Hive Inspection - Week of April 15

I still am holding virtual hive inspections and think it is a good value. In person is great, but COVID has taught us that you can learn a lot by asking questions on Zoom as well. This is the hive inspection that I shared last week on Wednesday on Zoom. We start with my top bar hive and then look at my Langstroth hive in my daughter's yard. It ends with a hive that is in the last throes because of a queenless situation and an overtaking by the small hive beetle. I included it so you could see what it's like to lose a hive like that. This hive was fully functioning and doing well three weeks ahead of this inspection.

 

A Strange Find in SHB Trap

Today I went to check on Sebastian's hives.  We had put a new SHB trap on one of those hives on April 21.  I wanted to see if the trap were working and I wanted to see if either hive needed a new box.

 We are in the middle of the Atlanta nectar flow but the weather has beaten the tulip poplar blossoms off of the trees and hasn't really been conducive to nectar collection - cold nights, drippy days.


















I pulled out the oil trap in the new SHB trap first and this is what I saw:

In case you are confused, those are NOT small hive beetles - those are earwigs drowned in oil.  I didn't see a single small hive beetle either in the hive or in the trap!

The hive was doing fine but did not need a new box.

The second hive - the survivor there from last year - was doing great.  There was lots of brood.  As is true in hives with slatted racks, the queen had laid the frames from end to end.   What I mean by that is that she had brood from the end bar on one end to the end bar on the other end!

Not only that, the frame below with solid brood on both sides was the last frame in the box, right by the side of the box.  

The frame on the far side of the box was solid honey.  I moved it out and replaced it with a foundationless frame. I then moved that honey filled frame into the middle of a new box fitted with foundationless frames.  We'll see if they fill it up.

I then went to Stonehurst to see how the hive there was doing.  Here's what the top box looked like:

I moved one of these up into an empty box and added a box to this hive.  I also met the very nice new innkeepers, Paul and Lorrie.  Caroline and Gary have retired so I'll get to know this new couple as I work the bees over there.  

I also made a quick stop at Morningside to add a box to that fantastic hive.  Here's how it looks now:

Spring Report on Rabun County Bees

On Sunday I drove up to Rabun County just for the day to check on the bees there.  I took Hannah, my dog, with me.  Hannah had a delightful time - she is a dog to whom rules do not apply: she sleeps on my bed; sits on the furniture; and loves to run off-leash on trails with stern signs at the beginning:  ALL DOGS MUST BE ON LEASH.

When we go to the community garden in Rabun County, I let her run free out of the car.  While I am checking bees, she is racing up and down the creek banks and running through the water.  She had fun.  I did not.














I found no bees in the remaining Rabun hive.  The first Rabun hive was dead before winter and someone/something destroyed the equipment.  The remaining Rabun hive was populated by a swarm last spring and the bees were still going strong in December.  Now, however, there are no bees.  They left the hive full of honey.   On the top of the slatted rack were dead hive beetles.

On the screened bottom board were less than 20 dead bees.

I brought the honey home and crushed it to feed to the new hives.  I hope there isn't anything wrong with the honey but I assume with honey's antiseptic qualities that the risk of the honey being OK is pretty high.

The only frame I could find with any brood looked like this:

I feel a need to explain that my brood comb typically doesn't look this dark and dirty.  I usually replace it every year, but a swarm moved into this hive with old comb before I knew they were there, so the hive didn't get its usual culling out of comb previous to spring.

Even with the SHB on the slatted racks, the honey had not been slimed.  I brought home six frames of honey that tasted like kudzu.

I put the hive back together and left it as a 2 box hive.  I smeared swarm lure (olive oil, beeswax and lemongrass oil) on the landing, under the inner cover and in several other places.  Maybe the feral hive in the wall of the abandoned school nearby will send a swarm my way.

Meanwhile, I'll make several nucs in Atlanta with the idea of taking one of them up to Rabun to have bees there this year.  My sweet friend, Julia, gave me a frame with at least one queen cell on it to do just that.  I added frames from the Morningside apiary to make the nuc and if it succeeds, I'll take it to Rabun County.

