Bees still buzzing!

It looks like I forgot to blog about wintering the bees, but it's pretty straightforward so here's what happened.  It turns out that there's not a lot you can do to help the bees make it through winter.  Insulation sounds like a good idea, but it turns out that the bees require constant airflow through the hives to remove moisture so the hives stay only a few degrees above the outside temperature all winter long.  The worker bees "shiver" by moving their wing muscles without moving their wings to generate heat and keep the little cluster of bees warm enough to make it through the winter, but they only keep their little cluster warm, not the whole hive.  On warmer days, they move around to follow honey stores, but they can't move far when it's really cold so it is important for a beekeeper to check the hives later in the winter (now) to shift around honey stores if the bees eat themselves into a corner and can't get to honey just a few inches away in a cold snap!

Because there's not much that can help the bees through the winter, it's not too difficult to get them ready.  The biggest concern is that they have enough honey to make it through the winter, and I covered that by simply being very conservative about how much honey I took from the hive.  Then you treat any diseases or parasites -- usually Varroa Mites, but since I didn't note any problematic infestation I didn't have to worry about that either.

Finally, in November, I added a sheet of particleboard to help wick moisture out of the hives and covered the hives in black wax-coated cardboard.  The cardboard heats up in the sun and might help to cut the wind a bit.  Here's a picture of the hives after I wrapped them up for the winter.

Late-Winter Inspection


On February 9, on a warm day above 40F, I drove out to the Lair to check the hives.  I gave a light tap to each hive and heard buzzing from the first two, but silence from the last.  It turned out that the third hive, the weakest of the three all last year, had died relatively early in the winter.  Below you can see the remains of a cluster with bees holding onto or with their heads stuck into the comb.  They are surrounded by empty comb so it is possible that they simply ate all the nearby honey and couldn't move far enough during a few cold days to find more food, but because they were still in the bottom two medium boxes out of four, I suspect they were also weak -- perhaps from Varroa.

The other two hives were doing very well and were clustered toward the South side of the top two boxes in both hives.  I took the top two boxes full of honey from the dead hive and added them to the other hive both to prevent the honey from going to waste (they're likely to mold if they stay unattended after it warms up) and to give the bees one more box of solid honey they can move up into in case we see more cold weather.

Below you can see a somewhat blurry picture of the left hive's cluster.  I only lifted up the box for a few seconds to see where they were, and while it's a bit worrysome to have the cluster all the way over on the side, I think it helps a lot that I could add a box of honey above them so they'll have room to move to nearby stores even if it gets very cold.

Another thing a beekeeper can do is move honey around within the boxes -- perhaps moving honey from the left side to a slot right next to the cluster, but the more you disturb the cluster, the more the bees will get stressed and cold so I was satisfied with adding the two boxes on top.

I plan to go back next weekend with some or all of my family to collect the two empty boxes from the dead hive.  They still have some honey (maybe 10-20 pounds) and I want to dry them out in my garage before they get regularly warm enough to mold.  In late March when the weather's good and the queens are laying eggs like mad, I'll split one or both of the living hives and buy a new queen to lead the new hive(s).  The bees will all appreciate the honey left on the hives and they'll have a head start on building up stores for me to steal next Fall!

Spring Cleaning and 3 New Hives

I've been a bit crazy since adopting a new child (yay!) but I still manage to make some time for the bees.

Mid-April, I opened up Meg and Jo to make sure the bees were near capped honey so they weren't in danger of starving.  Even if there's honey in the hive, if it gets too cold, and they bees are forced into a small ball to keep warm, they may starve with honey just a few inches away as they stay put to try to keep their brood warm!

Both hives were clustered in a great spot near plenty of honey, so I just took off the winter cover and swept out a couple of inches of dead bees that had collected over the winter.  Last weekend, my dad was kind enough to reverse the hives -- swapping the top and bottom of the three medium boxes to push the queen's brood rearing back down to the bottom.  This helps organize the remaining space for the year's honey collection and harvest.

On  April 23, my dad and I traveled out to our new location in Afton where Jen and Lucia have kindly allowed me to put up three hives on their property!  We built a simple fence to keep their dogs from getting too close and installed three 3lb packages of bees with MN Hygenic queens.  All three hives have one box of drawn comb from last year, a second box of foundation (undrawn honeycomb) and two boxes on top holding a small feeder jar.

