What Are You Doing? No Idea.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.