance, you don't want them to block the door.

The Late Summer Spider Gains Mass

2008-09-20T13:38:00.000-07:00

August pictures of the same spider, guarding the tomatoes. Fore and aft...

Click here for earlier photos.

Feeding and More Honey

2008-08-31T06:40:00.000-07:00

Beekeeping journal for Saturday, 8/30/08.

Got wind through the beekeeping grapevine that due to this summer's severe drought, it is a good idea to start the fall feeding early. We heated some water and mixed it, one part water to two parts sugar, and allowed it to cool. Put it in a large mason jar and poked some small nail holes in the metal lid.

Took it out to our hive, where we had topped the hive with a flat board with a mason jar top-sized hole and inverted the jar, drippy side down. It looks like it won't drip until they go up to seek the sugar water to put it in their comb for storage.

Then put an empty hive body box around the mason jar and put the hive's telescoping lid on top.

We'll put up some pictures of the feeder later...were in a bit of a rush when we added it to the hive yesterday.

In other news, went over to coworker Pamela's house in the afternoon and helped her harvest a shallow of honey. Much fun. We ended up bringing more bees in the house than during previous harvests, but it was easy enough to catch them one by one and escort them back outside.

I'm becoming quite the honey collecting pro. The main requirement for harvesting honey is to not mind getting a little sticky.

Today's Progress

2008-08-24T18:13:00.000-07:00

We took a whack at the leaning tower of bees today. The girls had completely cleaned out the honey comb from our latest harvest, so we took that box off the top.

The second box from the top was the shallow from our first honey harvest. It had some uncapped nectar here and there and two frames of capped honey. We put the two capped frames in the freezer, and moved the rest of the super to the party porch for the bees to clean out.

So...we're down to three deeps. We want to consolidate the deeps into two for winter, which will take some figuring out. We explored the top two boxes today....they both have some capped honey and some nectar and some empty spaces.

We're working on a game plan to get the best of the frames from these two top deeps into one deep and to put the rest in storage.

Today we just angered the bees, doing our explorations with a cloud of really unhappy bees buzzing around our heads. One bee followed me all over the yard as I put things away. I finally lost her when I stepped into the garage for a minute.

ABK had one bee still sitting on her back when she returned to the house. This little buzzy lady was escorted back outside.

Still no stings, which seems miraculous on days like today.

I fear that we are making mistakes left and right, but we learn more each day.

Today's note to self: we didn't use the fume board to get all the bees out of the top two supers before we put them on the back porch. There weren't that many bees, and our first thought was that they could just fly back to the hive and take the residual honey with them.

It was only in later reflection that I realized these particular girls had probably never left the hive. Younger bees work the inside of the hive....older bees forage. If these are younger bees, they may not find their way home.

We'll be more careful when we take a deep off in a few days.

We'll start feeding soon. I'll probably give them back some of the last honey we harvested, and feed them sugar water throughout the winter. The drought has been hard on the local bees, as well as most everything else.

It takes extra care with the smoker when all the grass is crunchy and brown. Don't want to set it on the ground and start a fire.

Second Round of Bottled Honey

2008-08-16T05:42:00.001-07:00

Nineteen and a half pints of very dark, lovely honey.

Flying Solo

2008-08-14T18:19:00.000-07:00

After slinging out the honey, it was time to return the super to the hive. The bees will clean out any residual honey, and we will remove the super again in a few days to put it in storage for the winter. The brave assistant bee keeper decided this return was a one woman job, so she suited up, fired up the smoker, loaded the wheelbarrow and headed out.

ABK reports the bees had figured out that we'd robbed them, and some flew angrily at her when she lifted the cover. But all was well. Still no stings.

August 12....a darker shade of honey

2008-08-13T17:46:00.001-07:00

The harvest was easy peasie this time...it helps to know what you are doing. We pulled off a full shallow super, carted it back to the house in the wheelbarrow and slung it out in the extractor with no difficulty.

Definitely darker in shade, but still oh so sweet. The bees are on to us though. At one point the assistant beekeeper told me to look at the windows of the "honey house." There were at least 20 cranky bees bouncing off the screens. They lost interest after I closed the glass windows, but for a while I thought we were going to have to abandon using the back door to come in and out.

Isn't that pretty? Will show bottles soon. We've let the honey filter and settle. Will probably bottle it tomorrow.

The Facts on Late Summer Spiders

2008-08-06T14:55:00.000-07:00

http://www.floridanature.org/species.asp?species=Argiope_aurantia

This just in from our correspondent nature photographer in Florida.

Late Summer Spiders

2008-08-01T08:34:00.000-07:00

The assistant beekeeper (ABK) has told me for years that late summer in western NC brings huge spiders. She calls them "late summer spiders." This beauty is living amongst the tomatoes in our garden. I nearly stuck my face (nose to spider) right in the web today while pursuing giant red tomatoes for lunch.

When they are not on my face (and preferably not in my house), I do love spiders and other bugs. They are interesting, diverse, beautiful, and so frequently quite useful. My late summer friend is protecting my 'maters from invaders, and me from mosquitoes.

