Checking on Lisa's Hive

We checked on Lisa's hive when we installed the swarm at Blue Heron yesterday.  We haven't inspected this hive since we moved it about three weeks ago.

The news wasn't great.  We thought the hive felt really light when we moved it.  Remember three of us picked it up and I had so little/no weight that I was bearing so I let go to take pictures?

Inside we found in the upper box frames that were barely drawn and not used.



The hive had what I think were earwigs (see bug at the bottom of the frame) living in it throughout the hive.



We found brood that was spotty and dead and old in the bottom box.  But there were two queen cells that had been opened - one ripped open on the left and the other properly opened on the right indicating that the queen had emerged and killed the remaining queen in her cell.



We also found lots of stored and crystallized sugar syrup.



There was about a baseball sized handful of bees.  But in the medium box we found three frames with new brood and some eggs.  The size of the new brood area was small but the queen can't lay more than the bees can manage to nurse.

Just yesterday on the Beemaster forum, Michael Bush wrote that if he had only a baseball sized cluster of bees, he would try at this time of year to give them the resources to succeed.

We decided to reduce this hive to the medium with the three brood frames.  Julia and Noah will bring them a frame of brood and eggs from another hive at their house.  We also took out some of the old-comb frames and substituted new foundationless frames to give them a healthier start.



Noah brushed all the bees from the deep frames into the only-medium remaining box.  This hive was quite a contrast to 2Cat which we had just installed.

We put the lovely top cover on this now tiny hive and left it with hope for the future.

New Swarm for Blue Heron

Gina went to Tucker today and collected a swarm for the Blue Heron.  It was lovely and a big swarm.  How grateful we are to have a good hive now at Blue Heron.  Here's the slideshow:

Live Bees at Blue Heron and at Jeff's

The bees in the nuc at Blue Heron are ALIVE! I really can't believe it. These are the vandalized bees that are now housed in a nuc and locked with a bicycle lock against further intrusion. I did not believe they would still be OK and we are not out of the winter death possibilities until March. At least for now they are flying.

I couldn't believe it so I took four pictures to prove to myself that they actually are coming and going. You can watch a hive and tell if the bees entering and leaving it live there or are robbers from another hive. The residents enter confidently and in one fell swoop into the entry. Robber bees are unsure and tend to hover around the entrance before going into the hive.

These bees own this hive.

At my old house where Jeff and Valerie now live we have two hives we are concerned about - now three. Colony Square is doing great with bees all at the entrance. Lenox Pointe has bees but also evidence of nosema, possibly, in that there are streaks of bee poop on the hive box at the entry way.

The hive we call "Five" is still alive. It was tiny going into winter and we had talked about putting it into a nuc, but never did. It is housed in two medium boxes. Jeff hasn't seen any bees flying in or out, so we opened the top to take a peek. The rapid feeder was still on the hive and there were bees walking up and down the sides of the cone. We both whooped out loud to see actual bees alive in the hive.

Our fourth hive over there is the swarm we caught in June. Although small, it too is alive and had bees in the feeder cone of the rapid feeder.

Don't be disturbed by the mold in the rapid feeder or the "weeds." The weeds are actually sprigs of thyme and we'll clean out the mold on our next opportunity to open the hive.

Today it was still quite cold and we didn't want to remove the rapid feeder to clean it because it covers the hole in the inner cover and the bees are likely to have propolized any air space to maintain warmth. I'll take warmth over cleanliness if they can make it through the winter.

Jeff and I are following Jennifer Berry and Keith Delaplane's system for powdered sugar treatment for varroa mites.  We are dusting the bees with the Dustructor - which means dusting without opening the hive - four times this month (three days apart) and then will repeat this in March.

Today was my third treatment and I dusted the bees at my house and at the Stonehurst Place Inn.  Jeff will do the bees at my old house tomorrow.  It's out of schedule but I dusted the bees at Blue Heron when I stopped there - they are actually part of Jeff's schedule, due to be dusted tomorrow.

Blue Heron Bee Report

Over last weekend, Julia called me from the Blue Heron with the sad news that she opened her hive and found it dead. The terrible vandal left it open to inclement weather, the bees had probably lost or balled their queen after that, and the hive had dwindled down to nothing. Very, very few bees were left in her hive and there was brood that needed to be capped and had died since the larvae was never capped. Very sad situation.

