Drone Layer Hive

Yesterday we had about a 2 hour break of sunshine and blue sky - followed, of course, by grey sky, clouds and, you guessed it, more rain.  It's raining now.

It was like the eye of the storm that I remember from hurricanes, growing up on the Mississippi river.  We would take a breath during the eye as it passed over, but the hurricane would start again.  I know it dates me, but the one I really remember was Hurricane Audrey in 1957.  I remember the eye because of the startling contrast to what was going on just minutes before - I was little and this fierce weather really scared me.  Hurricanes would devastate south Louisiana and then would come up the river to Natchez, MS where I lived.  By then they would be weakened and still wreaked havoc.

In our small calm of sunny weather, I opened the split to see if the new queen were laying and I opened the drone layer hive to see if their new queen had succeeded.  The split was doing great and had wall to wall cells of eggs and tiny c-shaped larvae.

The split was made on April 13, so the queen should have emerged around the 29th.  So checking on the 5th might have been pushing it.  We've had bad weather and I was concerned she might not have been able to go on a mating flight but she had and was working hard.

In the drone layer colony, I didn't find a laying queen.  I did find a queen cell on the frame I had given them that had been ripped open from the side, indicating that a queen had emerged, and I found a queen cell opened appropriately at the tip.  The last frame of brood and eggs I gave them was on April 15.  Doing the math, at the longest, the queen should have emerged on May 1 and this was just May 5.  We've had terrible weather for most of those days.  So either she hasn't mated; she was lost in a storm; she has mated but hadn't started laying.

So as a panacea, as per Michael Bush, I took a frame of brood and eggs out of the Patty swarm hive and gave it to the drone layers.

I'm leaving for Young Harris on Thursday and this way they'll have a chance if they need it.

I'm stopping by Chastain tomorrow and taking a frame of brood and eggs out of our nuc there to put in the Don Kuchenmeister drone laying hive tomorrow if I have enough time.

Another Queen Failure - this one from a Fatbeeman Package

The queen in our package installed at Chastain Conservancy was not released by the bees.  I picked up three packages from Don Kuchenmeister (Fatbeeman) for Julia and two for me on March 17.  I dropped Julia's by her house and drove home with my two.  On that same afternoon, I installed one package at my house and saved the other to take to Chastain the next day.

In most packages, the bees cluster around the queen cage and hang like this in the package (generally clustered around the queen cage suspended beside the feed can:

The bees in the package for Chastain were all over the place completely filling the box - not hanging around or organized on the queen cage.  That should have given me pause.  But I didn't think about it at the time.

I checked the newly installed hive for food needs two days after installation.  The queen hadn't been released and I gave them more honey.  Then the temperatures dropped into the 30s and low 40s for about eight days or more.  As soon as it was warm enough, we had our first hive inspection and the queen had still not been released.  So we made the decision to direct release her and she walked into the hive happily.

Now, three weeks after installation, I went to do an inspection with Julia on our own (not teaching).  To my alarm, the only brood in my hive was drone brood.  Egg cells had two to five eggs in them as if there were a laying worker.  I found several cells with two tiny c-shaped larvae in the bottom.  However, instead of a laying worker, we found the queen and watched her put her bottom in a cell to lay.

What this means is that the queen was barely mated.  She was mated enough to think she could lay but she must have only mated with a single drone, if that.  The bees weren't clustered around her in the package because she wasn't giving out queen pheromone and they didn't release her because of that as well.  Don said you couldn't tell by how they hung in the package, and said that I must have bumped the package.  I didn't - it's how the package looked when I got it from Don and also the next morning before I had touched it in any way.  Jerry Wallace, a well-respected local beekeeper, said that the bees weren't clustering around the queen cage in the package was a sign she wasn't mated.

When you purchase a package, if you get to pick it out yourself, you look for a package that has as few dead bees lying on the bottom of the package as you can.  Also since they are filled by estimate, look for one that is pretty full.  Now I know to look for how the bees are hanging in the package to make sure the queen is fully functioning.

Because there is no replenishment of the numbers in a hive that starts as a package, the number of bees is now greatly diminished and this formerly 3 pound package now only occupies a sparse three frames in the hive.  If the queen were properly mated and laying, this would not be an issue because she would have replacement brood and more ready to emerge by this point, but without any replacement bees, this hive is in jeopardy.  The remaining bees will not live for the three weeks it takes for the queen to lay brood and have it emerge.

I called Don and he questioned everything I had done with the hive.  He said I should have called him when the bees had not released the queen.  I didn't call him because once before I had purchased a queen from him; she had not been released and when I called him, he said, "Release her directly."  So rather than bother him, we just released her directly.

He said all of his queens were proven layers and that if I wanted him to replace the queen, I would have to catch the faulty queen and bring her back to him and then he would give me a queen - "I still have three or four," he said.  I said I thought he should give me some bees as well because the $95 I paid for the package is all for naught with no replacement brood at this point.  He said, "Bees are not guaranteed to live."