I know folks come here (blogwise) looking for bees, but the amateur Swammerdam just loves the bugs in general. Updates soon on bees...they have been minding their own business for weeks now with no interference from their keepers. We've kept a basin of water near the hive for these hot, thirsty days. And in return, our garden has produced and produced and produced with the help of our cheerful pollinators. The neighbor's crab apple tree, which I never even noticed before, is jam smack covered in fruit.

Other People's Bees

2008-06-29T13:26:00.000-07:00

Now that I have fallen for honey bees, I find myself observing other people's hives as I drive along the road. Yesterday I found some hidden hives while hiking around Hawksdene out in the western mountains.

The Cleaning Crew

2008-06-22T11:34:00.001-07:00

So, one might ask, how do you clean up all that sticky equipment after extracting your honey?
Simple. You just put it outside and let the girls find it. They'll get every minute drop of honey and take it back to the hive for their own use. I did learn the hard way that it is best to turn the buckets on their sides. We had a small number of fatalities when the first few bees got stuck in the honey. Since turning, though, most of the bees have been able to come, get their honey and go back home with no problem.

Another tip...beware the honey-guarding-bee. One of the bees chased me back into the house when I took this second picture, buzzing indignantly next to my ear through the yard, through the mud porch, into the kitchen. I was alone in the hallway and returned to find the bee grooming herself on the kitchen floor. Popped a tupperware over her and put a sheet of paper under her and escorted her back outside where she belonged.

Another couple days and the extractor and bottling bucket will be clean as a whistle and ready to store until the next harvest later in the summer.

17 Pints

2008-06-17T19:10:00.000-07:00

So the math teacher took pi times radius squared and multiplied by the height of the honey in the bottling bucket, which gave her cubic inches and then she googled to figure out how many cubic inches were in a pint....her estimate was 16 pints. I did the math the redneck way, put the honey in the jars and then counted the jars. I got 17 pints, but we filled to the neck of the bottle, not to the lid, so there may have been some variance. Either way, that's a whole bunch o' honey.

The Leaning Tower of Bees

2008-06-17T04:26:00.000-07:00

On Sunday when we were taking the shallow super of honey from Rachel, we also dismantled the Sylvia hive and put her bottom deep on top of Rachel's two deeps, separated by a piece of newspaper with some small slits in it. Once they eat through the newspaper, the plan is that they will smell right to each other and not have to have a small war. The shallow super pictured on top had some honey started, but was not capped, so we left it there for them to finish. We also added the shallow super we extracted back to the very top of the hive (not currently pictured) for them to finish cleaning the honey out of the cells and hopefully start over again with the upcoming sourwood honey bloom. By late fall we hope to figure out how to get the hive back down to two deeps.

All that is left of the Sylvia hive is her bottom board with a few homeless and unhappy bees. Many of these bees came home after the hive had left. We decided to leave them to their own resources, as they were likely to be most cranky and likely to sting us. The top deep off of Sylvia is going into storage for the time being. The little bit of nectar stored in the bottom of a few frames was left out in another part of the yard, where bees are busily taking it out and back to their hive. When they've cleaned out those frames, we'll store them, too.

8 Shallow Frames of HONEY

2008-06-15T13:50:00.001-07:00

Robbed the hive with very little problem. The fume board and the Fischer's Bee Quick emptied the bees out of the supers in only a couple minutes. The only effort was using the hive tool to pry the supers apart where the bees had industriously glued them together....and the heavy lifting. Wheelbarrow helped there. Had one super (pictured above) with capped honey on 8 out of 9 frames. Left the 9th frame intact and extracted the other 8.

Isn't that beautiful? The white is the beeswax capping they put over the honey when it is dehydrated to honey goodness.

We just sawed the cappings off with what is basically a very sharp bread knife. Went back over the low spots the knife didn't get with a cappings scratcher...something that looks like a metal version of a hair pick from the 70's. Sort of.

Put two frames at a time in the simple plastic extractor...

Turned the handle and spun it around....

And voila! The comb was empty and the honey was in the bottom of the extractor bucket.

Then opened the gate and let the honey flow through the filters into the bottling bucket.

You can see white comb remnants there in the filter. There are actually three filters on the bucket top.

If you look at the bottling bucket, you can tell that it is almost half full....just from 8 shallow frames. Tonight we let it settle, then tomorrow we put the honey into jars. Which reminds me...time to go to store for some jars!!

Update later on combining the hives...I think that went well, too.

Plan for a Corporate Merger

2008-06-11T15:39:00.000-07:00

Here's the plan. Sometime this weekend I will fire up the smoker and stink up the fume board and haul out the wheelbarrow.

We'll head to Rachel-the-healthy first, and replace her cover with the stinky fume board, encouraging the bees to flee down deep into the hive and out of the honey supers. While the fume board is fuming, we'll head over to Sylvia and pop the huge staples out that connect the bottom box with the bottom board.

Then we'll take the two shallow supers off of Rachel, putting them in the wheelbarrow and covering them with a towel to prevent bees from trying to come take their honey back.

