Hive Inspection at Blue Heron

Today we did a hive inspection at Blue Heron that was a combined endeavor - beekeepers from the Metro Atlanta Beekeeping club and anyone who was interested who is a gardener at the community garden at Blue Heron. We were a small group: three beekeepers from Metro and two from the garden, and me. The two people who participated from the community garden were two of the beekeepers who have hives at Blue Heron.

The goal was to acquaint the gardeners with what goes on in the hive, since their gardens benefit from our bees and vice versa. Since the Blue Heron participants this year were already beekeepers, they were not unfamiliar with beehives! Maybe we can get a better response next year.

I opened Julia's hive first which has a new queen from the Purvis Brothers apiary. She was laying beautiful patterns. We didn't see her, but this is the first time this hive has looked so good since we started the Blue Heron hives. There was an empty super on the top of the hive, so I took it off for Julia. But this hive is going to go into winter well.

The other two hives of mine are not doing very well. The first hive seems to have a drone-laying queen. There was very little honey in the hive and lots of drone brood. There's not a good reason for the bees to be making drones so close to when they kick all the drones out unless the queen is "short-bred," as Keith Fielder described it in a talk to our bee club. The other hive is only one deep box. They have two good frames of honey, lots of pollen, very few bees. We saw the queen but her pattern is scanty and not impressive.

One thought I have is to combine the two hives, throw out both queens and put in a purchased replacement. I wrote Don K at Dixie Bee Supply to see if he has any queens and I'll call the Purvis Brothers on Monday. Maybe I can find a queen and drive up to get her. Either beekeeper is within 1 1/2 hours drive from me.

We opened Kevin and Peter's hive (I finally could take pictures - while I worked on the other three, I didn't get a chance). Their hive which is a new start with a new queen this year, was doing beautifully. As I wrote about in a post on how to do a hive inspection, they removed the second frame as the first frame out to lessen the squashing of bees when putting frames back in the box.



There was brood in the honey super (an argument for same-sized frames), but it does mean their queen is really productive. Their queen was laying a lovely football shaped pattern just as one would wish in a good hive.



See how well covered with brood this frame is?



We all conferred and decided that since they had a super on the hive which was mostly filled with honey and another super with what looked like two or three frames of honey, that they should get the honey out and only have one honey super on the hive. The guys pulled the empty frames from the super and replaced the empty slots with the full frames from the almost empty super, leaving the hive with one full super of honey.



We were all surprised to find that in none of these hives did there seem to be a small hive beetle problem. We only saw one or two in each hive. The weakest hive had about six that we saw.

I brought a jar of honey from my hives for the participants to taste. Then since the bee tree is only about 1 mile up Roswell Road from Blue Heron, I offered to show it to them.

The three beekeepers from Metro drove the mile and were amazed at the bee tree with the hive box on the top, as am I every time I see it! The bees in just two days had used up the baggie of sugar syrup, so I replaced it. I can't believe they went through it so fast. I can't return to replace it again until Tuesday. I hope they'll be OK until then.

Yet Another New Queen at Blue Heron and Powdered Sugar Shake

When I was last at Blue Heron, our third hive, the one the supplier gave us to replace the queenless nuc we got from him, didn't look good. The hive was not bustling with activity or bees and the numbers seemed small.

I was disappointed to find that the bees I saw on the tops of the frames had many shriveled and deformed wings, indicative of Deformed Wing Virus vectored by the varroa mite. I decided that I would return this week to do a powdered sugar shake.

Before shaking the powdered sugar, I pulled each frame to see how things are going in this weak hive. On the second frame I saw this opened queen cell. This is at least the third queen for this hive. Their first one failed and I don't think the second one was doing anything. Now they apparently have created yet another queen. Hopefully she'll be a good one.




I found two frames full of eggs and brood which was reassuring. The hive had good honey stores in the deep in which they live. The box above was completely empty and I removed it to give them more security (less space to defend).

The powdered sugar shake was quite an event. Here are the bees, covered with sugar clinging to the frame.

Here's how the whole box looked!

I took off the inner cover and put it on the ground and I removed the top box before doing this. When I lifted up the inner cover to set it back on the hive, the bees who had not experienced the powdered sugar shake surrounded one of their sisters to see what was going on with her and all this white powder!

Blue Heron Inspection June 28

On Sunday we held a Blue Heron inspection of our three hives there. There were several goals for the inspection.