Today, I went out to make sure the queens were laying, and I found all three hives had eggs, and at least one of them had capped brood in it!  I'll have to make a regular pilgrimage to the apiary as it was really nice to take a long lunch break (the apiary is MUCH closer to work than home).  I removed the feeders and found that each hive was well established in the bottom box and none of them had started drawing out comb in the second box.

Here's a couple more pictures.  First, the collection of bees on top of the first box of one hive, and
second, some eggs and larvae on a frame after I blew on them a little to get the girls to move out of the way.

Spring Inspection

Last week, the temperature got up to around 50 degrees, so I went in for a quick inspection.

The bees were out on their "cleansing flights" to get rid of waste they'd been saving up for weeks or even months (to avoid dirtying the inside of the hive) and there were a few hundred dead bees outside the front of the hive where some of the girls hadn't quite made it back in the chilly winter air before running out of energy. The picture doesn't show them very clearly, but you can see some yellowish spots where the bees relieved themselves and darker spots where some of the bees fell into the snow and died, leaving a little melted pit as their body heat was drained off by the snow.

I first had a look inside Meg (the closer of the two hives in the above picture).  I could tell there were bees in there since they'd buzz when I knocked on the side of the hive, but I couldn't see any through the top of the top box.  I pulled off the top super (which is totally full of honey) and found a small cluster of bees about the size of a grapefruit near the back of the hive!  I put the top super right back on and closed up the hive -- they're in a great spot with lots of honey above and around them, and I didn't want to stress them out any more than I had to.

The bees are probably raising brood right now inside their cluster, so it's important that they have plenty of food within close reach for those cold winter days when they can't walk far in the hive before freezing and won't leave the brood to die unless absolutely necessary.

The other hive didn't seem at all in "winter mode" and instead of clustering tightly, they were active across three different supers!  The top of all three supers looked like the below picture -- it was like there were a full 30 frames of bees in there!

You can see some of the girls flying around to get at me, although most were smart enough to stay in the hive where it's much warmer.

For whatever reason, it looks like Jo has totally broken out of the winter cluster and the girls are running all over the top three supers.  Actually, when I first opened the hive, I noticed that the top two supers were quite heavy with honey, but since the bees were so active at the very top of the hive, I moved the third super (about 1/3 full of honey) to the top.  They quickly took over this top super too.

I don't think this move was smart -- the top two supers were so heavy that no matter where the smaller brood nest is, I think they'd have been fine, but initially I didn't realize that the bees were active throughout two full supers and I thought they were stuck at the very top of the hive.  Adding a less-full super on top of the hive could entice them to move up further and then die when they run out of honey, but with only a month or so left until good weather (we hope!) and such full supers, I think they'll be fine.  Of course, I can't just put it back the way it was because the bees are now active in the top 3 (instead of just 2) supers, so I'll see what happens and learn from it.  Worst case, I end up with the 4 hives I intended (when ordering 3 packages) instead of the 5 I'm half-fearing.

I've got a great new site for bees near my work, but it's far from home so my wife wouldn't be involved much.  Last night, there was some talk about leaving a hive or two at my brother's house, so we might just end up with 2-3 at his house and the 3 new hives at the new location.  I wouldn't move them until May I think, so there's no rush to make a decision!

Still one good hive

Both my hives are doing well, and while Meg (the taller one) seems to be stalled at 2.5 full supers, Jo has drawn 70-80% of the fourth box and should have plenty of room for honey going into the winter. Jo is around 80% done capping two boxes of honey in the supers, so I'm looking forward to around 50 lbs of harvested honey from the one hive!

In other news, my dad reports that three of his hives are now queenless. He thinks all three of his hives swarmed, and while he caught one (now doing very well and building up for the winter) the three original hives have neither eggs nor larvae suggesting that they are queenless. The hives are still reasonably strong, so he's planning to purchase three new queens and cross his fingers that they'll build up a good bunch of bees for wintering.

Other than that, not much to report. I suspect we'll be harvesting in two weeks as I want to have most of the honey fully capped to make my life easier when we're harvesting. If too much of what we take is unripe, we could have to run a dehumidifier in the room with the honey to get it back under 18.5% water content (so the honey doesn't ferment).

Moving from collection to processing in the hives

The bees have still been very busy with such consistent beautiful, sunny weather and some great nectar sources. In the bright sun against a backdrop of shaded trees the hundreds of bees zipping in and out of the hives every minute are really fun to watch!

Last weekend, I went through hive Meg and did some reorganizing to convince the queen to stop laying eggs in my honey supers! I simply moved all the frames with eggs and brood down into the bottom four boxes, and replaced them with frames of pure honey in the fifth and sixth boxes. With no cells open for laying eggs at the top of the hive, the queen should stay down in the first four boxes where the bees will be spending the winter.