I told him that I have a hand tremor and that I have never picked up a queen.  He said with a tone filled with contempt, "You are a Master Beekeeper and don't know how to pick up a queen?"

When I went over to Jerry Wallace's house today, he lent me his queen clip and also told me how to "herd" the queen into a queen cage without having to pick her up, so I'll try that first tomorrow and then the queen clip if I can't "herd" her.

I have bought bees from Don for four years and spent a lot of money with him.  I have put him on our supplier list that we give out to new beekeepers (over 100 of them) who take our short course.  Every time anyone asks me where to get bees I recommend him highly.

No more.

I wish he had just said, "Gosh, I'm sorry, Linda.  With this cold beginning to the spring a lot of queens have been poorly mated.  Come by and get another one, no problem."  But instead he was angry that I was unhappy and seemed resentful that he would have to replace my queen.

I guess he would rather be angry at me and make a poor business decision in how he handled my problem instead of being nice and helpful to me, a steady customer who has sent him many, many customers.

I told him that in my business, we call what he was doing to me "blaming the victim," and he told me not to lecture him and to get another supplier.

But now that's done, as far as I am concerned.  I will not be giving out his name any more to anyone.  Julia and I are in charge of the MABA short course next year so I will remove his name, since he has essentially suggested that I do so, from our recommended suppliers.  I can't imagine a new beekeeper having to deal with what I had to deal with yesterday and today in my interaction with him.

Post Script:  Jerry Wallace has been in touch with a number of bee suppliers in south Georgia where Don's packages are raised.  Jerry reports that they tell him that many of the queens coming out of south Georgia as early queens are poorly mated because we have had such a cold March throughout the state.  Our winter months were not any of them as cold as the first three weeks of March were in Georgia.  So many of the queens who flew out were not able to mate as often or as well as they would need to in order to be a success in their hives.  I imagine I am not the only one who has called Don to say that the package they received from him had a bad queen.

Survivor Miracle Maybe???

On Sunday after the robbery on Friday, I walked out of my basement door and noticed this nuc, sitting with four empty frames in it.  There were bees!  And no reason for them to be there.

I think these are the survivors from the robbed hive.  The queen is from Don Kuchenmeister and the bees are tough little small cell bees who should be able to make it.



Quick like a rabbit, I put the nuc up on bricks, gave it an inner cover and a top cover and added an empty nuc as a surround with a Boardman feeder full of honey in it.  I replaced the empty frames with drawn frames from what I think was their original hive, the robbed out one.

I also put two frames in the upper nuc with the Boardman (with a pint jar of honey) in between.  I think I should put those two frames side by side and will when I go back to it.



I didn't look for the queen, but the bees acted like a small swarm does.  I'll check for a queen in a couple of days.  Bees were orienting and flying in and out.



I reduced the entrance so that they would be safe while I'm off to the mountains to the Asheville conference.  I hope they'll make it.  I'm inclined to consider keeping them in the nuc for the winter if they can manage to get a hive going.

Beekeepers Creeping in the Middle of the Night

What do beekeepers do in the dark of the night? We move bee hives!

A kind woman named Lisa who studied about beekeeping with Don Kuchenmeister in Lula, Georgia and who got these bees from the Georgia bee lab donated this hive to the Metro Atlanta Beekeepers for our hive inspection program. She lives in Lilburn, about a 35 minute drive from Julia's house.

Immediately after work tonight, skipping dinner, I drove to Julia's house, we loaded up the car with what we needed, and drove to Lilburn to get these bees. For those of you who don't know, bees are ideally moved at night because all of the foragers are home for the evening and it's a calmer move than trying in the day time.

The hive is one of those English garden hives with the lovely rooftop. Here's how it looked before we moved it.

I had been worrying about it all day - it was potentially 160 pounds of bees and honey and boxes. Lisa said her driveway was quite steep, and it's easy to make errors when one is tired at the end of the day. It turned out that the biggest challenge of moving this hive was backing down Lisa's steep driveway.

We brought flashlights, a staple gun, screened wire to staple the entry, and our bee gear, just in case. Noah is stapling the entry closed with screened wire in this picture.

Julia strapped the hive together with her hive strap. And then we loaded it into Julia's car. It wasn't very heavy and although it looked like Julia, Noah and I were all carrying it, actually the two of them had all the weight so I let go to take this picture.

Below you can see Lisa and Noah. We are so grateful to Lisa for donating this hive since we have no bees at the Blue Heron and the inspections for our club are about to begin. Lisa also gave us an eight frame hive that we will use for bee inspections at Chastain Park, if we get permission to keep bees there. (Have I told you all about Chastain Park Conservancy and our dreams of having bees there? - if not, I'll post soon.)