1. Julia wanted to taste the honey from her hive, so we planned to take a couple of frames off of it. This gave us an opportunity to show how to remove a frame from the hives without using chemicals or anything very violent - like a blower - to get the bees off of the frame.

2. We wanted to use hive #2 to look into the hive to see the development of the hive. This meant we planned to look for eggs, larvae, the queen, the state of the hive.

3. Hive #3 looks from the outside like it is not thriving and we wanted to understand why. In addition, Jerry Freeman sent me a new small hive beetle trap. Since this is a weak looking hive, it is subject to being damaged by the small hive beetle. I planned to take this hive apart and replace the current screened bottom board with the Freeman beetle trap.

It was about 100 degrees in the field at Blue Heron and we all sweated our way through the inspection.

I did not light the smoker for the first hive because we were taking off honey frames. The smoker sends a smoke smell into the hive which the bees can clean up over time, but if you are taking off honey frames, they will have a smoke smell if you use the smoker, so I never use a smoker when I am robbing the hive.

After removing the frames of honey from Julia's hive, I then lit the smoker, puffed at the door of the second hive, set the smoker down, and completely forgot about it. I never used it again. When I opened the third hive, one of the guests reminded me that I hadn't used it.

In spite of using no smoke, we had a very peaceful inspection of three hives. I explained to everyone that I rarely use smoke and the bees do just fine. As long as you move slowly and take some care with what you do, why should you need to smoke them?

With these goals in mind, please enjoy the slide show with pictures thanks to Julia. Click on the slideshow to see the pictures full sized and with captions.



So did we meet the goals of the inspection?

1. We removed two frames of honey for Julia

2. We saw eggs and tiny larvae in the second hive and saw great brood patterns, confirming the thriving nature of that hive

3. We determined that hive #3 is probably on its third queen and she has barely started laying. We did see very young (tiny C-shaped larvae) proving the existence of a functioning queen. She probably broke out of the queen cell, went on her mating flight, and has just gotten started. However, we'll keep an eye on this hive for the possible need for queen resources or extra frames of bees before the end of July.

4. We installed the SBB for the Freeman trap but didn't put the tray in or arm it with oil. We only saw one hive beetle and it's too hot to deprive the bees of the ventilation from the SBB.

Note to self: Buy ventilated inner covers for all of my hives. Julia's hive looked so cool and comfy.

This inspection is the last one Julia and I will be doing at Blue Heron for the Metro club this year. We've had a great time and I hope you've enjoyed our slide shows.

Inspection #3 at Blue Heron

Blue Heron was due for another teaching inspection today for members of Metro Atlanta Beekeepers' Association and people who took our short course. We had about 8 people at the inspection.

Luckily we had good queen spotters in the group who spotted the queen in my two hives. These hives were all started from nucs this year and not one hive of the three has its original queen. Keith Fielder at our last bee meeting said that the queens in nucs are often poorly mated or old queens that a beekeeper wants to get rid of.

Julia's hive swarmed multiple times and finally have made themselves a good queen. My first hive showed all indication of being queenless from the beginning so we gave them resources and they requeened themselves with a well-functioning queen. The hive that we got to make up for the nuc being queenless had a queen in it but she is no longer there. They have also made a new queen and either ousted the old one or sent out a swarm with her.

Here is the slideshow of our inspection today. As usual, click on the slide to see it full sized and with captions. You can choose how long the picture will be on your screen as well:

Eco-Fair at Blue Heron Nature Preserve

Today there was an Eco-Fair at Blue Heron Nature Preserve. I went to represent beekeepers in the natural environment. Several members of Metro Atlanta stopped by and Gina, my local beekeeping friend, helped me run the table.

We took Julia's observation hive, which I had to go get from her house. What an adventure, but I got the bees without mishap. I have the Ob hive at Blue Heron from 11 until 4 when the bees began to act agitated and I thought I should take them home!

Here are Gina and me, working together to explain bees to all the passersby. We handed out information about how to learn more, including information about Metro Atlanta Beekeeper's Association.


Gina did a great job of explaining bees to this family and everyone got to taste honey.



Several of the kids tried on bee veils and loved doing that.


At the end of the day the hive was acting agitated and buzzing. I left the festival early to get them back to Julia's. I was so scared trying to take the cork out of the hive, uncover the pipe to the outdoors, and hook the whole thing up without mishap.

