2013-06-08: Seize the High Ground!

     I decided to give the hives at my satellite yard some attention and add drone frames to them.  I did not need to remove any frames as I was short of frames when I set them up so I had only placed 9 frames instead of 10 into the top box.  However, this led to Goldenrod building a mass of burr comb in the the empty space where the 10th frame would be.  I had to use my hive tool to separate it from the wall and then fish it out… sort of like the game ‘Operation’.

My father pointed out that there was a dead elm branch leaning over the hives that would need to be removed.

It was also very obvious that Goldenrod has many more bees than Hodgepodge.  

Back in my main yard I noticed that some ants have set up home on top of the inner cover of Sage.  With all the rain we have been having, their holes have probably flooded.

2013-06-01: Closing the Barn Door

Bees generally swarm when they feel crowded.  They can feel crowded for various reasons, but one obvious one is that they have filled up too much of their brood next with honey and the queen doesn’t have enough space to lay.  The solution for this is to get supers (boxes with frames intended predominantly or entirely for honey production or to swarm frames full of honey in the brood next with new empty frames (either empty drawn comb or undrawn foundation, the former I believe is preferred if you think they may decide to swarm before they can draw out foundation).

Obviously, I should have been paying more attention to my bees and have done either of these sooner.  I probably should have had a super on all of my hives back when the dandelions bloomed, but the season had gone from being stuck in first to kicking into gear very quickly.  So, today my plan was to get some supers on those hives!

I had some drawn comb from the previous year and I also spent much of the evening before assembling more frames.  I had also started to enact a scheme to make use of the shallow supers that I had got used,something I wouldn’t recommend but my mother had got them for free several years before from somebody who was getting out of bees and was just stacking them on the side of the road, this was while she was on the way home from the super discount green house sale and the car full of plants so she and my sis squeezed as many as they could into the Subaru and this has nothing to do with my bee inspection.  Anyways, back to the shallow sups, they are not as efficient as mediums but I decided that they might be a nice way to provide upper entrances and extra ventilation so I had drilled out some holes etc…  I also had prepped some medium supers as well.  Last year I had always put in 10 frames/super just like in the brood next.  However, I had read that, if the are already drawn, 9 frames can be placed in with a little extra space and the bees will fill them out a little bit farther so that they will be easier to uncap and there will be more honey per frame thus making the extraction process a little more efficient.  So I did that in those that I had drawn comb.  In other supers I tried to interspace drawn with undrawn foundation.. the drawn providing the guide so that the bees don’t draw out the comb in odd directions and hopefully the smell of used wax might lure the bees up to the supers. You will also note that I like to put the year I made the frame so that in the future I will have a good idea of which foundation should be replaced first.  This year I also had the idea of adding an M for mediums and S for shallows so when they are in storage, where I may have a mix of frame types in whatever boxes can hold them, I can just look at the tops and see how many I have of each rather than having to lift each one out to be sure.

  

I also decided to try something new by filling up a pointy tipped ketchup/mustard squeeze bottle with mineral oil in order to use to lay down a bead of grease between boxes and along the groove the frames rest on.  The hope is that the mineral oil will help to me to break the propolis seal in the future.  Also, if a little splashed oil causes grief to a few mites, so much the better.

Purple (aka Aubergine):Very full, bees some bearding in the front.  Removed the drone frame and replaced it.  The bees appeared to be putting some honey into the cells of the brood chamber.  This spurred me to put on two supers (a shallow and a medium).  I did not add an excluder in since the bees appeared to be filling up the brood chamber with honey I wanted the queen to have a space to lay.

  

Sage:  Shallow supper heavy but not yet capped.  Removed one frame in brood chamber to add a drone frame.  Added a medium super.  Left the offset thick style excluder in place since the bees seem to like having that gap at the top and its warming up enough so that the extra ventilation is probably helpful.

  

Dark Green (Holy?):  Pretty mehh…

Blue (hmmm.. should come up with a botanical name, Indigo?  Wode?):  Soso population, but some frames had plenty of capped brood.  Inserted the frame removed from Sage.

Red (Rose?):  Frames heavy with honey.  Did find some brood, put in             a drone frame and swapped out one honey frame with a frame that was half empty from the blue deep box on top of Red that I was using as a way to store frames.  Hopefully this will give them some more space to lay.

Yellow (Sunflower? Lemon?): I didn’t take any notes but the pictures look ok.

  

 

2013-05-31: Swarmiversary

I was at my desk at work and the phone rang.  I picked it up and it was my mother calling to tell me that they had spotted a swarm in the honey suckle 10 feet from the bee yard.  I was unable to leave work at that time and so they tried to catch it, but as I did not have a easy to use swarm kit ready, they had to resort to knocking some bees into a box with a few frames and hoping for the best.  But, they flew the coop an hour or so later so they probably did not get the queen.

Oh well.  Not sure which hive through it.

Interestingly, my mother checked her notes and we had a swarm just a few days earlier the previous year.  I need to keep this in mind next year.

2013-05-12: Fixing an Oops

I realized that when I had reversed some of the hives the last time, I had not properly separated the slat bottom board ( a device that gives the bees some space under their frames above the bottom board, supposedly allows them to keep the bottoms of the frames warmer during cool months and feel less crowded) from the bottom of the bottom box.  So it had tagged along for the reversing and ended up in between the two boxes in Sage and Blue.  This visit to the bee yard I fixed that.  The bees had built a little burr come in the slat bottom boards, especially Sage.  Hopefully this had not caused them too much trouble with this huge gap in the middle of their brood space.

