First Look at the Blue Heron Hive in 2011

I bought a new veil for this year. It's a clear view all the way around with only a seam in the very back. It's so comfortable - nothing fell into my eyes, the hat didn't slip all over - I love it. I saw Jennifer Berry in one when we went last year to get our nucs and I couldn't wait to get one of my own. It seemed ideal to me not to have my veil be as much of an encumbrance as the ones I had.  Jennifer works the bees in a work shirt, a round clear veil like this, and cotton garden gloves.

My work shirt is one from back when my youngest daughter was a freshman at CU so it has a buffalo above the pocket and, I discovered today, is missing a button in a crucial place in the center of the button row. A work shirt is something that I can throw on over my other shirt and it is made of good, sturdy cotton material.  I wanted to wear something and didn't want my bee jacket since it has a veil attached.  I liked the way the work shirt and the veil felt and worked today so I'll try this combo again.

I really loved the veil.



Our purpose in opening the hive was to reassure ourselves that it was a hive that was up and running. We therefore didn't look deep into the hive. It's only February and we are likely to have another cold snap before spring has really sprung.  The bees need the protection of propolis to seal the hive against cold weather.  I did not need to break their seals just to see if the queen is laying.

I might have gone deeper into the hive if it were not the only surviving hive at Blue Heron.  I didn't want to risk anything today.  I am sure the bees have the space below the feeding super just the way they like it and I can wait to see how the queen is doing.

Julia took this wonderful picture of a bee returning to the hive with full to the brim pollen baskets. Must be from maple and maybe something else.



Inside we found that the baggie feeder I had left in December was still full and that the two pint jars were only half empty. Noah's theory was that the sugar syrup had crystallized over the holes and kept the bees from having access.



In the photo you can see the crystallized sugar over the entire lid. I scraped it off with my hive tool and returned the jar to the hive.



This is a hive that I don't plan to feed with the coming spring, but will let them finish this if they want to or can get access.

When we opened the holes in the feeder jar the bees gathered around the drippings.

It would have been hard to check anything with the feeder super so loaded up still.  I guess we could have lifted the box below up without looking into it but likely the bees are currently living in the box just under the baggie.

My plan this year is to get rid of the deep box and that will be easy to do if the bees have moved up into the box below the food.

Peter, who was there inspecting his dead hive, commented as we put my hive back together.  "Those bees are so organized, they must have a queen!"

While that doesn't matter in the least - they can be quite organized without a queen - it still felt good that they were alive and working together.

Visit to the Rabun County Bees

On Thanksgiving weekend we went up to the mountains and while there, I checked on the Rabun County bees. It was around 36 degrees when we stopped at the community garden. I wanted to leave the bees with a baggie of food for one of these warm afternoons that happen in the south, even in the mountains.



Valerie took these shots. I don't know why I had my jacket on, but these have been angry bees and even though I didn't expect anyone to come out to say hello, the old saying is, "It's better to be safe than sorry."



Indeed both baggies I had left for them were completely emptied of the bee tea.



I had a baggie with 2 1/2 quarts in it and placed it inside the shim. One bee did make her appearance to see what we were up to.



My handy Swiss army knife cuts the slits in the baggie after it is placed.

If I were a bee, this would look delicious to me on an over-60 day.

I put the cover back on - worked very quickly so as not to put too much cold air into the hive - and went on my way.

I returned to Atlanta to find that my new Jennifer-Berry-esque veil had arrived at long last from Brushy Mountain.  I can't wait to try it out!  In the spring I plan to work the bees in jeans, a work shirt (long sleeved chambray) and this new veil.

I'd put a link up but Brushy Mountain doesn't show it on their page any longer and it was back-ordered for quite some time.  It's a clear view veil with string and a soft hat rather than the helmet that never fits me.

Revisiting Bee Tea

It's been over a week since I have fed either Blue Heron or Valerie's hives - I decided to take care of that today so I went with Julia to Blue Heron before I went to work and to Topsy at a break after lunch.  Here is the process of making the bee tea and the feeding of the hives.

I put a slideshow up because I am now including both chamomile and thyme from my garden in the bee tea.  Interestingly, the hive at Blue Heron had only used half of the baggie syrup and almost none of the pint jar in the Boardman on the interior.

I wonder if they have run out of storage room?  Or if the aster blooming in the fields is meeting their current needs?  Or if I hadn't cut long enough slits in the baggie or had clogged holes in the jar lid of the Boardman?  I cut longer slits in the baggie and changed out the pint jar for a jar with a better lid.

We'll see this weekend when Julia and I revisit these hives to do a final consolidation for winter.

Relief at Blue Heron

While I was waiting today to show Travis, a new beekeeper, how to inspect the beehive, I saw bees all over this aster that is blooming. Look at the pollen packed into her corbicula (pollen basket). This was the best picture of many I took.



I fed the Blue Heron hive 2 1/2 quarts of Ross Conrad's bee tea on Thursday afternoon. It's Saturday afternoon and all of it is gone! Travis and I reloaded the interior Boardman I was using with a new pint and we put a baggie filled with 3 quarts of tea onto the hive.