I managed to get the cork out of the hive and cover the opening with a card. Then I eased the aluminum stopper off of the pipe to the outdoors. Then I slid the Ob hive so that the only thing between the hole in the hive and the hole to the vent was a thin card. I slipped it out and slid the two together.

One bee escaped into the room, but I got a cup, rescued her and sent her on her way outdoors.

The bees clearly were desperate to get out of their cramped quarters. They poured out into the tube. Here they are "escaping."

Keith Fielder on Beekeeping more Like Mother Nature

Last night Keith Fielder, Cooperative Extension Agent at UGA, Georgia Master Beekeeper, Welsh Honey judge and all around good guy, talked to the Metro Atlanta Beekeeper's Association on the importance of low impact beekeeping.



As a beekeeper who is trying to stay as natural as possible with my hives, I was thrilled to hear Keith supporting Mother Nature.

By low impact beekeeping he emphasized:

• No chemicals
• A more natural environment both inside and outside the colony
  

He also emphasized the importance of us beekeepers understanding the biology of the honeybee (see my notes from his earlier talk) as well as the biology of the pests that intrude on the bee and the biology of the diseases of the honey bee.

Keith uses no chemicals in his hives - no chemical treatments and no drugs. He discovered that he lost about the same number of colonies each winter with or without chemicals - so why not leave the bees be?

From the outside the hive natural approach, he put up the slide below. The tree in which a bee colony could certainly live stands alone, and thus the bee colony stands alone. We tend to put our colonies side by side (for the convenience of the beekeeper) and that is not natural. Keith is trying to locate his colonies at least 50 yards from each other.



While that is impractical for me in my urban yard, remembering the consequences of unnatural colony location is important. With hives beside each other, drifting between hives may occur and if you have mites in one colony, you will have mites in all the colonies. Just as if you have small hive beetles, you are likely to find them in all hives.

From the inside-the-colony perspective, he encouraged us to keep our equipment clean, to be super cautious about purchasing old equipment from old beekeepers because all of its problems will come with it, and to change out the combs at least every three years.

I asked him about the old comb in a tree (in other words, how does Mother Nature handle old comb) and he said that bees in a tree continually build upward in the tree trunk. When they've gotten as far up as they can go, they abscond and find a new home. The inherent wax moths then take over and destroy the old comb. Then scout bees show up, attracted by the hive smell, find a new home with no old wax, since it has been destroyed by the wax moths, and move a swarm in to start the process all over.

He said that screened bottom boards are essential to a clean hive. Debris, mites, and other detrius fall through the SBB and don't return to the hive. In addition the SBB provides ventilation, essential to a healthy hive.

While he didn't talk about or encourage foundationless beekeeping, he did say that if you use commercial wax, you will have chemicals in your hive introduced by the wax from the commercial companies. He suggested using plastic foundation with no wax coating.

Michael Bush says that the bees don't like plastic and it doesn't work to give them plastic with no wax coating. Cindy Bee who was at the meeting asked about using a strip of paper in the groove, much like I use a wax strip. Popsicle sticks will accomplish the same thing when glued in the frame groove. The goal of all of the aforementioned is to have fresh, uncontaminated wax in the hive.

He talked about bee genetics - using queens from hygienic stock such as the Purvis Brothers' gold line or from survivor stock - like great swarms. If there are enough drones around, he is fine with the bees making their own queens. (Currently my hives at home all have queens that they have made themselves).

When asked about the bad queens many people got in Atlanta in the early nucs this year, he said that buying commercial nucs means that you are getting old queens from last year that the commercial guys don't want any more and that the new queens, with all the rain this spring in Florida, are (and what I heard here was:) shortbread.

As a cook I wondered how the queen bee can be shortbread, but his answer made me understand that what he actually said was, "short-bred," meaning that instead of 17 or 18 drones mating with the queen, she may have only mated with one. (See the story about Julia's drone laying queen at Blue Heron)

He said that nutrition for bees will be the next area of research after colony collapse disorder. Bees have a hard time now getting variety into their diet. We have a "fragmented habitat" and less plant diversity. You should see in a healthy colony all colors of pollen coming in the door in the spring. If you don't see this, then your bees are probably not being fed in a well-rounded way.

He did encourage feeding nucs sugar syrup - not corn syrup. As an Ag agent, he is quite aware of the process sugar goes through from cane to table and feels fine about feeding syrup made from cane sugar to his bees.

