Monday, August 23, 2010

Good News and Bad News

I have visited the gals twice since I last wrote in mid July.

Shortly after my last post I became convinced that I was in danger of the bees, taking advantage of the feedings and the goldenrod blooming, filling up their frames with and running out of room for brood (this is known as being honey bound) with the possible danger of the bees swarming. So great was my fear that I spent my evenings assembling 10 shallow frames and 10 medium frames so that I could add a super to each hive. Taking advantage of a nice day, I sped from work on Tuesday, July 27th, passing huge patches of wild parsnip in full bloom along the interstate, to get home before it got too late. It turns out that the bees had plenty of room. I put a shallow super on top of Juno, more for the sake of putting it somewhere rather than storage. I also assumed that Juno would be the most likely to fill out as she had not lost her queen, though my mother reported seeing less activity in front of her. I also weed whacked and tidied up the area in general.

Later, I heard reports from my mother of odd behavior in front of Juno... behavior that got me wondering if there was robbing going on, which I thought a little odd since shouldn't Juno be the stronger hive?

On August 14, before settling down to having a family tea party, my sister and I opened up the hives. My sister had not yet had a chance to be part of a hive inspection and was eager to get up close and personal with the bees. Not having a spare bee suit, I had brought along a fencing jacket I had, figuring that it was white (and bees are less averse to white) and would provide decent protection since it covers the neck and arms well. So donning the jacket and the spare head netting, my sister wielded the smoker and the camera during the inspection.

We immediately had cause for concern with what appeared to be a large number of dead bees in front of Juno.




Also, she had a paltry 30 returning foragers/minute. Opening her up, I had no cause for cheer as we found many empty supercedure/queen cells. Apparently, Juno somehow lost her queen as well at some point. Further investigation showed no sign of brood in the many empty cells. I can only hope that there was a new queen in there somewhere and that she had just not gotten around to laying yet.




Closing up Juno, we turned to Artemis. Many bees greeted us as we took the top off of Artemis. After poking around we found vast expanses of new brood, little 'C'-shaped larvae at the bottom of the cells. Proof positive an active queen. After examining the photographs, I suspect that said queen might even be visible in the following blurry photo.




Some bad news was that I spotted (but did not photograph) my first varroa mite. While not unsurprising since almost all hives have them these days, it was sad to see it. With a mind to anti-mite procedures, I looked at my bright green drone frame that was chock full of capped drones. I decided to remove that frame and replace with another. Since the mites prefer drone larvae to lay their eggs on, by removing drone cells from the hive you can reduce the mite burden without undue impact on the hive.




My sister enjoyed her bee experience even though one bee got her in the knee (without so much as a 'En Garde!').

I have been scratching my head as to how I could have lost both of my original queens. Poking around, I have found mention that sometimes hives from nucs just decide to supersede their queen. So perhaps that is what is going on. Another possibility was that robbing in Juno was occurring and the queen got killed in the scuffle.

I intend to inspect Juno this weekend to see if there is any sign of new brood. If not, I will assume they are queenless and have run out of eggs so will be unable to make any new ones. In which case the Juno bees will be combined with those of Artemis to make one strong hive to enter the winter. If there are brood, I will probably try to come up with a way to feed that colony extra to try to get their numbers and honey reserves up before winter....

Other news, I contacted Mike Palmer today regarding ordering queens from him. He is a breeder of queens in Vermont. And while he wont be able to provide queens until June 15th (over a month later than other sources), they will be native queens rather than 'Southern Belles' that may not be up to the challenges of a Vermont winter. I will contact him again in January to get on his waiting list if I think I will need more queens. Additional queens will likely be needed if I do have to combine my hives as come Spring, they will likely be feeling a little crowded and may want to swarm. And even if I am not forced to split to avoid swarming, I do want to expand my the number of hives.