I noticed that the bees have made a great start at filling up the lower frames, and they've started capping all the frames in the first two honey supers (boxes five and six). I'm still looking forward to around 50 lbs of honey if they cap it properly and continue to backfill into the bottom boxes in preparation for winter. Hopefully all the honey will be capped by mid-august so I can harvest it and get out of the bees' way for the rest of the year.

Jo is still making slow progress on her fourth box, and is about a third done drawing out that fourth box's foundation. I may have to add some extra frames from Meg to top off Jo for the winter, but I'm hoping that with some fall feeding, I can get Jo to fill most of four boxes with honey and syrup without any transfers.

Babies in my honey!

The first picture is a wonderful frame full of honey and about half cured and capped. The bees take nectar from flowers, stick it in the cells, and then process it and evaporate moisture until it's under about 18% water. When the honey is finished curing, the bees add a protective layer of wax to preserve the honey until it's needed.

The second picture is from middle of the same box -- apparently the queen has moved up into my honey supers and is using them for her bee-making activities! I suspected this might happen when the bees filled so much of the bottom two boxes full of frames of pollen, but I was hoping there was still enough room down below to keep the queen happy.

On one hand, this is awfully inconvenient as I won't be able to just steal supers of honey off the top of the hive, I'll have to go through and carefully mix and match frames of honey when I take it off for the winter. On the other hand, I was a bit worried about crowding at the bottom of the hive, and that the bees are using middle frames all the way up for brood rearing suggests that I won't have to worry as much about swarming (although that should be largely finished by now). Practically, I'd have to go through the hive frame by frame anyway, and ensure that I leave enough honey and space for honey so the bees don't starve in the winter.

This development does somewhat dampen my optimism about the honey crop this year. It looks like there will be a lot of honey, and I'm sure the hive has at least 50 pounds stored away already, but I'm hoping to leave 80-90 pounds for the winter and without a more accurate count of individual frames I just don't know what to expect.

In the future, I could use a queen excluder to keep the queen out of the honey supers, but I'm leaning toward letting her roam -- if the brood boxes get stopped up with pollen and honey, I'd rather have her move up than force the hive to swarm, and I'm not working enough hives that it's a HUGE inconvenience to swap back frames of brood when the time comes to harvest the honey.

I'm still not allergic!

In hindsight, opening the hives between thunderstorms may have been a poor idea, but I really wanted to add a third box to Jo before she totally ran out of room in the second. On Saturday morning, I sprayed the foundation with syrup, then opened Jo to give the girls more space. Immediately, there was an angry buzz with half a dozen guards head-butting me and stinging me three times! Good news: I'm still not horribly allergic to apitoxin. I did have a quick peak at one of the frames and found eggs, so they're not queenless, they're just not as calm as Meg.

Today I had another look under the covers and while Jo was much more docile, there still seemed to be more angry guards than in Meg when I had a look. I suspect it has something to do with the much slower buildup Jo has experienced, or maybe Jo's queen is just a little hotter than average.

I've got another box of embedded frames ready for each hive, and I've wired another 20 or so. My dad's hives aren't quite as far along as Meg as they're only half done with their fourth box, but they've been collecting nectar like crazy. It's almost surreal (and slightly hazardous) to stand in the middle of their flight paths and watch/hear them zipping past -- a bit like going into hyperspace in Star Wars where each star sounds like a Formula 1 racecar!

Moving Ahead Slowly

On June 10th, I added a fourth box to Meg since she was about 70% done with the third box. I noticed a lot of burr comb, but didn't have time to take care of it as it started sprinkling in the middle of my inspection.

Jo is still lagging about half done with her second box. I'm just hoping we can build up enough to last through the winter, but worst case, I've got some good drawn comb to start with next year.

On June 20th, I went through all the frames in Meg scraping off burr comb. Overall it wasn't horrible, just a bit of drone comb between boxes except for one frame where the bees had started a second layer parallel to the foundation on one side. After eating a bit myself, I put the honey and brood-filled wax on the top cover for the bees to clean up -- within a couple minutes there were hundreds of girls happily lapping up honey with their cute red tongues!

I stopped feeding Meg as I think the hive has just about stopped taking syrup, but I'll keep feeding Jo since that hive has a long way to go, a much lower population, and seems to still take syrup even if at a lower rate than before. Jo is still only around half done with her second box, so I'll wait a bit longer before adding a third.

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).