A very natural, as in nonchemical, way to control for mites is to do splits. This is because in a split, the old queen stays in one place and the other half of the split has no queen. bees in that half of the split have to make their own queen from an egg, and the process takes about a month from egg to laying queen. This disrupts the varroa mite life cycle because without a laying queen, the mite can't reproduce themselves in a bee egg. Thus the mites die out over this period.

In essence he promoted in every way that a good beekeeper helps the bees have what they need NATURALLY.

What a breath of fresh air!

Powdered Sugar Shake at Blue Heron Hives

Yesterday (before the current monsoon rains hit Atlanta) we went to the Blue Heron preserve and did a powdered sugar shake on the hives there.

The idea of using powdered sugar is to cover the bees with sugar and encourage their grooming. In the grooming process, they knock off the varroa mites on their bodies. The mites fall through the screened bottom board and can't get back to the hive.

While there is research to suggest that this isn't really an effective mite control, I still do it because by using it in my oldest hive that almost died from Varroa vectored disease, I could really see a difference. The hive is quite healthy today.

Randy Oliver is trying to research this in three articles. Here's the first one and you can find the others on his site.

We used powdered sugar on all three Blue Heron hives. Sam, Julia's youngest son who is in the FOURTH grade, took amazing pictures of the process. I have labeled his pictures with his name on the slide show.

We found two things during the inspection - one great and one not so good.

Great: Julia's hive that appeared to have no queen at our Sunday inspection actually has a laying queen. We didn't see her but saw a good frame of brood and eggs - Woohoo!

Not so good: Our first nuc at Blue Heron came from a supplier who gave us the nuc without a queen . To make good on this he gave us a second nuc - this one had a big beautiful queen. We installed her in another hive, since the first queenless hive had successfully made their own queen.

In the second hive the bees were doing a lousy job of comb building in the second box. We cut out the bad comb, put a drawn frame in the center of the hive (instead of the frame of foundation that was originally there) and moved the frames around so that the badly drawn frames (without the badly drawn comb) were on the edges.

Here's the slide show. Click to see it larger and to be able to read the captions.

Inspection at Blue Heron: The Good and The Bad

We had our second inspection of the hives at Blue Heron yesterday. Noah, Julia's son, led the inspection and did a fabulous job. He was well-informed, could answer questions, and gave the participants lots of helpful information.

One of the nice things about having two of us at the inspection is the proof of the old adage: Ask 10 beekeepers a question and you'll get 10 different answers. In fact, Julia and I do things a little differently so when questions were asked, there was a demonstration of the fact that beekeeping is a matter of choice. We all make decisions and not always the same decision!

In the bad news column, Julia's hive was filled with swarm cells and apparently no longer had the original queen. We counted 12 queen cells on the bottom of one frame. The hive was calm and didn't have a queenless roar when it was opened, however.

This may mean that there is a virgin queen in the hive who may or may not have successfully mated but at least is not yet laying. We decided to add a frame from one of my hives to her hive.

This is like an insurance policy. If the virgin queen is in the hive and just hasn't started up yet, the frame we added would provide a jump in numbers as the eggs and larvae mature. If there is no queen or an ineffective one, we gave the bees the resources to make a new queen.

Another choice that could be made is to order a new queen. Julia will have to decide if she wants to wait for the maturation of this queen or to do that.

Either way, the hive is now behind in the middle of the nectar flow. It will take about a month for the hive to be up and running well if they have to make their own queen - which will be half way through the nectar flow. And if they have a queen, they still will be behind since she isn't laying yet, but not as far behind.

On the good news side, my hive in which the bees made their own queen was thriving. We took a frame from that hive to add to Julia's. We didn't see the queen so we were very careful to make sure the queen didn't leave with the frame we gave to Julia's hive. There were good brood patterns and lots of eggs and larvae in that hive.

On the second hive of mine we saw the queen with remnants of her red dot - the bees frequently eat the paint off in the process of grooming the queen. She had been laying well also.

On all three hives the box we added about 2 1/2 weeks ago remained untouched, so we didn't add any further boxes although we had brought them along. Since we'd like to get honey from these hives, the slow progress in the middle of the nectar flow is a little discouraging, but my hives at home are doing exactly the same thing.

Below is a slide show of photographs from the inspection. Click on the slideshow to be able to view it larger and with captions for the pictures:

Hive Check Easter Sunday

The tulip poplar flow began in Atlanta last week, so I am anxious that my hives take advantage of this, our best honey flow. I checked the boxes yesterday afternoon to see if any new boxes were needed.