Then in the dark of night we drove to the Blue Heron (after a quick stop at Chick Fil-A so I could get something to eat, having skipped dinner). We were a little scared - after all, there has been vandalism at our Blue Heron hives and it was 9:00 PM by this time. Noah told us loud and funny stories as we walked guided by flashlight up into the apiary to make sure our cinder blocks were placed OK.

We set the hive up and then put some vegetation on the landing entry so the bees would orient themselves when they fly tomorrow.

Here are Julia and Noah in the dark beside our newest hive. We faced it east and hope it will live and thrive.

Noah, who will be chief in charge of this particular hive, checked with the level on his phone to see if the hive were level. Satisfied that it was level enough, we went home. I got back to my house at 10:10…..what a long day, but so fulfilling to end it this way.

Picking up Bees from Don (aka Fatbeeman)

Today Julia and I drove to Lula, Ga to pick up bees from Don. She was getting a package for Blue Heron and picking up another for a friend. I was picking up 10 packages for Linda T's Bees in South Georgia and getting two packages for another friend.

When we arrived, Don was shaking a package into a nuc. He is using an empty medium nuc box as a funnel to help contain the bees as they are shaken.



Now he is taking the cork out of the candy end of the queen cage. He wedges the queen cage, screen wire down, in between two frames and leaves her for the bees to release. (The man in the white shirt just got stung right in the middle of his forehead).



Now Don is closing up the nuc before taking us to his basement to pick out our packages.



It's always fun to see Don in action. (The white-shirted man is trying to scrape the stinger off of his forehead!)

 
All told we were picking up fourteen packages in the back of my Subaru.  It's important that the bees not overheat in transit so Don nailed them apart using pieces of wood to keep the packages separate and to keep them upright.

With the car all ready to roll, I got Julia to take my picture with Don.

We drove back to Atlanta with a car full of bees and only a few loose in the car at the back window.

A Visit with Don (Fatbeeman) in Lula, GA

This afternoon I drove to Lula, Georgia with Julia and Noah to get the two queens I had ordered for my queenless hives. Don K is a character and fun to spend time with - I learned so much in the 45 minutes we spent at his beeyard. He was constantly sharing what he knows and challenging us to think about the whys and wherefores.

He had the queen cages ready. He said he knew I'd post pictures so he had new queen cages for me! We got to go with him into the yard to get the queens out of his hives. Note he has on NO protective gear - neither did any of the three of us. I did have veils in the car, but we didn't stop to put them on.

Don has his own system of hive marking. The brick you see in the picture with the stick on it means that the hive we are opening has a laying queen in it, ready to be sold and go to a new home.


His beeyards (his land is covered with bee hives - all systematically organized in his own special way) sport multiple colors and many types of tops and bottoms. Many of his boxes are really boxes - solid on the bottom and four sides - with a drilled entrance hole.

Here he explains his brick marking system to us.

He shows us the brood and eggs this queen is laying.  He makes sure each queen that he sells is proven as a layer.

He had Noah, who is trying to be more comfortable with the bees, lay his hand right on top of them to feel how they are under his hand!  He was totally surprised but did well.

Don found the queen and put her in his closed hand; he held his hand over the open hole in the queen cage; she moved right in.  Then quick as a wink, he picked up about five workers from the frame and put them in with her.  He marked the hive as now queenless and we moved on.

 

To rectify the queenless situation, he immediately moves to a hive that has queen cells (he can read the bricks on top of the hives to know which ones fit the bill).  He finds a viable queen cell.

    

Using a knife, he cuts a circle of comb containing the queen cell.  The cut cell lies next to the smoker in the next picture  He then wedges the ripe queen cell between the frames of one of the queenless hives and that hive is in business again!

There's no way to cover everything we learned in such a short time in this post.  One of my favorite moments was when he pointed to this stack of nuc boxes.  "Now this is natural beekeeping," he said.  As he pointed out the nucs are about the size of a tree trunk and he can stack them and the bees will make honey forever.  "After all, it's just like a tree...." he said.

Since this visit, I have had two very negative interactions with Don - one in 2011 and one in 2013.  

Don is a good beekeeper and a good teacher but does not appear to take a positive approach to his customers.

I have bought bees from him every year since I found out about him, so in 2011 I just let what he did go and chalked it up to his being basically a rather angry man.  In the most recent incident, he directly blamed me for the failure of a queen and hive after three weeks when the queen was obviously not mated well - the bees wouldn't release her and when we directly released her, she only laid drones.  He was very difficult to deal with, criticized me personally and my beekeeping,  and did not say, "no problem; I'll be glad to replace the queen"  Rather he said I would have to bring him the failed queen in order to get another and was quite angry and critical.    

I will not ever buy bees from him again and, since I am in charge of the list we give out to new beekeepers, I am planning to remove his name from the list of suppliers that Metro Atlanta Beekeepers recommends to our members and participants in our short course.