Spring Bee-ing

Atlanta has strange weather.  In December and January, it's not very cold - I rarely get out my winter coat, but March - it's cold.  It's a week before the first day of spring and the nights are in the 20s and 30s.  However, this weekend the temperature is supposed to reach 72.  But all over Atlanta last week the bees were swarming, so I got worried about my 3 year old hives at my old house.

I drove up there on Saturday to check for swarm cells and make at least one split.  We do have drones in the hives - not yet in large numbers, but I am seeing them, so I thought I could make a split and then plan to split and move these hives on the 16th.  I need to sell the house and can't put it on the market with bee hives in the backyard!

I went through every frame in Colony Square and didn't find a single swarm cell.  I made a nuc from frames in the hive.  I did find good brood patterns and that the queen was filling in holes where brood had emerged with new eggs.

The hive was full of bees and seemed to be doing well.  I looked at every frame but the two under the board in the lower box.  This is an eight frame box hive sitting on a 10 frame deep.  I blocked the two outside frames with a board that is so well-propolized that I didn't even try to get it off.  Since there were no swarm cells (and I looked at every frame except those two), I'm thinking it will be fine until Saturday the 16th for Jeff and me to do splits.

Next I went through Lenox Pointe.  Again, no swarm cells

In Lenox Pointe I saw signs of a good queen at work.  Empty cells, each with a single egg or c-shaped larvae.  And then I saw the queen in the second box.

  

I realize it's a blurry photo, but at least she is distinctive and you can see she is there...right in the center.

In the bottom box, nothing much was happening.  When we split the hives on the 16th, I will leave this box off altogether, if I can, because I prefer to use all medium boxes.  If not, I'll make a nuc of deep frames from Colony Square and Lenox Pointe and see how they do.

I had made a nuc from frames out of Colony Square so I closed it up rather clumsily with hardware cloth.  Note to self:  Next time staple the hardware cloth to the entry before putting it into the car to go visit the bees!  Because I hadn't closed the entry well, there were bees all over my back window, much to the consternation of the car behind me at a red light.  

I took the nuc to install it at the Morningside Community Garden to replace the hive that had died over the winter.  The bees seemed happy there, but I am worried that I didn't shake enough bees into the nuc, as I always worry when I make a split.

I then went into the survivor hive at Morningside that made it through the winter.  It had obviously emerged brood with the cells filled in with new eggs and larvae - great, hard working queen.  

Although the camera doesn't let you see it, the space inside the curve where brood has obviously already emerged was filled with eggs.  I took a frame of brood and mostly eggs from this hive and put it into a pillow case to take it home to the drone laying hive.

At home the drone layer hive looked the same.....still three frames of drone brood.  I went all the way down to the bottom of this hive and found eggs in two of the bottom deep frames.  I have not yet seen the queen in this hive, but every cell I see with eggs has only one egg and it is standing upright, as it is supposed to.  I don't think I have a laying worker, but rather a poorly mated queen.

I added the frame of eggs from Morningside to this hive to give them the resources to replace their queen.  There are a lot of bees still in this hive, despite the queen not making replacement workers.

In this hive on the bottom I found in the deep a frame close to the side of the box that had fairly new wax in it.  In the cells were dead small hive beetles - not bees.  The SHB were crowded and face down in the honey cells just as a starving hive of bees might be.  I don't know how to explain it since the hive is alive and doing well.

I made all of these photos last weekend and tomorrow is my move and split day.  Jeff and I are meeting to split the hives at my old house in the morning and we are moving the newly split hives at dark later in the day.  I will take one of the nucs to Rabun County to replace one of the hives there and will cross my fingers that the other hive is also there and alive.

Pests in the Hive - Ants and SHB

One of my hives at Stonehurst is the subject of a UGA study (along with a number of other beekeepers' hives).  The researcher came last week and emailed me that he thought the hives were so infested with SHB that they would not survive the winter.

I went over today with the only small hive beetle trap I could quickly find that didn't need an Imrie shim.  It was an AJ's trap.  I recently won two beetle traps like AJ's from Buster's Bees at a Tara Beekeepers meeting, but I couldn't find them today.