On Saturday I had put a new box on Aristaeus2 (the swarm hive from last year) so I didn't expect it to need anything. I did peek in, but the bees were not happy to see me since I had disturbed them only the day before!

My daughter is getting married and I won't be paying attention to the bees next weekend, so before I get totally distracted by the wedding, I'll put a new box on both Bermuda and Mellona. Each of those hives is very active.

In Bermuda, with four boxes on the hive, the queen was avidly laying in the third box. The fourth box given to them to invite honey production still has three undrawn frames. I attributed the lack of wax work to the weather in the earlier part of last week when we had two nights in the 20s/30s - probably slowed them down a lot. So given warmer weather is on the way, I'll put a new box on Bermuda before I leave for the wedding.

Mellona also has a few undrawn frames in the top box and a very actively laying queen. I saw eggs everywhere. I'll, for the same reasons as Bermuda, give her a new box on Tuesday or Wednesday before I leave for the wedding.

When I lifted one of the honey frames out of Mellona, I unintentionally ripped wax off of the tops of a 1 1/2 inch vertical strip of honey stored. The bees anxiously recollected the honey from the tops of the frames. In the picture below they are congregating around a drip of honey.



In Aristaeus2 they were drawing wax in the new box I had given them. I'm sorry for the unfocused picture. I think the camera thought I wanted it to focus on the deck rather than the honeycomb! I'll try to pay better attention to the focus next time because I loved seeing the bees in action.



In Blue Heron news, I added a box to both hives on Friday morning and added a box to Julia's hive. Her hive still had undrawn frames and seemed lackluster by comparison to the other two. There have been four swarms seen or captured in the vicinity of the Blue Heron hives and I wonder if her hive has swarmed.

While I was there on Saturday, (and I didn't have my camera #$&#$&) Kevin, the overseer of the garden, was moving a swarm that he collected on Friday night just before the tornadic rains came down. He had had it in a temporary box arrangement and was moving it to a real hive box.

The swarm was hived in a cluster around the queen in the hive box but a handful about the size of a baseball remained on the tree where they had been found. He, his brother Peter, and I looked carefully through the "baseball" and didn't see a queen. We surmised that the bees were still drawn to the queen pheromone that remained where she had been on the branch.

Our decision was to cut the branch and move it bees and all to sit in front of the hive to see if the bees would move to the stronger smell of the queen from within the hive. I wish I had pictures.

Lesson learned: Always have the camera in the car (and an extra hive tool) - you never know!

SHB note: Still not a sign of small hive beetles in the hive with the Freeman trap on it. To be fair, I didn't see a single small hive beetle in any hive yesterday.

Blue Heron Actual Inspection - Finally!

Today it was warm - the weather cooperated and we didn't have anything unusual like snow, hail or Oobleck, so we could continue with our inspection. We had a great time and ended it with a taste of honey. Click on the slideshow below to get a larger view with captions:

First Semi-Inspection at Blue Heron

We're having a strange March in Atlanta - or really a typical March. March is always both lion and lamb in Georgia. We had thunderstorms and fierce rain for three days running at the end of the week.

I woke up on Saturday, the date of our scheduled inspection for the Metro club, expecting sunny weather in the high 50s. But no, that was not to be. Instead the skies remained overcast all day long and the temperature was only 46 by 11 AM. The inspection was scheduled for 1:30. We had four people eagerly signed up and we were as prepared as we could be.

We decided to meet our participants at Blue Heron and see if the bees were flying at 1:30 when the temperature was supposed to be up. When Julia and I arrived, it was 48 and very cloudy....grim weather and not conducive to inspecting bee hives. Julia brought her two sons: Sam and Noah, both of whom had helped install the hives at Blue Heron.

We decided to do a truncated "inspection." I had brought a new super for the nuc we installed last weekend and we knew it would be needed by that hive and we had a handout for the participants on how to do an inspection, derived from this blog post. We also thought we could demonstrate lighting a smoker, how to use the hive tool, and how to slide a hive box onto a hive.

Here's a slideshow of our "inspection" visit to Blue Heron. Click on the slideshow to see the captions and choose the length for each picture to remain visible to you.



We talked about Housel positioning and each participant was able to see the "Y" in the back of the honey cells - that's why we are looking so carefully at the old comb.

Because of the bad weather, we are rescheduling the inspection to happen at 10:30 AM on Saturday, April 4 at Blue Heron. In Atlanta's inimitable way, let's hope it doesn't snow!