As we opened the hive, we clearly broke open some honeycomb. I love it when the bees efficiently circle the honey leak and all stick in their tongues to suck it up. Bees are really waste not, want not creatures! See how they completely circle the honey so as not to lose a single drop.



Here's Travis wearing my ill-fitting bee helmet looking at a beautiful comb of brood laid by this queen. In the bottom deep we saw several frames - actually almost all of the eight - with dark brood cappings - meaning it's not new - probably bees that are about to emerge. If this hive keeps putting away the syrup I am giving them, they may make it through the winter - fingers crossed, everyone!



Some of the frames are incompletely filled with comb as this one is. You can see the liquid in the cells. We saw lots of festooning bees in this box and hopefully they'll use the syrup to draw some wax to contain winter stores.



The hive was much heavier than on my last visit and I am well pleased with how it is growing.

The nights are much cooler now so I removed the ventilated hive cover and replaced it with a solid inner cover.  I will do that with the Rabun county hive next week when I'm up there.  I also plan to replace the cover of Topsy with a solid board like Sam Comfort uses.

Ravenous Rabun County Bees

The bees at my Rabun County hive are flying enthusiastically in and out of the hive, bumping into each other on the landing and generally looking as busy as bees.

I haven't looked in the hive in about three weeks. I came to Rabun County planning to feed the bees at the community garden, so I am armed with bottled sugar syrup - I have about 1 gallon with me.

Here is the hive with bees flying in and out rapidly.

It's nearing the end of the fall flow here but there is blooming goldenrod everywhere as well as many asters and the bees are having a field day.



I took off the third (top) box which is full of foundationless comb and completely empty. I was pleased to see in the second box that the bees are putting up nectar and therefore storing honey.



I had brought two medium nuc boxes with me as demos for the festival. These boxes were filled with drawn comb on medium frames. I decided to take this drawn comb and substitute it for the foundationless frames in the third box. Fall is drawing near by the minute and I didn't want them to need to create space in which to store the syrup I am giving them today.



I put the third box back on the hive. I also brought a shim to surround the baggie feeders. This is the first time I have fed this hive.

Now that I know there is a hive in the walls of the building just across the field from this hive, I am worried about robbing.  I put two ziploc baggies side by side inside the shim.

The bad news is that I am using a bottom board from a 10 frame hive for the top cover of this hive.  This means there is a back entrance and there is no way to close this hive up completely.  I feel sick that I didn't think to bring an inner cover and a top for a 10 frame hive.  I certainly have them in Atlanta.

Because I had no entrance reducer and wanted to make these bees safer from robbing, I stuffed pine needles into the opening at the upper rear of the hive to close it up.  I hope they will make quick work of moving the syrup from the baggies into the drawn comb I left them.

When I come back in two weeks, I'll put an inner cover and top cover on, but I hope they will be OK until then.  The good news is that there is a good fall flow ongoing right now in Rabun County, so maybe the temptation to rob will not be there for the in-the-wall hive or any other neighboring bees.

Feeding the Blue Heron Hives (Creatively)

I've had a bee and Easter filled couple of days with way too much on my schedule. So as I was frantically running around, I realized that I actually had about 30 minutes to run a bag of suger syrup over to the bees at Blue Heron. I grabbed the mixing bowl with the bag of sugar syrup in it, jumped in my car, and drove the 7 - 8 minutes to the preserve.

I got out of the car and realized that I had not brought an empty hive box to use as a surround for the baggie feeder. I didn't have time to go home and get one and do this yet again.

However, I've bought a ventilated inner cover for this hive. It should add to ventilation and in addition it is raised up about 1 1/4 inches from the tops of the bars. I considered this and thought I would experiment. I laid the bag down, slowly and gently to avoid squashing bees. Then I slit the baggie on the top.



I laid the ventilated cover over the frames and it worked! There wasn't much room for a bee to feed, but I can imagine that they will be able to use it just fine.



I closed the top on this happy hive, grabbed the now empty nuc box and top and headed for the car.



Don't these bees look happy? I think they will enjoy their new home at Blue Heron and I am sure glad to have bees there again. Inspections at the Blue Heron hives start on April 18 for members of Metro Atlanta Beekeepers or people who took the short course we offered in January.

Death threat and the bee hives

Finally the temperature has risen to 52; I am actually at home being Grandma to my grandson Dylan; and the bees are flying - but only from two hives. Before lunch I noticed that the bees are having a veritable party in front of Mellona (the center hive) and are pretty enthusiastic in front of Aristaeus2.

But Bermuda, my original bee hive which, if it survives this winter, will be entering its fifth year, is painfully quiet. I watch the entrance like a hawk, but no bees appear. An occasional bee hesitates around the entrance the way a hive robber does, but no normal entering and exiting is happening.

