Bees on the Home Front are Bursting at the Seams

Colony Square is growing and growing as is Lenox Pointe. I checked on Saturday and knew I needed to add a new box to both hives really soon, but was going to be gone all day. When I got home from South Georgia, I headed out to add a box.

My friend Julia who is my beekeeping buddy at Blue Heron showed me to take the hive tool and drag a line across all the frames toward the ends so that you'll not have to remember the orientation when you put the frame back in the box. If you click on the picture below, you can see the hive tool mark I've made.

The boxes I added were a combo of old crush and strain frames and some new frames.



The bees have made fat honey comb in this box and it is bulging at the sides - yum, yum.



Lenox Points has many bees as well. These Jennifer Berry bees are darker and larger than my other hives, but maybe they'll changes as the generations emerge.

I checkerboarded these boxes so that there is a combo of the new and old box on Lenox. Every other frame in the honey section is an empty one in the top two boxes. I didn't checkerboard in Colony Square because I didn't have my smoker lit and the bees were none too happy with my 5:30 PM intrusion.



Here are the newly taller boxes. The stick on markings on the front are designed hopefully to cut down on drift. The bees will have a way to distinguish their hive from the one beside it.

Oops! Used the Wrong Sized Frame

Before I went out of town to a conference in the middle of the honey flow, I put a super on each hive to allow them to use the space to make honey. My smallest swarm hive was one on which I quickly put together a super and threw it on the hive before leaving.

Today I opened the hive to find that I had put shallow frames in a medium super - WHOOPS -

In an inspection I always remove frame #2 as a way to start examining the hive. This allows me to move the frames within the hive - not needing to take each one out unless it seems necessary. Removing this one frame in position #2 also means that when I put the frame back into the hive box, my bees press against each other rather than against the hard outer wall of the hive box. I think I kill less bees on inspection this way.

As you can see the bees in this hive have built combs filled with honey in the space left by having a shallow frame in a medium box. I worried about how to handle this and posted about it on Beemaster.



In the end, I opened the hive up again and took off the medium box with the shallow frames. I scraped off the burr comb and put it in a cake pan. I then added a medium 8 frame with all medium frames (DUH). I took each frame out of the original box and examined it. Most had not been built out. Three had comb attached to the bottom. It's beautiful comb (see picture below), but is not in a useful place.


I didn't want to take the honey the bees had worked so hard to produce. I took the burr comb in its cake pan and put it under the top but on top of the inner cover. This should inspire the bees to move the nectar into the hive itself. I didn't have a shim to put around the cake pan, but I did have several 2X4s cut the right lengths. So I set up a fake shim under the top and set the cake pan there. The bees can clean it up and I'll remove it tomorrow.



Here's the clean new box on this hive (which will have a name before morning - the hive, not the box).

Adding Boxes to the Hives

I'm leaving for a week and it's the peak of the tulip poplar flow in Atlanta, so I posted on Beemaster to find out if I could leave empty supers on the hives even if the boxes below were not built out enough. The answer was to leave each hive with room to store honey in an extra box.

I checked the hives as I added boxes. In the small office parking lot swarm, the queen is laying. Here is her new brood. I was thrilled since I wasn't totally sure I had a good queen in this hive.


In one of the yard hives (I HAVE to name these hives - otherwise I'll have to resort to 1, 2, 3, etc. and that's no fun) the bees were building comb on top of the frames. I scraped off the burr comb and added a box. I turned to put the top back on the hive and there was Her Majesty, wandering around on the top! Horrors! I put her back as quickly as I could.


I added an 8 frame medium to this 10 frame hive and put a painted 2X4 to cover the exposed frames in the bottom box.

When I left town each hive had a yellow newly painted box on top. I didn't check the hive where the queen was released because I didn't want to disturb her.

Much Activity in the Hives

Today the man who supplied my nucs called to say that my queen may arrive tomorrow afternoon. If she does, I'll need to pick her up and essentially take her straight to my hives and establish her presence there. He said she would be in a container with no attendants.

So on the way to work tomorrow, I will be stopping at the hardware store to purchase #8 hardware cloth to make a push-in queen cage. I've been to two lectures on how to do this - one at Young Harris last year and one at my bee club this year - but I've never done this myself.

Actually I've never introduced a queen. I've ordered nucs that already had a queen in them and I've given hives frames of eggs to make their own queen, but I've never ordered and then introduced the queen to the hive. So this will be yet another first in my life as a beekeeper.

In addition my hives are going really well right now. I checked Bermuda this morning and they are slow to work on the top box. I am thinking that they probably swarmed when I wasn't home. They are acting like a hive rebuilding rather than a hive that is moving into honey production. Mellona is doing great and today I added a honey super.

The small swarm from the Dunwoody yard has not been opened because I suspected that it has a virgin queen who had to be mated and return to the hive. I opened the top of that hive today to see how it's going in there and they seemed angry. I am wondering if they are in fact queenless. I did give them a frame of brood and eggs a week after they arrived, but I'm not sure they have made a queen. They had built out all of the frames in the boxes they had so I added a third box.

Tonight I built frames and waxed in starter strips of foundation. I expect that before the weekend at least two more hives will need more growing space and probably Bermuda will need a honey super (cross your fingers).

Added super to Bermuda

This afternoon I added the super to Bermuda (the pinkish hive on the left). I am pleased because I did it without using my smoker and only wore my regular clothes with a bee veil and my gloves.