Blue Heron - the Queenless Saga

As you'll remember from earlier posts, my hive at Blue Heron was started with a nuc that had no queen. There was little or no brood in the box and we saw no queen and no evidence of a queen - no new eggs or larvae, very little capped brood, all in all a sad state of affairs.

To cope with this I gave the hive brood and eggs on two frames, hoping that they would make a queen. They made at least one perfectly lovely queen cell and the hive is calm, quiet and seems to be chugging along.

Meanwhile the nuc supplier calls and wants to "make us whole" by giving me another nuc, this time with a queen. I called several beekeepers whom I respect: Cindy Bee, Jim Ovbey, and I posted on Beemaster. Everyone agreed that the hive that made its own queen needed to have a chance.

So we got permission from Blue Heron to install the nuc in a second hive. I will keep an eye on the first hive to see if the queen they made successfully mates and begins to lay eggs. If she succeeds, then we have two good hives and I'll move the newest one somewhere else. If she fails, I will combine the hive I installed today with the first hive since we know there's a good queen in the new hive.

Here's what our process today looked like:



Now the supplier feels good about coming through with a queenright nuc, I feel good about Blue Heron allowing us to temporarily have two hives there, the whole process provides a great teaching/learning opportunity, and the new queen in the first hive has a chance to prove herself.

Everybody wins!

The state of Blue Heron's Queenless nuc hive

As you may remember, on March 8th I put two frames of brood and eggs from my hives at home into the Blue Heron hive. My hope was that they would make a queen to make the queenless situation queenright.

I checked on Thursday, the 19, and sure enough, they had made a beautiful queen cell. I'm sorry the picture is out of focus. I forgot to put the camera on macro and I forgot my frame rack. So I didn't hold either the frame or the camera steady and it wasn't macro focused.

I went through every frame of the hive. The bottom box had all syrup filled frames. The second medium box into which I had put the brood/eggs frame also had no eggs or larvae.

Important note: I couldn't light my smoker - we've had rain for several days in a row and all of my pine straw in my yard was damp. I worked these bees with no smoke and they were calm as if they had a sense that all was well in their world. There was no queenless roar and the bees did not act angry.



In addition to this lovely queen cell, the frame also had two opened queen cells on the bottom of the frame. I think these may have already been there, but I took again a shaky shot of them as well.



My guess is that if there were a four day larvae on March 8 on the frames I brought them, then tomorrow (Sunday) or Monday, is when Her Majesty should emerge from her cell. She'll hang around the hive a little and then go on a mating flight. Let's hope all of that happens without incident, including her return to the hive without being breakfast for a bird.

Then we might see eggs and brood in the Blue Heron hive!

Ministering to Blue Heron

Yesterday when we inspected my hive at Blue Heron, we found absolutely no brood, no eggs, no capped brood, no queen cells, nothing. I've been wondering what happened. The hive was boiling over with bees when we installed the nuc and there are still lots of bees but no brood or any evidence of a queen.

It's possible that the queen wasn't in the nuc or that she had died in transit. It's possible that the queen who was probably raised in the fall didn't mate properly.

A gardener at Blue Heron reported that she saw a huge swarm on Friday, hanging on a tree near the hive area at Blue Heron. Possibly the nuc hive swarmed. Sometimes a hive swarms to deal with overcrowding when they don't have enough stores and can't find another solution. However these bees were being fed and had lots of room in the hive.

The swarm being from my Blue Heron hive is less likely because there were no queen cells left in the hive - usually a hive that swarms is reproducing itself and would leave behind resources for the hive to survive. But a virgin queen in the hive would need to make her mating flight and wouldn't begin laying for a while after the hive had swarmed.

The only things to do at this point are:

• To call the supplier who hasn't yet called me back to see if he can supply a queen, since the nuc was supposed to have one or
• To set the hive up to make its own queen by giving it frames of brood and eggs from another hive.
  

The latter is a good thing to do in any event. If there is a queen in the hive, the bees will simply raise the brood I provided them and add to the numbers in the hive. If there is no queen, then the eggs in the cells with allow the bees in the hive to make a queen.

So today I brought a nuc filled with three frames of brood and eggs as well as two frames of honey to Blue Heron.

Important note: When we opened the hive, the bees did not make the characteristic "queenless roar" of a hive without a queen and we didn't use smoke and the bees were not angry and attacking as they were on Day one at Blue Heron.