I opened the smallest hive and there were SHB EVERYWHERE on the top cover and in the corners.  I didn't see the SHB in the actual hive, which was comforting.  First I used a funny suction instrument that John Jones gave me.  I tried....I really did, but I only sucked one SHB all the way into the bottle.  The rest were in the suction tube and I had no idea how to manage them.  So I gave up on the method and installed the AJ's.

The good news is that the larger hive (fartherest away in the picture) felt heavy and when I opened it, there was not a single SHB.  In the smaller hive beside the smoker, were the tons of SHB - probably at least 150 on the top cover.

I left the hive with an oil filled AJs and we'll see if it catches any of them.  I also put a surround box with a rapid feeder filled with last year's honey on the small hive.


After that I went to Sebastian's to see if that hive needed food.  I opened it to find that ants had taken up residence:

I wish you would LOOK at all the ants.  Funny thing, they weren't in the rapid feeder and there was still some crystallized honey in it.  I had two jars of last year's honey so I refilled the rapid feeder.

I think I'll go back and sprinkle cinnamon all over the inner cover.

At the bee club meeting this week, the president asked who wasn't feeding their bees.  I didn't know whether to raise my hand or not.  I'm not feeding mine in the way she meant - with sugar syrup.  I am feeding the ones that are light on stores with last year's honey.

After the bee meeting in Massachusetts, I want to raise bees that aren't dependent on my interference and don't need sugar syrup to make it through.  I also was scanty in my harvest this year to make sure that the bees are OK for the winter.

Rabun County Bees

A couple of weeks ago when I went to Asheville for the Natural Beekeeping meeting, I stayed at my house in Rabun County.  On the way up I saw the bear in the misty rain at Black Rock Mountain Lake.    The day after the conference, the lake was sunny and beautiful and while I didn't see a bear again, I did see Joe Pye weed and goldenrod, evidence of the fall flow (for what it's worth).

Before I drove back to Atlanta, I checked on the Rabun bees.  The last time I was up at the mountain house, I discovered that one of the hives was almost dead and had small hive beetles all through it.

I didn't really check out the cause of the problem when I was there before because I was so upset, so I opened the hive on this visit and brought the boxes back home.  Clearly the hive had been robbed out, and left so weakened that the small hive beetle took advantage of the opportunity.

Two things are evident in this picture.  The edges of the cells are ragged, indicating a robbery.  There were dead bees littering the ground in front of the hive.  And you can see the slime of the small hive beetle.  I brought four boxes back to Atlanta and could hardly stand the sicky sweet smell in the car of the SHB's destruction.

The other hive was almost completely covered with weeds.  It was totally in the shade and had kudzu and other brambles all over the entry.  I didn't take a before picture, but I wish I had.  The bees were still flying happily in and out of the hive.  I knew this vegetation situation was likely so I brought my hedge clippers with me.  I went to work and freed the hive from most of the vegetation.

When I opened it, I was shocked (in all the previous shade) to find that I only saw one small hive beetle in the hive.  Perhaps they were all satiated on the frames from the other hive?

This hive has honey in all three boxes and brood in the bottom box.  I really wanted to taste their honey.  The top box is likely sourwood, but they had not completely capped the honey in those frames, so I brought back a frame from the middle box.

I didn't come prepared for harvest transport, so after brushing off the bees, I put the frame into a pillow case (I'm now using them for hive drapes like Julia taught me), and brought it back to Atlanta.  I crushed and strained it and now have three pounds of luscious grape-flavored honey, likely from the kudzu all around the creek bed where the hive is located!

(The HIDDEN honey frame).

Checking on the Linda T's Bees hives

I started to call this "Checking on the Farm Hives" but they aren't on the farm any longer, so I decided just to call this group of hives Linda T's Bees since that's the name of our business.  Three of the hives are in my backyard, so this week Jeff and I did an inspection.  We haven't opened these hives in several weeks.

The first thing that caught our eye were small hive beetles.  The disadvantage of opening a hive at this time of year is that the bees in a strong hive keep the small hive beetles corralled at the top of the hive, but breaking the  propolis seal and lifting off the top cover makes the hive vulnerable to beetle invasion.

Jeff and I smashed and smashed with both ends of our hive tools, leaving beetles dead on the top cover.  The bees went after them too so we were challenged not to smash bees in our enthusiasm for killing beetles!