Here is how they looked after I was done, I find that having the gap between each pair is useful when I need to place a box to one side while working on the hives:

 

I also visited the annex and I was busy shifting the second hive there around to face South and to lay down pieces of cement board under the fence line.  This later material is something that I had gotten off of Craigslist for free several years ago imagining that it would be useful one day.  And it was!  By placing them under the fence line I would help keep grass from growing up and touching the line and shorting it out. 

2013-05-04: Reversing

The plan was to check on how the hives were doing and to reverse the boxes to counteract the fact that bees had likely worked their way to the top of the hives during the winter and might feel crowded up there even though they have plenty of room below.

Purple: So me of the foragers bringing in yellow pollen.  Most of the sugar mush is gone but the pollen patty was hardly touched.  I had placed a medium frame in it at one point in the past and I removed it and put in a frame with bare foundation instead.  There was a brood frame in the bottom box, moved it to the top.  It had brood in it so I will need removal in a 1-2 weeks.  Frames had pollen and nectar (thus they are bringing in nectar).  The hive had a solid bottom board, I will eventually want to replace that with a screened bottom board.

 

Sage:  The top b ox was heavy, outer frame  was solid honey.  Appears to be a lot of done comb built between the boxes which I fed to the chickens.  Had a screened bottom board.  I placed a shallow super on it in which I had modified by adding screened ventilation holes in the sides and open holes (with folded screen landing pads in front of them) for top entrances.  I have read of some theories that increased ventilation will free up more workers from fanning to keep the hive cool and to dry the honey, thus increasing production.  Perhaps, perhaps not, but I do like the idea of upper entrances so the forgers are getting right to the supers instead of crawling up from the bottom entrance all the way to the top supers.  I placed a queen excluder underneath it so as to keep the queen from laying in the supers.  I places it offset to the back by an inch to allow somewhat easier passage by the workers, this left a gap in the front which proved to be big enough for bees to use as an entrance.  I hadn’t meant to do that but it was done and they had already swarmed up into that gap by the time I noticed.

   

DarkGreen:  Empty frames (around 4) in the bottom.  Switched boxes.  It had a screen bottom board (specifically one with a space to allow monitoring trays to be slid in from the back.  I removed the insulation box and the frame of honey that was in it.

Blue: Bottom box was empty of bees, switched boxes.  Replace green plastic drone frame with a regular frame.  Saw a mite.  Some of the comb had dark stains suggestive of nosema infection during the winter.  That might explain why this hive came out weaker than the others.

I did not have time to do Red and Yellow.

Annex yard:  I transferred the nucs to proper hives (Marigold and one cobbled out of spare boxes).  I of course did not do my math right and I had to run home to get enough boxes and frames to finish the set up.  As it was, I was short a frame for each hive in the top box and the cobbled hive is missing a proper inner cover.  I also need to have a better stand for them.

2013-04-21: Moving the Nucs

I had agreed to move some hives to a nearby organic farm in order to help them pollinate their crops and for me to test out the site.  My hope is that the bees will flourish there, produce substantially more honey than at the beeyard at my parents (to warrant the extra effort of a second site), and that they will not be attacked by a bear.

To address that last concern, my father and I went down to the site on a Saturday in April and settled on which site to use, cleared the site, and then set up an electric fence that will hopefully be a bear deterrent. 

When we got home I put straps on the double nuc so it will be ready to move the next day.  I had decided to move the double nuc as I wanted to move to hives down and it was two hives for the effort of moving one hive.  IT would have bene more scientific to bring down one nuc and one full strength colony to compare with the nuc and the other colonies left behind, but I had not been able to transfer the nucs from the double nuc boxes into regular hive boxes since the cold had persisted.

The next morning was a frost, which suited me fine as it meant that the bees were not flying.  I plugged up the entrance again thankful for the cold as it meant that the bees would be less likely to overheat during travel with reduced ventilation.  We lifted the hive up on to the truck, placed it on a bag of wool for padding, secured it, and off we went.

It was straightforward enough to get unload the hive and put it into place on top of some cinder blocks. 

 

My beeyard looks noticeably emptier without them and Orange hive.

2013-03-09: More Mush and a Post-mortem

I went up to the beeyard to see how the bees were doing, give them more sugar mush, and try to learn something from Orange, the dead hive.

It was 48F in the shade, sunny, and bees were flying enthusiastically.  Green was especially busy, I suspect that it has a very large population and I will have to keep an eye on it to make sure it doesn’t swarm.  And here is a video!

Here is a piece of wood where you can see the results of the cleansing flight.  And you can also see where a bee cleansed herself at me.

 

When I opened up the top box on each hive, the bees were all over the sugar mush from last week

 

After adding more mush to all the hives I moved the Orange hive out of the bee yard and opened it up to try to figure out what went wrong.  I discovered what looks like the remains of a small cluster in the back right corner of the hive.  They apparently starved there, even though on the left hand side there was several frames of honey.  Perhaps without the insulation at the top of the hive the bees couldn’t travel to the other side to make use of that honey.

I took three frames of honey from the hive and placed two into the Red hive’s top insulation/feeding box and one into the Dark Green hive top box.  I picked these two hives because they had deep boxes on top which allowed me to place the frames in easily.