Julia had taken honey to feed her hive. My hive did not need food, so she left the honey on a cinder block with slits in the baggie for any takers. When I arrived to check my hive, there were bees enjoying the honey.


Here are Julia's hive boxes, now empty. We will scorch the insides for safety but the cause of death for this hive was mistreatment and exposure.


You can see bees on the landing of my nuc hive. The bees were flying in and out. I did see a few with pollen in their pollen baskets which was hopeful for the hive as a whole.



When I opened the hive, they had not emptied the jars of bee tea - when you have honey available why would you want bee tea? In addition the asters are still blooming profusely in the fields around the apiary.



I left them with the half empty jars and will check on them again this coming week.

Blue Heron Hive is Warm and Fed

Yesterday I went over to check on the Blue Heron. This incident with the vandal has left me really nervous. I pulled up to the garden parking lot and I was the only car there, so despite Roswell Road traffic in full view, I turned my car to face toward the street before getting out of it.

Then I walked up to the hives to feed them and was so nervous that I did something by accident to my phone so that all the photos were black and white - not nearly as illustrative as color, but certainly a sign that I am massively uncomfortable at the Blue Heron alone - which never used to be my truth.



The hive was still locked up and undisturbed.


The boardmans were empty and bees were flying in and out of the hive.


I reloaded the Boardmans with lovely amber colored bee tea which you cannot begin to appreciate in black and white.


The aster is still blooming, the bees are still flying in and out. I will probably move these bees home next week when the weekend cold will still the aster bloom.

Blue Heron in the Dark of Night

As you remember, on Sunday I moved the Blue Heron hive into a nuc for the winter.  On Monday night Jeff and I planned to move the nuc to my backyard - it would take two of us because it's a 2 story nuc. (Not to mention that he has the straps required to keep the thing together in the process of a move.)

On Monday in the middle of the day, I went over to see how the nuc was doing.  The bees were blissfully flying into the nuc with pollen on their legs and full honey stomachs from the field of aster in bloom just outside the apiary in the garden.

I looked at the garden, at the football field's worth of land, covered in white aster with some purple in the mix as well.  Each plant was weighed down with bees.

I couldn't justify taking this already damaged hive to a new place right now - it would be like saying they had to eat at MacDonald's when Godiva Chocolate was free for the taking.  So I decided I had to leave the nuc there until the aster bloom is finished.

The other glitch was that I was going to Santa Fe for a professional conference (where I am right this minute) and wouldn't be able to oversee the hive, so we needed to do something to protect them.

I wasn't free to do this until after dinner on Monday and Jeff agreed.  So in the dark of the night, we drove over to the Blue Heron.  It WAS dark.  We had flashlights and made lots of noise getting out of the car to scare the honey thief, or any other vagrant who might be around (there are supposedly two homeless people who live at the Blue Heron).

Jeff suggested that I leave the car unlocked so we could make a quick get away if we needed to, but I wasn't comfortable with that - his suggestion points to how unsettled we both felt.

Our plan was to lock up the hive with a bicycle lock as Julia had with hers.  We set the combination in the car - we had to hook two locks together to be able to completely surround the hive.  Then we headed for the hive.

We set everything up first - put the two boardman feeders I had brought together (set the jar of sugar syrup on each of them); prepared the nuc box that would serve as a surround for the feeders so we could place them on top of the inner cover; figured out what each of us would do to make this happen.

Jeff started to unlock the bicycle lock.  "Don't say the combination out loud," I said, still worrying that someone might be hiding in the bushes listening.

The pictures are below.  We did lock the hive up as best we could, but someone could still push the boxes out from under the lock, as they could at Julia's as well.

I suppose we needed another cable lock to make a "gift package" approach which would indeed secure the hive.  Jeff's suggestion was that we do some sort of hinge lock system on hives that aren't in our backyard.  Sounds like a plan to me.

BTW, Jeff was right about the car.  When we got back, I fumbled with the keys and took forever to get the thing unlocked - good we weren't being chased or threatened!  I don't believe we'll visit the Blue Heron at night again!

