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.

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!