I drew in red on the photo so you couldn't miss them.....they're everywhere, they're everywhere.  We actually saw a sizable number of beetles in all three hives, sending me off to buy sandwich boxes to make Sonny-Mel traps to put on after the rain stops on Wednesday.



We saw evidence of the queen in every hive.  Larvae in all stages were evident and in the spotty brood patterns, the holes were filled with young larvae.




However all three hives were very light on stores and we determined that bee tea will be necessary in the next week or so to get them going OK into winter.  We do not want to lose these hives over the winter.



The hives at my house are in the shade which probably increases the likelihood of SHB, but it is shady in my backyard - so shady that I can only use the solar wax melter in the front of the house.


We used hive drapes throughout this inspection and neither of us got stung.  The bees seemed quite calm.  Well, now we'll get to work making SHB traps and bee tea for the next installment of this tale.

And on the deck, another inspection

This not-exactly-queenless hive is not doing well, but I don't understand what is going on. They have a queen who isn't laying. They've had a small hive beetle problem but that appears much more under control. They aren't consuming the sugar syrup I've had on there for two weeks.

What's going on?

The Sonny-Mel trap is accumulating dead beetles by the day. I saw no beetles under the cover and only two on the under side of the inner cover. There are lots of dead ones in the trap below. I also had an AJ's on this hive and it was full. I refreshed the lure in the Sonny-Mel trap and put more oil in the AJs. I also added a second AJ's beetle trap.



I didn't go deep into this box. I pulled up two frames of honey from the bottom box, so they do have some honey. Maybe that's why they aren't laying or consuming.



The nuc hive is going great guns. They had emptied the two Boardman's feeders. I replenished their supplies.



In the hive there is laying going on and you can see at least five eggs in this picture and two tiny c-shaped larvae. The eggs are at 2 and 3 o'clock. The queen is eager.


I keep thinking about Don K in Lula who points proudly to his nuc hive with five boxes on it and says, "How much closer to a tree can you get?" His nuc hive is very productive. I am going to add another box to this nuc hive and have a tree hive on my deck myself!

Big Bee Day Part Two: The Blue Heron

Sunday morning after inspecting the Rabun County hive, I drove back to Atlanta for an inspection at the Blue Heron at 2 PM. Noah, Julia's son, led the inspection and did a really great job. We had a small group of beekeepers for this inspection, which made it easy to move around the hives and to be a part of it.

Noah is about to open the first hive and is explaining about the smoker and our foundationless frames.



He takes the ventilated hive cover off of the first hive.

There were a few hive beetles on the inner cover and we smashed them with our hive tools. This hive had been chock full of hive beetles, but the numbers have significantly diminished since we put the nematodes all around the hives at Blue Heron.



There's no nectar so the bees have no resources for building wax. But to be sure they wouldn't fill the empty space with wax when Julia and I took two frames out of this hive this past Monday for my nuc, we filled the space with newspaper. We would not have left the hive like this, but I didn't bring shallow frames with me when we took the frames. I only had mediums.



Noah is showing the participants the brood and eggs in this frame.



When we moved to my hive, I wanted to try using hive drapes as I had in Rabun County that morning.

In this hive, even though it faces east, the bees are putting the brood, the honey, etc at the back of the hive.  This probably means that the sun hits the back of the hive first in the morning.  Bees like to let the natural forces heat the hive so they don't have to work so hard.  The queen in this hive is laying well despite the lack of nectar resources available.

Finally we moved the the third hive at Blue Heron where Noah decided to try the hive drapes as he worked on it.  All of the Blue Heron hives are light and have very little stored honey.  We are worried about them and put sugar syrup or honey on my hive and the hive below.  The first hive we looked at has stored honey so we didn't put food on it.

This is the first Blue Heron inspection when we didn't see the queen.  These hives all feel a little fragile to us because they are so light on stores and we didn't want to disturb them as much as we would have needed to to see the queen.  So we looked but we didn't find Her Majesty in any hive.

At the end of the inspection Noah and Julia shared with us some delicious creamed honey they had made after the three of us took Keith Fielder's workshop at Young Harris.