Oh, but we will have to go again at night to move the nuc when the asters are done......

As always, click on the slideshow below to see the photos full sized:

Hope for the Blue Heron

Today I moved my hive at the Blue Heron into a nuc box.  I will give the bees a day to orient to the new box and will move it to my backyard tomorrow night.

 We talked via email all day about suggestions people made on this blog and ideas Julia, the Blue Heron board, and I had about ways to better protect our BH hives. I'm going to bed feeling a little more hopeful.

 

Thoughtless Vandals Damage Blue Heron Hives

We are so sad to report that the Blue Heron hives have been vandalized by someone who apparently sought to steal honey.  Julia's hive was the only hive in the apiary that actually had honey.  The vandals removed her honey super and took three frames of honey away with them.  They then left all of the hives at Blue Heron opened up to the elements.

I'm sure bees died.

These hives are not in a good location.  They are not doing well and we feel violated as the hives have been, not to mention really discouraged.

Tomorrow I am moving what is left of my hive into a nuc and bringing it home for the winter.  In the spring I'll either move it back to Blue Heron or start over there with a new hive.

The best part of the Blue Heron project is that I have something special to do with Julia and with Noah.  Also the Blue Heron hives are a great central location for teaching new beekeepers about hive inspections and these hives have been important in that program for the Metro Atlanta Beekeepers.

But.....it's hard to get invested in those hives when we've now had the hives destroyed in two of the four years we've been there - first by flood and now by some thoughtless person.

Although Noah ventured the thought that perhaps someone thought that if the hives are at a public garden, then the honey is for the public to take.  I thought that was incredibly generous of him.

I personally have mean and ugly thoughts about the vandal.

Julia took these pictures when she went to survey the damage:

Sad State of the Second BH Hive

We opened my struggling hive at Blue Heron today to find that it was still in terrible shape despite the combination of the two struggling hives and the installation of the very sparse nuc that we got late in the summer.

The top box was empty of supplies and brood - just empty comb.



In the second box, the bees only covered about three frames. Pitiful.


I have a new camera that I am not very pleased with so the pictures of the brood and larvae we found were not in focus. However, we did see brood and larvae.

Mostly we discussed the possibility of feeding this hive heavily through October and perhaps trying to overwinter it at my house rather than at the Blue Heron in a nuc box rather than in a hive box.









I brought a rapid feeder with me and would have put it over the hole in the inner cover but forgot that this hive had a ventilated hive cover (note to self: replace with solid cover ASAP). So I put the rapid feeder right above the frames.


I poured bee tea into it (that's thyme floating in the sugar syrup/chamomile tea).

'

The rapid feeder holds almost exactly 2 quarts of syrup. I'm going to try to bring honey for these bees on my next trip to the hive.




I turned the ventilated cover upside down, eliminating a top entry and potential robbing.


I closed up the hive and we went to lunch. I don't have much hope for this hive. I do like the plan, though, of overwintering in a nuc, should we be able to keep them alive through October. The field around the community garden there is so full of goldenrod and aster that there seems to be nectar to be had, if they can just collect some.

Consolidating a Hive as Winter Preparation

We haven't checked on Blue Heron in about a month so we decided to go over there today. Julia's hives at home were markedly low on stores and not at all ready for winter so we assumed Blue Heron was probably in the same state. We didn't want to feed these hives but are afraid that we will need to.

Noah looks into his hive there - at least we see bees. We noted that the screened ventilated top cover needed to be replaced with a solid cover for winter.



Unlike Julia's hives at home, there was some honey in this hive. This frame is typical of what we saw....not full frames of honey but some honey on enough frames to fill a box.




When a frame was mostly empty as the one hanging on the rack is, we decided to leave it out of the hive to consolidate and give the bees less space as winter approaches.



Frames with brood or with nectar stored Julia put into one box. The box originally had about five frames in use and the other five were empty comb. So she substituted frames from the second box that were in use for the unused one (thus removing one box from the hive).




In the end she had a box full of frames that were in use - either for nectar storage or some brood.



When we opened the bottom box, we found the queen on the second frame we pulled. That felt good to all of us so we closed up the hive.



