Hive Installation Glitch

Most of the time when something goes wrong in a hive, I'm quite clear that I've made an error (and anyone who has been following this blog knows that I have made many)

Every once in a while I'm not totally responsible for the bee messes that can happen in my hives.  Last Sunday and Monday I installed two packages - one in my own backyard and one at the Chastain Conservancy.  Generally the beekeeper would go back into the hive in about 3 - 5 days to see if the queen has been released from the queen cage.

However, both we've had bad weather ever since and (good news for me) my office practice has been very busy so I haven't had any free bee-ing hours during the few times when it was warm enough to open a hive.  Over the weekend our highs were in the 40s and it was pouring rain on Saturday as well as cold.  We can't get into the Chastain apiary on Sundays.

So now it's Monday - one week from installation - and I have not opened either hive to see if the queens were released.  Hopefully they each were and all is well, but you never know.  The temperature is going to be in the freezing range, really until Friday, so the chance of opening the hives is slim.

So here are the various scenarios:  The queen has been released and the hive is functioning with an empty queen cage in the hive.  That shouldn't be a problem at my home hive because I wedged the queen cage between frames:

But at Chastain, I set the queen cage on the bottom bar of a frame (one of the advantages of using foundationless frames).  There if she has been released, the queen cage is in the way and they may have built crooked comb around the cage, throwing off the symmetry of their comb building:

It won't be in the 60s until Friday and I'll be out of town, but Julia will open the Chastain hive that day and remove the queen cage and check to make sure she was released, but I won't be able to do a thing between now and then because of the weather.

Atlanta has the strangest weather.  We don't have winter until March and now it's the week after the first day of spring and we are having the coldest week since March of last year.

And on to Stonehurst Place

Well, after a kind of rough start at Sebastian and Christina's house, I went on to the Stonehurst Place Inn where I installed two more nucs.  This went smoothly.

First I put the nucs on top of the hive bodies where they would live and opened the screened wire.

The bees seemed delighted to be freed from captivity.



These bees looked good although there weren't as many bees in the nucs as in the first two I installed.



I did not see either queen but the brood looked good and I saw new eggs in both installed hives.



Above and below you can see brood frames.



They are happily ensconced in their new homes.



I did see one bee in one of the hives that I installed here with definite deformed wing virus.  We'll keep watching for other varroa vectored problems.

While there I inspected the one hive that made it through the winter.  It was full of bees and full of drawn wax filled with honey.  I added a box recently to that hive on March 20, but it was full, so I added a new box.

A Big Bee Day: Nucs, Nucs, Nucs

First thing this morning I went to pick up nucs from my friend Jerry Wallace.  He had a yard full of nucs waiting for the purchasers.  I loved chatting bees with Jerry and his father-in-law (also a member of our bee club).  Jerry put the nuts on this trailer to close up the entrance.



He sprayed the bees with sugar syrup to encourage them to go inside the nuc.



Then he closed up the entrance with a stapled piece of screened wire.



I took the first two to Sebastian and Christina's house.  I didn't expect them to be at home and nobody answered the door, but we had prearranged the installation, so all was well.   They had cut the grass and settled the hives into place.

I set both nucs on top of the hive they would occupy.



As I was opening the first nuc, Christina appeared from a dog walk and wanted to watch.  I didn't have a lit smoker - it was in the car - and I had already started opening the nuc.  She was sleeveless, but wanted to see the installation.

I had left the boxes set up with room for the five nuc frames.



As Christina was taking the next two pictures, she got stung a couple of times on her face and bees were in her hair.  I hated that she got stung when her new bees had just arrived.  She had appointments all afternoon and now would be dealing with bee stings.

I had so hoped for a better introduction to bees for the two of them.





The bees in the first box were really feisty.  There were a lot of bees in the box, more than in the second nuc, and they had been cooped up for a while.  I didn't see the queen, but did see tiny eggs so we know she is there.

For the second box, I lit the smoker and had a smoother experience.  These bees were really nice and calm.



The brood patterns in this hive look great.



And I saw the queen.  She has a lovely yellow dot on her back - which made her easier to find.



As always when you install a nuc, many bees remain in the nuc rather than going into the new hive.  I left both nucs standing on end so that the bees would go into the hive to join the others.



Here's how they looked when I left.  I didn't get to see Christina again before I left - she had gone - and I hope she is OK.

I Should Bee Happy, but I Bee Tired

What a long bee day!  By the time I left home to drive to Rabun County today, I had already hived three bee families - the swarm and two packages at Morningside.  The drive to Rabun didn't result in hiving any bees, but I still had three more packages to install.

When I got back to Atlanta around 4:30, I met Jeff at Chastain to install a package in a hive there.  Julia and Noah were there installing their two packages.  We have these bees thanks to Julia who drove up toe Lula yesterday to pick them up from Don Kuchenmeister (brought home five packages for me - thanks so much, Julia).