Sam, Julia's son, helped by spraying the foreign bees and frames with sugar syrup to ease their introduction into the hive.

First I hung a frame rack on the side of the hive to hold the frames I planned to remove. Sam is holding the spray bottle and I have a bee brush to help with clearing the frames of bees when I swap them out.


We pulled the frames from the hive to make space for the nuc frames of brood, eggs and honey.

The frame in the picture below came from my hives at home. It had tons of eggs and some capped brood as well as nurse bees. Sam is poised to spray sugar syrup on the nurse bees as we put the frame into Blue Heron.

We successfully moved all five frames to the hive and took out five frames. Yesterday I had put a new box on the Blue Heron hive so these frames were not used yet. It was easy to remove the bees from them and make room for the frames from home.



When we finished the transfer, we shook the bees off of the original Blue Heron frames back into the hive and closed up the transfer nuc.

Yesterday I noticed the box that I brought over for the second box on the hive had one side broken. In addition to the frame transfer, I also moved all of the frames in the second box into a box that didn't have any damage. I left an empty box on the Blue Heron hive because we have been feeding sugar syrup in baggies, but I should have removed that box. We will feed with a Boardman to avoid disturbing them while they make a queen.

I am in a dilemma about the empty top box. If I leave it they will probably make a mess of comb in it since there are no frames in it (set up to shelter a baggie feeder that is no longer there). If I remove it I'll disturb them in the queen making process.....hmmmm.

Probably the best solution will be to leave the empty box on until a queen cell is probably capped - that would be in about 9 days - so I'll leave the empty for 10 days for good measure - until March 18 - and then remove it.

In the picture below I am moving the frames to the box that is not in disrepair. You can also see the transfer nuc sitting atop Julia's hive.

Blue Heron: The First Inspection

Julia and I visited Blue Heron this afternoon. We installed the nucs on February 25. We've given them sugar syrup about every three days since then. We haven't opened the hives because we wanted to get them well started. Usually you wait at least a week after installation to check on the hive.

There's good news and there's bad news. In the bad news category: We opened my hive which was boiling over with bees. They are in an eight frame box and although we had given them the five frames that came with the nuc and three frames with starter strips, they had already built out the wax in all eight frames. The comb was beautiful, but the cells were all empty. There was absolutely no sign of a queen - not any capped brood, no eggs, no larvae, nothing.

This hive will die out if there is no queen. I called the bee club president who purchased the hives we are using at Blue Heron and he told me to call the supplier, so I did. Hopefully I'll hear back from PN tomorrow, but just for insurance, I'm going to put a frame of brood and eggs into this hive tomorrow from one of my other hives.

We put a box on the hive since they had more than built out the frames so they could keep busy and because the frame I'll bring tomorrow is a medium. We also gave the hive a baggie of sugar syrup.



There was much better news when we opened Julia's hive. Note that the first frame we removed was the next to the last frame - not the last frame. In an inspection, bees get killed but to minimize this, removing a frame that is not next to the hive wall helps. When you are returning that last frame to the hive, having it be in position 2 or 9 makes the bees on the frame press against other bees or wax rather than the hard wood of the hive box and saves bee lives.


Julia's hive is in a 10 frame box. The bees were doing well with capped brood on at least four frames. The remaining frames that we put in the hive when we installed it were empty frames with starter strips of wax. Below you can see a built out frame of wax drawn by the bees. In the lower left corner we saw her majesty (circled in red!). We were so relieved and thrilled to see her.


We put a baggie of sugar syrup on Julia's hive. We didn't put a new box on Julia's hive because there were about 3 frames that hadn't been even started by the bees and the fourth was barely started (see below). In that photo you can see how the bees begin to build out the wax from starter strips.

Note: We found the queen on the second to last frame in Julia's hive. She is likely to be found there in future inspections so we made sure to notice where we found her.

Her hive will need a new box next weekend.

Feeding Blue Heron in the Cold Weather

Yesterday we had significant snow in Atlanta, but since it's March by this afternoon, all of it had melted away. Around 2 PM I went to Blue Heron to add food to the hives. There was still a tiny bit of snow as you can see in the first picture.



When I arrived at Blue Heron, my car said the temperature was 42 degrees. The jars of sugar syrup had been in my car for the last couple of days and in the cold, unscrewing the top was quite a challenge.