There was brood in the bottom box as well as you can see on the frame below.



Julia had brought honey to feed this hive so she put a baggie of honey on the hive and cut slits.



Now that we are committed to feeding these bees, they will need feed again probably in less than a week, although the field around the Blue Heron garden is full of blooming goldenrod and aster.

This is my 900th Post! Blue Heron Inspections in July and August

I can't believe this is my 900th post. Fitting, since I've been showing so much throughout the other 899 posts about inspecting the beehive, that this post is about two inspections at the Blue Heron. I've been so tied up this summer with moving on July 15 and with teaching at Emory, as I do every summer, that I've gotten behind.

Here, then, is the slideshow from the Blue Heron inspection on July 10. We combined two hives into one - one was the weak nuc we got as a donation and the other was the long-queenless hive that apparently did not accept the donated queen that we got on the same day as the nuc.

First you'll see the inspection of Julia's hive including removing a frame of honey for harvest. Then you'll see the combination of the two weak hives.



We went back to inspect these hives this past weekend on August 14. We've been away from these hives for a little over a month.

Julia wasn't with us and so we didn't get many pictures. I took some of Noah inspecting his and Julia's hive but didn't take any during the inspection of my hive, so you'll just have to read about my part.

The slideshow is below. Noah's hive looked good - with honey, brood, and some small hive beetles but not as many as we have seen before.

My combined hive had no newspaper left between the boxes. The original nuc hive had a black queen from Jennifer Berry's stock. We did not see her but did see an opened queen cell as well as the queen.

This queen was golden and lovely and looked just like the queen I had installed about six weeks ago into the queenless hive half of the combo with the weak nuc. I wonder if she killed off the black queen or if she is a new queen that the bees made. They have had time to make a new queen and for her to be laying since we introduced that donated queen.

We did see lots of eggs and small brood in the combined hive and the hive appeared to be doing well. Cindy wants us to essentially give her back the nuc she gave us in a split from this hive (which she was hoping for in August). However, there's no way this hive is in any kind of shape to split so we'll have to give her back her nuc in the spring.



Interesting stats at this 900th post:
There are 448 of you who follow me on Blogger, 817 who subscribe by RSS feed, and 60 who follow me on Twitter. There are visitors to this site from 180 countries in the world. So far in August there have been 7771 pageloads of these blog pages.

Checking on Blue Heron on the last day of June

Julia, Noah and I checked on the Blue Heron hives before the July 4 weekend.  We wanted to see if the queen were established in the queenless hive with the donated queen; we wanted to see if the nuc had managed to get started despite its poor resourced beginning; and we wanted to see if there was honey to be had at Julia's hive.

Here's a slide show.  After the inspection, we decided that if there is still no laying queen in the large Blue Heron hive, we'll combine it with the mean hive from the nuc that we know has a queen.  Hope for the future and all of that.  We have a MABA inspection on June 10 and we'll put the hives together then if we need to.

As always, click on the slide show to see the pictures with caption and full screen.

Queen Release at the Blue Heron

As I returned home today, I stopped at the Blue Heron to see if the new queen had been released. Remember, she had not quite been released on Tuesday. The hive seemed calm and happy. I left my smoker in the car, so it was nice to discover that the bees were calm.



In the second box, the queen had been released and the queen cage was empty. I guess it just took them longer because there was more fondant to eat through.



I didn't check to see if she were laying. I would have been so disappointed if she were not, so it was simply enough that she had been released.



The hive started with the nuc was very quiet - no bees on the landing. I decided even though they were feisty bees and I was without my smoker, I'd still give them a look. As you can see in the photo above, it's a hive in only one deep box.

I am not a foundation user, and this is the first time I've ever looked at black plastic foundation. Wow, can you see eggs and brood well. You can have the same experience looking at the photo below. There is lots of brood and c-shaped larvae on this, the only frame I looked at.

Don't worry, I'm still a foundation-less beekeeper, but I'm glad I've had the experience now of looking at eggs and larve on black plastic - no wonder people like it.  I still think the bees like having the opportunity to make their own foundation and I'm sticking to that!

I am relieved - this hive may turn out to be a good one after all.