Julia installed her bees in equipment very kindly donated by Leslie Gerber who felt bad about our losses at Blue Heron due to the vandalism and our general bad luck at the Blue Heron.  I have donated equipment too from Lisa who gave us her hive for Blue Heron and a set of 8 frame boxes.  I'll be using her boxes on my hive at Chastain, but forgot it today for the install.

So here's my day:

8:30  Collect the swarm from my azalea
9:15  Mix up sugar syrup for bees at Morningside
9:30  Pack car with equipment and bees and go to Morningside Community Garden to install two packages there
10:30  Return home and install collected swarm into top bar hive
**Left swarm to gather in collection box while I installed hives at Morningside
11:00  Mix up more sugar syrup to take to Rabun County, pack car for drive to Rabun County with two packages of bees and equipment for install
**Reminded self to take sugar syrup in a spray bottle, my pocket knife, a "church key" to open the jars of syrup that come with the package, and lunch for the road
11:30  Drove to Rabun County - ate lunch as I drove - no time otherwise
1:15 Arrive at Community Garden and find that I don't need to install bees there - a swarm has moved in - so I just inspected the hives - good laying queen in both hives
2:15 Stop at mountain house literally for 10 minutes to check on things there
2:30 Drive back to Atlanta (still with packages in the car)
4:40 Meet Jeff at Chastain and install bees there
5:30 Drive home to install two more packages of bees at home
6:45 ALL DONE - what a BEE DAY

Since I've posted photos of the swarm and Rabun County in two earlier posts, these are pictures of the installs at Morningside, Chastain and my house.

Jennifer Berry Bees - Wow!

After my weekend at a professional conference, I got up at 5:30 AM on Sunday to drive to Athens from Rabun County to pick up bees from Jennifer Berry.  I had dropped off my nuc and an 8 frame deep hive box a few weeks ago to get ready for this event.

Here's Jennifer posing with her girls before they leave the farm.

It was great to see Jennifer on this cold morning and so wonderful to get these last bees of the season (for me) to take back to Atlanta.  I planned to put these bees in my own backyard that has been bee-less since the fall.

Actually I put a contract on a house in town the day before I left and enjoyed the grimace of my real estate agent when I wondered aloud if we could put in the contract that I wanted to put bees in the backyard of the new house before closing!  Oh, well, the bees will go to my current house instead!

Don Kuchenmeister loves a hive he runs all year in a nuc box.  It gets taller and taller.  He says it is one of his best honey producers, because it is like a tree to the bees.

So I thought I might keep the nuc in a nuc box and add my medium nuc boxes to it to give them space and grow them taller.

So I installed it with a medium nuc on top of the deep.  As you can see in the photo, I have two waiting painted medium nuc boxes to add over time and another unconstructed one in the basement.  If it needs more room than that, I'll either split it or move them to a regular sized box.

The minute I removed the screen, these bees were all over it.  They were orientation flying, massing on the front door step and generally full of energy.  The second hive, placed under a tree nearby, looked lifeless - not a bee emerged.

To see if there were actually bees there, I lifted the top and there they were, but nobody came out of the door.  OK, I said to myself, it's only 56 degrees, probably too cold for them.  

An hour and a half went by and the action below is the most I saw.  It was still 58 or so degrees, but I'm not happy with what is going on.  Did I get one good hive and one dud from Jennifer?  Surely not.

Here's what it looked like, comparatively:

After some thought and knowing few if any foragers had left this hive, I moved the lifeless-looking hive to a sunnier location near the nuc.

Within ten minutes, there were the bees!  I hope these hives do well.  If they do, then when I move in July or so, I'll split them and take the splits to the new house.

Note:  I had the deck pressure washed today - it's just up above these hives and the steps to the deck are about five feet away from the front of the 8 frame.  I called the guy who did the work to tell him what a good job they had done.

"Did the bees bother you?"  I asked him.
"What bees? !!!" was his reply.

It was 78 or so today so we can know they were flying, but he and his men did not even notice the bees five feet away!

Rabun Hives are Thriving!

This morning I stopped by the Rabun County hives on my way to a professional meeting in Young Harris.  They have been established for two weeks now and are doing really well.

In the first hive (in the old hive box), the bees were concentrated on one side of the box.  They peeked up between the frames as I opened the hive:

I checked the hive and they were mostly using the old comb frames and had not begun to draw out the new foundationless frames.  I moved the concentration to the center of the box and put a couple of undrawn frames on either side.

When I slid the frames apart to remove them, the bees were festooning, linked together making wax.  I hated messing up the good work they were doing!

I never saw the queen but I did see brood and eggs so I was relieved.  Because the nectar flow has started, and I won't be back for a couple of weeks, I added a box of empty frames for them to move into when they are done with this box.

