Snow Bees

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

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

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.
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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!!??!!

****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

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!

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

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.