We'll put a sheet of newspaper on top of Rachel, move Sylvia's bottom deep to the top of the sheet of newspaper, and then pop the cover on top of the three deep hive.

The top deep off of Sylvia with its trace amount of honey and the two shallow supers will come into the house for processing.

The bees will eat their way through the newspaper, with their respective smells blending. When they break through, they'll become one big happy hive.

Next spring we'll split this huge hive back into two hives.

Rachel will benefit from Sylvia's gleanings, Sylvia's heritage will be preserved.

Sounds complicated, but I'm wildly optimistic.

Laying Workers, Dying Hive

2008-06-10T19:17:00.001-07:00

We went back in to the Sylvia hive today, after several weeks of neglect and general "hoping it will sort itself out because between work and vacation I don't have time."

There were very few bees, almost no brood, and far too many drones in terms of percentages. They're the big fellows with the big eyes that you can see in almost every picture.

It turns out that we were indeed without a viable queen, and while the general population began to die of "old age"---I think summer bees live about six weeks, at least one of the workers decided she would try to be queen and lay some eggs.

While a worker can indeed lay eggs, because the eggs are not fertilized, they all become drones.

With the hive full of nectar and increasingly devoid of bees that work, I'm now looking at how to save the frames for a new colony of bees next spring. I've posted a question on the WNCbees forum about what to do with all these frames covered in nectar.

The white capped cells in the second picture from the top and the picture right above this line are honey. Bless their hearts, they did their best. I have some general guilt about not intervening when it was early enough to do some good....but the demands of time and my complete lack of experience conspired against the needs of Sylvia.

On the bright side...delving in this hive repeatedly has helped me get over my initial heebie-jeebies of working the bees. And I've been motivated by their crisis to read, read, read and learn much more about how to help my other hive and my future bees. I hope to become a bee keeper instead of a bee haver.

More Tales of Bad Beekeeping

2008-05-31T14:46:00.000-07:00

On the bright side, Rachel is growing, full steam ahead. I went in, thinking I would add a queen excluder, and she had not only drawn out comb on the first shallow super, but it was chock full of bees. I ditched the queen excluder and just added another super. What the heck. Perhaps they'll keep the brood in the lower deeps. Perhaps I'll just wait and see what happens. Sometimes the queen will stay lower down below all the honey.

Meanwhile, things still seem dire in Sylvia. She has started to pull out the comb in the upper deep, but down below we still saw no sign of brood, and perhaps a few too many drones. I'm reading up on combining a weak hive with a strong hive. Reading, reading, reading. I'll study up, give her another week and proceed from there.

Wrongedy wrong wrong wrong

2008-05-31T09:58:00.000-07:00

Hmmm.

So I did more reading after writing "A Box Full of Honey."

It turns out that queens take LESS time than workers to hatch out. So...probably the queen cells we saw in the Sylvia hive were formed before half the hive swarmed. I'm still thinking there is a queen of some sort in the hive, since the bees are calm and not cranky. She may be one of the queens that hatched around the time the hive swarmed....which would mean that she is only now getting down to business. It takes several weeks for a young queen (a virgin queen) to mature, go on her mating flights and settle into laying eggs.

I may poke into the hive today and see if there are any eggs or brood. Or I may just let them percolate another week or so and then check after the May honey flow is good and over, and prior to the July honey flow.

New Links

2008-05-25T14:32:00.000-07:00

Be sure to look to the right for some new links that will show information about queen cells and such...

A Box Full of Honey

2008-05-25T14:01:00.001-07:00

Pamela, beekeeper buddy from work, came and helped look at the hives today. ABK (usual assistant bee keeper) provided educational narrative to the young children watching from the back porch across the yard. Here's the update on the girls. Rachel, as previously observed, is busting at the seams. The second hive body is full of comb, bees and honey. I added a shallow super (a shorter box with frames) to the top for them to make more comb and more honey. We'll give them a few days to start drawing out comb and then put a queen excluder between the top deep and the shallow to keep the queen out of that top box so that she doesn't lay eggs there, which will keep that shallow super full of nothing but pure honey. You can tell that Rachel is now a taller hive than Sylvia.

We delved deeply into Sylvia, taking out each of the frames in the bottom deep to see what was going on. Still no production in the top deep.

Sylvia seems quite lacking a queen. There was no brood (no eggs, no larva, no capped brood). Just frame after frame filled with nothing but nectar and honey. So...they've got food, but no mama and no babies.

We did find queens in the making...peanut shaped protrusions from the comb called supercedure cells. When a queen dies or otherwise disappears, the worker bees will pick some very young larva that would otherwise become worker bees, and they will begin feeding those larva royal jelly. The royal jelly leads the bee to become a larger queen bee. When the queen bee hatches out of her very special cell, she will make a mating flight with the drones and begin a career of laying eggs.

So...if I leave this hive alone, odds are that one of these queen cells will hatch into a queen and all will be well. The first queen will kill any other queens that hatch out.

I could also order a queen and add it to the hive, which I plan to research some this next day or so.

The lack of brood was not happy, but the queen cells and the box full of honey give me hope.

No pictures inside Sylvia today...but you can find pictures of queen cells in books and through internet links.