Inspection With My Wife

My wife joined me today in an inspection of Meg and Jo! I thought she was just less interested in beekeeping, and I didn't want to push it (it could be argued that I spend too much time with my girls as it is). However, she made it quite clear to me last week that she's only been holding back because she feels like she needs to take care of our baby Brennan while I'm looking at bee-covered frames. We got her sister to watch Brennan while we were inspecting and we had a great time!

We didn't have a ton of time, so we never got around to finding the queens, and we didn't get any good pictures from Jo, but we had a great time watching the girls work.



Meg is doing great and is about half done drawing out the third medium frame. This hive has about a dozen frames of capped brood with a great pattern, and a whole lot of honey/syrup being cured and capped around the brood. We may yet get some significant amount of honey from this hive, although it might ultimately depend on whether I decide to leave them 3 or 4 mediums of honey for the winter (roughly equal to 2 or 2.5 deeps).

One interesting thing I noticed was a frame of 80% pollen with occasional larvae or capped brood where the queen found an open cell. I love all the different colors! This abundance of pollen probably explains why they've largely ignored the single pollen patty I gave them early in the year -- our location must be great for pollen, I just hope it's as great for nectar collection!

Jo is still lagging significantly. The hive is still largely confined to the first box, and I'm still worried about them building up by winter. They're not taking much (if any) syrup, and while brood patterns now look good and I can't find anything else wrong with the hive, there could always be something I'm missing that is preventing their successful expansion.

Given Meg's great progress, I took a frame of capped brood from Meg and added it to Jo's brood chamber. The capped brood take very little maintenance, and when they emerge, they'll add hundreds of new bees ready to draw out comb for future generations. To do this, I had to knock all the bees off the frame first so they didn't get in cross-hive fights inside the hive. I bumped the frame sharply on the ground, then wiped off all the remaining bees with some long grass. It was fun to watch all the bees fanning their Nasonov glands at the entrance to guide the poor nurse bees home. The nurse bees were initially clumped up together, but I prodded them a bit, and they all started marching straight home!

Tomorrow, I'll return with some new syrup for both Meg and Jo (Meg is almost out and Jo's is a bit old as they aren't taking it).

A peek under the lid

My mum says I need an electric fence to keep me out of my beehives...

I had a quick peek under the top covers today, and since Meg's second box is over 80% drawn out, I added a third. Meg has brood in both of the first two boxes, and some great heavy uncapped frames of honey/sugar water.

Jo is worrying me a bit. After adding a second box, I think the population has contracted (or more bees than usual were out foraging) and there are only 6 frames of bees at this point. They've actually stopped clustering around a couple frames of drawn comb! There's a significant amount of capped brood though, so the population should be growing in the next couple weeks, and I am convinced that if I just leave it alone, they'll slowly build up to strength. I might have to feed them much more than Meg to go into winter with enough food to last until April, but unless there's some bad disease I'm missing, Jo should be fine.

One more interesting note, both hives suddenly became sticky with propolis this week. This is expected, but I find it interesting that after a month with no noticeable propolis, they both got sticky at the same time within a week or so. There must be some source of sap that suddenly became appealing.

Queen Trouble

After a couple weeks had passed, my inspection showed that Meg had immediately drawn out and started laying in a number of frames, but while Jo was drawing comb almost as fast, there were only a couple cells with eggs, eggs on the sides of cells and multiple eggs in some cells. There were also a number of queen cups on some of the frames suggesting that the bees were trying to raise a new queen.

With no improvement the next week, I purchased another Minnesota Hygenic queen and added her to the hive. She's been laying wherever she can, although without a good brood pattern to start with, she's been rather limited in the amount of drawn comb available to her. It's starting to open up a bit as new comb is drawn out, but it will be a few weeks before her brood really starts emerging and the hive population takes off.

In the meantime, many of the frames are deformed from the queen cells, and some of the cells have been enlarged to accommodate the larger drones. It looks to me like there is enough consistent capped worker brood that the hive has only been set back a few weeks and it should take off mid-June, but I'm not expecting any excess honey from this one. I've been considering adding a frame or two of capped brood from Meg, but I'll probably learn more by watching how this turns out than by making any more manipulations. I did move a frame of undrawn foundation to the middle of the drawn frames to try to alleviate the honeybound state. They're almost done drawing out this comb, and in two weeks, I should be able to use this frame to judge the queen's laying pattern.

Meg is 60% finished drawing out a second medium box, and there are eggs and curing honey in both boxes. I'll probably be adding another box next weekend as long as the bees continue drawing out comb in the next week's warm and wet weather.

One other thing I noticed is that Meg is taking almost a gallon of syrup a week, where Jo wasn't touching their syrup. Jo also stopped drawing out comb as fast, and I suspect the lack of thousands of new bees every day as well as a few weeks without a queen has slowed them down more than I'd hoped. I removed the second hive body I'd added to Jo to put the feeder directly above the main cluster. I hope this helps them to take as much syrup as possible to stimulate more wax production so we can open up some more space for brood and further stores.

Installing Bees

Apivia -- [ey-pi-vahy-uh, ey-pi-vee-uh] n. "Bee road" -- my journey with beekeeping.

Thus begins the record of my beekeeping adventure.

No, I'm not going to write like that all the time, but it seemed like an appropriate cliche to throw in the start of a new beekeeping blog (as if there aren't enough of them out there already).

I installed 2x 3-lb packages with Minnesota Hygienic queens. My wife immediately named them Meg and Jo, inadvertently giving me permission for at least 4 hives (I wonder how many characters are mentioned in Little Women...).

Meg's queen started laying right away, but I suspect Jo's queen flew away during the installation, and I had to introduce a new Hygienic queen a couple weeks later. All is well as last Sunday (May 9) when I inspected the hives, Meg had 7 frames with capped brood, and Jo had at least one frame with dozens of new eggs. Meg is significantly ahead of Jo, but they're both starting to draw out foundation in their second brood box so they're well on their way to making me some honey by Fall!