A View Into the Bee Tree

Even though I don't post about it every time I go, I feed the bees in the bee tree at least once a week. The last time I went was last Thursday, after a visit to see the flood damage at Blue Heron.

Today I took them a baggie feeder full of 2:1 sugar syrup. It was only 59 degrees this morning and the bees weren't clustered around the opening and weren't flying too much. So I took advantage of the opportunity to peek inside their tree home with my camera.

Here's how the entrance looked this morning. The bees are clearly more inside the tree than out.


A view of the inside reveals bees on top of bees.



I couldn't decide if they were clinging to each other or if there is a shard of rotting wood still in the center of the hollow part of the tree.



It looks as if they are clinging to each other as I get closer inside. I so wish I could see their interior combs and how long they are and how they have been repaired after the tree cutting. But for now, this is the view.



When I opened the hive box on top of the bee tree, I found a totally empty baggie and no bees at all. I guess they were all clustered to keep warm - it was about 49 or 50 degrees last night. When I put the baggie on the frames and slit it, one lone bee came up to greet me.

Sugar Syrup from Bag to Baggie

What a terrible year this has been for the bees in Georgia! We had hard rains throughout the honey flow and they put away very little in the way of stores. People tell me that there was little sourwood honey in the N Georgia mountains this year either. Whatever stores my bees put away they are consuming now as if it were already winter. My hives are very low on stores.

According to Keith Delaplane in First Lessons in Beekeeping, a hive should weigh 100 pounds (including the hive, the bees and the stored honey) going into winter. So my hives are all light because they have gone through their stores. I have been feeding them for the last several weeks and will continue into October.

It's not a cheap thing - more expensive, actually, per month, than feeding my two dogs. I go through a 25 pound bag of sugar weekly at $15.00 a bag - whew!


To make 2:1 sugar syrup, you have to bring the mix to a boil or that amount of sugar won't dissolve in the water. Occasionally I leave the kitchen with the pot on the stove, as I did this morning, and forget to go back until the pot has boiled for too long. Usually that means 10 minutes instead of the usual 1 minute boiling.

The other day I left the kitchen, I think, for longer than 10 minutes. When that sugar syrup cooled, it hardened into a block and I threw it away. There went 8 cups of sugar (4 pounds) and several dollars into the trash.

Today I ate breakfast while the sugar syrup was heating up, but left it while I went to check my email. When I (finally) returned to the kitchen, the syrup had boiled down 1/2" lower in the pan. This was bound to become another hard block. I just was not going to throw that batch away.

I decided to try something different.

So I boiled water for tea. When the water was boiling, I added it to the pan with the hot syrup in it and whisked it around. I think this will liquify what would have become a solid block and repair the damage so that I can use this sugar syrup. Here it is in its baggie, ready for delivery to the hives.




PS. As an illustration of how hungry the hives are, Bermuda consumed a whole gallon baggie of syrup between Saturday afternoon and Monday morning!

Thumbs Up for the Freeman Beetle Trap!

After 24 hours under Bermuda, the hive I disrupted so much on Saturday, here's what the tray looked like - Jerry told me to use less oil and it was so much easier to pull out and the beetles were dead, just the same!

The tray picture below was taken on Monday morning after putting the tray in on Saturday afternoon.


The picture below was taken on Tuesday morning after putting the tray in on Saturday afternoon. It's interesting that in the later picture (below) there are even more beetles and that they are concentrated in the same areas.


On the Podcast, I told Jerry I wish he would make one that is half tray, half ventilated screen so we could leave them on the hives in the south. I hope he does so. I'm leaving this full tray on right now

• Because the hive has been so disrupted and
• Because our nights are so much cooler right now that the bees are not bearding.

I put a feeding baggie on Mellona - the only hive I haven't been feeding. It is a 10 frame hive so I had a shim I could put around the baggie, making less space for the bees to protect.



You'll notice that Bermuda to the left, has a box surrounding its baggie. I replaced that with a shim today as well.

Feeding the Bees all over Town!

Because I am off to visit my daughter in Maryland this weekend, I wanted to feed all the hives that need feeding before I left. I opened the nuc with the poorly mated queen from Blue Heron and found that they had not touched the baggie I left there last weekend. I don't really understand why they have not, but I added a couple of slits to the bag and didn't replace it.