I felt deflated at lunch, thinking my bees, my original hive, had now bitten the dust. Recognizing that bees were out and about, before Dylan and I went to lunch I made up three sugar syrup baggies (being optimistic) and left them to cool while we went to Dylan's favorite place: Chik-Fil-A.



When Dylan went to nap, I opened up the hives. I opened Bermuda first, feeling a sinking in the pit of my stomach.

Joy! Joy! Joy! Under the hive cover in the top box were the bees. They were tightly clustered around two frames in the top box. I think their numbers have diminished considerably, but they were there! And they were alive.

I immediately gave them a bag of 2:1 sugar syrup. It's still too early in Atlanta to feed them 1:1, according to Jennifer Berry's article in Bee Culture this month.



I then opened Mellona and was sad to find dead bees in the sugar syrup which was crystallized. I don't understand this but feel very sad about it. This hive is doing fine, despite the bee kill in the baggie. There are lots of bees somewhere in a lower box on the hive. I didn't explore since it was clear that they are alive and doing fine. I just wanted to put in a baggie and shut the hive back up.



After feeding all three hives, I looked at the leaves in front of Mellona. I pushed the leaves aside and saw the piles of dead bodies. Over the winter many bees die in the hives and the mortician bees can't carry the bodies away from the hive. They appeared to have simply swept these bodies out of the hive.


So for the moment the good news is that my bees are all alive - all three hives.

That can turn on a dime, with the exigencies of the weather, and more sudden cold snaps after a few warm days may kill one of my hives yet.

Last Call for Lunch

I'm about done feeding my bees to build them up for winter. Today when I opened my hives at home, the hives felt heavy enough to satisfy me as far as their having enough supplies to make it. I went ahead and added food today, though.

I have made the sugar syrup for the bee trees and will make one more trip over there either tomorrow or Saturday.

Here's the newly placed baggie feeder on Bermuda.


When I opened Mellona, the sugar baggie that was there had crystallized sugar in it. I don't have good luck with the method I am currently using if I don't heat the water some after adding the sugar. This baggie represents a sugar syrup baggie in which I boiled four cups of water and then stirred in 8 cups of sugar and turned off the heat. The sugar syrup never lasts as well that way.

When I leave the pot over the flame for a minute or two after adding the sugar, then the suspension works better.



I didn't know what to do with the sugar crystals. I could mix it back into water. I decided for now to put it on the deck and observe how the bees handle it. It is supposed to rain tomorrow night and on Saturday, so I may bring these crystals in tomorrow and mix them back into water for more syrup.



Finally Aristaeus2 got their baggie. These bees had a bag with some syrup still left in it but I replaced it all the same.

The Messy Sugar Syrup Process

When people talk about harvesting honey, there's always some discussion about how messy the process is. When I harvest via crush and strain, I put cardboard under everything, keep the harvesting in a small area of my kitchen and have very little clean-up. I put the cardboard outside on the sidewalk and the bees clean it up. The equipment - a pan, a rubber spatula, a pestle, a sharp knife - is easily cleaned in the sink.

Making sugar syrup is an entirely different matter. I find it very messy and difficult to clean up. Since the process takes place on my gas stove, I can't line the burners with anything and sugar and drippy syrup get all over EVERYTHING.

When I'm done, there are sugar drips on the stove, on the floor, on the counter, on my clothes, on every square inch in the vicinity of the pot.



Drips happen in the pouring of the syrup from the pot to the ziploc baggie. The measuring cup drips. The pot is too heavy for me to pour and hold the baggie open at the same time so I start by transferring the syrup from the pot via a glass one cup measure. Drippy, drippy, drippy.



And in pouring the sugar into the boiling water, sugar gets sprinkled all over my burners.



The only discovery that has diminished the mess is that I discovered that two of these one quart mixing bowls (see photo below) filled to this level = eight cups of sugar. I then don't have to make as many transfers from the bag of sugar to the boiling water. That has cut down on the sugar on the counter.

When I'm finished I have to clean at least three or four pots, three or four mixing bowls, an assortment of whisks, a sharp knife, and of course, the kitchen counter, the floor and the stove top.

In addition the bees go through a baggie in about five days so I am feeding at least once a week and often more. So unlike harvesting which takes place a couple of times each summer, this feeding mess and clean up happens weekly or more and has been continuous since the beginning of September.



All in all, I'd say making and using sugar syrup in ziploc baggies is the biggest clean-up challenge I've had so far in beekeeping.

Bees Eating Sugar Syrup

These days I am feeding my bees sugar syrup in order to help them prepare for winter. I didn't do this last year, but this year my hives, despite my harvesting very little honey, are too light to go into winter.

The bees in the picture below have just discovered the sugar syrup floating by the slits in the baggie feeder.




The hive from which I took these pictures yielded me no harvest this year and they are very light on stores for the winter. This is the hive that I combined with the nuc from Blue Heron back in August.



In these two pictures (above and below) you can see the bees' tongues out to slurp up the honey.



Below is a frontal view of a syrup slurping bee.



I closed up the hive with one last glance through the hole in the inner cover to see them feeding away!