If I had been at home, I would have held the lid under a hot stream of water until I could easily unscrew it. However, no such condition was possible here so I used my Swiss Army knife to loosen the lid. I then substituted a solid lid with tiny punched holes in it.


There were a few bees actually flying around the hives, but unprotected by veil and gloves, I put these two Boardman feeders on our hives. We have added food to these hives now about every two days.

Don't you love Julia's Apis Mellifera?


In case you didn't believe the bees were out and about, I took a picture of one who landed on the grass right in front of the hive!

Nurturing Blue Heron

The Blue Heron bees are vigorous and HUNGRY. We put a quart of syrup on each hive last Saturday, another quart on each hive on Monday (the previous quart was empty) and gave each hive a baggie filled with 2 quarts of syrup/hive on Wednesday when we installed the hives.

Julia stopped by this morning (Friday) and found that the bag on my hive was empty and the bag on her poetic hive was almost empty. So she between raindrops filled two more half gallon bags and put them on the hives. I'll check again on Sunday - bet they will be out of food again!

Blue Heron Phase Two Installation of the Nucs

Today we installed the nucs into their hive boxes. It's all in this slide show. Julia brought hive boxes that she had painted in both an educational and artistic way - perfect for the setting at Blue Heron. Be sure to notice them.

We also took probably more slides than you want to see because we really wanted to document the move from the nuc into the hive box as well as how to set up a baggie feeder which we did on both hives.

Click on the slide show below to see it full sized. You can also use the bottom of the slide show screen to say how long you'd like to view each slide. There are captions for each slide.

Enjoy!

The Blue Heron Project

Metro Atlanta Beekeepers' Association will now provide hive inspections to help new beekeepers learn about beekeeping in a hands-on way at three locations.

One location is the Atlanta Zoo; another is the Dunwoody Nature Center; and the third is at the Blue Heron Nature Preserve.

Each site will have two working hives that belong to Metro members and will be used several times during bee season as inspection sites for the club.

As you may remember, I've already been involved with several beekeepers who have hives at Blue Heron. Previous posts are here and here. So I was thrilled when Kevin, the person in charge of the community garden at Blue Heron, got an OK from the board of directors to let us manage two hives there.

I'm going to have one of the hives and my friend and fellow beekeeper, Julia, will manage the other with the help of her two sons. They have been keeping bees longer than I have, so I am sure we will all learn from this experience.

Metro purchased two nucs for us and we provide everything else - the hive boxes, maintenance, etc. The nucs arrived (early, isn't it?) on Saturday. So we are feeding them in the nucs until Wednesday when Julia, Sam, her youngest son, and I will install them in the hives. Below is a slideshow of our experience so far.

We got a pretty good record of our adventure, but nobody had the camera when a bee stung me inside my hood. When I took off the hood, there was another bee in my hair. We all swatted at my hair as I hung my head upside down - I'm sure it was quite a sight, but we didn't get pictures!



Click on the pictures in the slideshow and you'll be taken to Picasa Web albums where you can view it in a larger frame.

Another Adventure at the Blue Heron Nature Preserve

Two of the hives at Blue Heron appear to be queenless. I helped the guys look at their hives two weeks ago and there is still no brood, no eggs, no sign of a laying queen. They decided to bite the bullet and buy new queens, rather than using a frame of brood and eggs since the time involved would make them miss this ongoing honey flow.

The frame below is what all the frames in the hive looked like - lots of room for brood but no eggs and lots of nectar stored but little else. Wade installed his queen by laying her box on top of the frames in his 10 frame box.


He took the cork out of the candy end of the queen box and laid her on top of a central frame. I brought him a 10 frame shim to borrow to allow her release without removing a frame.



We closed the hive up and he'll check on her release state in about 4 days.

Kent is using 8 frame boxes (in the picture below). They are built with more space in them. He was able easily to space his frames in the box and allow room for the queen without removing a frame. He tied the box and then attached it to a thumb tack on a centrally located frame.

He too will wait four days and then check to see if she is released.


I'm really enjoying helping these guys with their hives at the Nature Preserve. They are all enthusiastic and eager beekeepers. Their excitement about their new adventure makes it all the more fun to help them out.

These guys caught a swarm while I was at Young Harris. It literally landed on a tree in the garden area near their hives.

We checked the box they put the swarm in and saw eggs and young brood. Clearly the queen in the swarm hive is thriving. We all cheered.

Great to have one hive doing well with a laying queen while the other two are getting a slower start.