I moved on to the new box.  I was so pleasantly surprised.  The bees had drawn comb on every single frame in this box.  Each frame looked about the same like the photo below:

I thought you'd like to see a close up of these beautiful productive bees.  Here they are:

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Toward the right side of the photo above, you can see some really fat larvae waiting to be capped.

And then on the next frame, the same one on which she was installed, I spotted Her Majesty.  She is a gorgeous queen, moving regally along the honey comb.

Isn't she beautiful?

I gave this hive another box as well and expect they will use it as well as they have the first one.  Good I visited this morning - the rain has been terrible all afternoon and late into the night.

I left the hives closed up for another day and hope they keep going as well as they have so far.

Installing the Bees at Stonehurst Place Inn

Last night I picked up the two nucs for the Stonehurst Place Inn.  I got the bees from Jerry Wallace who took great care to make this go so smoothly for his customers.  He even put my nucs in the car for me.

I drove to the inn and set the boxes up behind the cottage at Stonehurst.  I wanted everything to be in place before the installation today.  Caroline, the innkeeper, mixed up sugar syrup for the bees.  Gary, her husband, carefully built and painted all the boxes and nailed each frame.

We set the hives on old brick and Gary made sure the hives were level:

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I set the nucs on top of the boxes into which they would be placed this morning.

The bees peeked out of the newly opened front door as they waited for today's installation.

Today each deep box got the five frames from its nuc and I filled the rest of the box with deep frames from my stash.

Then I put the frames from the nuc into the hive in the exact position each frame was in in the nuc.

I saw the queen in each of the hives, which gave me a really good feeling about our impending success.  The tulip poplar was blooming in the yard and I stepped on fallen blooms as I moved to the hives.  This could be a really great location, with good blooming plants in the inn's yard and the Atlanta Botanical Garden just over the next street.

I fed each of these hives with a baggie feeder over the inner cover; left the nuc boxes in front of the hives to allow any errant bees to make their way into the hives and left.  I hope they do well.

First Inspection in Rabun County

The hives were installed on Monday. I inspected them for the first time early Saturday morning. It was a partly cloudy day and the temperature was 62.

The bees housed in the original hive box had not taken much of the sugar syrup, nor had they appeared to empty any more of the syrup can that I had left for them. I did give each of these hives a frame of capped honey so I hoped they were making use of it.

I installed the hives on Monday and overnight we had violent winds, hail and rain in this area of Georgia as well as Atlanta. I didn't know how bad it was in Rabun County so I didn't know how much this may or may not have affected these bees.

They had released the queen. See the frayed ends of the kitchen twine attached to the queen cage? Bees dislike foreign material in their hives and do their best to figure out a way to carry it out.

In the box the bees were festooning between the frames where the queen had been. She was between frames 3 and 4 so the hive had built more on that side of the box. I added a frame between these two to make up for the missing frame space that the queen cage had occupied.

The honey frame I had left them was being well used. You can see the scraps of wax on the lower right where they have chewed away the cappings to get to the honey.

This was a large two pound package and you can see the bees peeking through the frames.

I didn't see the queen or any eggs, but there were so many bees on the occupied frames that I didn't worry. I'm going back next weekend and if I don't see evidence of the queen then, I'll be concerned.

I left the feeding situation a little different than at installation since I was worried that they couldn't get to the ziploc baggie easily enough. I left the inner cover hole partially open to the upstairs section above the inner cover and balanced the syrup can on two rocks.

Next I went to hive #2.  I brought an 8 frame inner cover and top with me to replace the jerry-rigged way I had left it on Monday.  I forgot to take a picture of the closed up hives so you can't see that I left it in better shape, but I did!

Here's a picture of the frame blocking access from the outside to the inner cover feeding arrangement.

Inside the bees were drawing wax.  Here's one of the beginnings of comb building.

There is wax under the collection of bees you see in the photo below.  They are definitely busy bees, working hard to build wax for their own use.

I saw the queen in this hive and I saw eggs.  I'm sorry I didn't get her picture - she was a vision of loveliness to me!

Here is the capped frame of honey I had left them.  They obviously used it as well.

Again I left the inner cover feeding area more accessible and left the syrup can raised up enough for the bees to access the syrup, should they need it.

I'm back in N Georgia for a conference this coming weekend and will check on these hives again.  At that time, whether they need it or not, I'll leave each box with a new box of frames because it might be a couple of weeks before I'm back in the area and they will need it since the flow has begun in Atlanta and will in a few days in N Georgia.

Many apologies to any of you who visited the day I posted this.  Something is wrong with Picasa's relationship with Blogger and for my last several posts, the pictures don't upload but remain on localhost.  I'm sorry for the inconvenience.