Plan for a Corporate Merger

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

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.

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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

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

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

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

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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

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

Rachel's Beard

Rachel's bees have been sitting on the front of the hive the last couple days. Not robbing, not swarming, just hanging out on the front porch on a hot day. According to the bee books, this sitting out front to cool is called "bearding." Makes sense, since it does give the hive a bearded look.