I am also feeding Aristaeus2 (the swarm hive from last year on my deck). I gave them a new bag as well. They had drained the bag from the weekend completely dry.



I went over to Blue Heron and opened up the Purvis queen hive. It's hard to put a baggie in without squashing bees. I've learned to lay it down slowly and gradually like a glacier moving over the frames to allow the bees time to move out from under the descending sugar syrup.



Now the baggie is fully down on the frames. I believe a couple of bees may have lost their lives in the process but it isn't as bad as it could be if I had cavalierly put the baggie on top of the frames.



Finally I went to feed the bees at the bee tree but that didn't go so well. The bee tree bees have gotten all possessive of the hive box. This should be a good thing but not for me and my health and well-being!

I climbed up the ladder with my jacket on and well zipped (remembering the last time last week when I got stung in the head under my unzipped veil). I did have my camera around my neck sticking the strap through the opening in the bottom of the veil.

I opened the top of the box and looked at the bees crawling all over the frames under the empty syrup baggie. I pulled off the syrup baggie and the bees came at my veiled head. One came in through the hole for my camera strap. I knew I didn't want to get stung before seeing my daughter for the first time in several months.

I climbed down off the ladder and moved away from the bee tree and zipped off my veil.
Big mistake. Apparently there were bees all over me. Taking off the veil gave them the opportunity they were waiting for and I suddenly had several bees in my hair, a bee in my nose, a bee under my glasses and a stinging bee above my eyebrow. I got the bees off of my face but the ones in my hair all found a way to sting me.

At the end I had about four stings in my head, one on a significant middle finger and one over my eyebrow. So now I headed off for Maryland with a face all swollen on the left side. Thankfully by the time the plane landed 24 hours after the sting, most of the swelling was gone.

Note to self: From here on out, take a smoker to the bee tree. Those girls OWN the hive box.

"Well, we're moving on up, to the east side...."

The nuc I created with the combination at Blue Heron appears to be doing fine. I didn't open up the bottom box today, but I did look down into it to see so many eager little bee faces. The five frames in the box are fully built out and mostly used. There are three brood frames (one with some pollen) and two solid honey frames. Only one of the brood frames has much space in it, so first I gave the nuc hive a medium box to move on up into.



Then I wanted to feed them since it's only a short time until winter and they are weak and small. So I put a third medium nuc box on top of the hive body and put a ziploc baggie feeder on the tops of the frames beneath. Because it is a quart instead of a gallon bag, I'll need to check on it more frequently.



So here's their new "deluxe apartment in the sky..." Doesn't it look like a row house!

But I think the girls may have the capacity to fill the second medium box before winter hits. Several beekeepers I respect keep bees in nucs through the winter in much colder climates than here in Hotlanta - Michael Bush in Nebraska, Ross Conrad in Vermont. So I am having hope for the future, especially if the new queen emerges and gets well-mated.



The only problem is that the nuc box on the bottom is poorly built and a little warped. I didn't match up the sides well and it's uneven on the top, so the bees are using the space between the bottom box and the first blue medium box as a middle entrance.

Sunday Afternoon Visit to the Bee Tree

I love visiting the bee tree, but I want so badly to see inside. This close up of the front door is the best I can do. It's funny to me that they are all in a circle around the opening - especially since one of the bee dances is the circle dance.



Last week I changed out the top box (really just a surround for the baggie feeder) for a prettier box. This looks so much better, don't you think?



I added a new bag of syrup. The old one still had about 1/4 cup of syrup in it so I left it hanging under the top so maybe they can finish it off.

Meanwhile they appear to be doing well. The other day I tried to pull up the center frame and it was hooked by wax or propolis to the comb in the tree - I think that's a good sign for their moving into the box.

Cross your fingers! I am......


This afternoon I also went over to Blue Heron and gave them a new baggie of syrup. They looked good and were happy and calm, despite my intrusion. Makes me feel better about killing that gorgeous queen, but see, I'm still thinking about it. Never again.

Downsizing When the Economy is Bad!

So with neither hive thriving at Blue Heron, I killed one queen, put the other in a nuc, and combined the two hives there. I left this bag of sugar syrup on top of the frames in an almost empty third box. The bees were on it right away.



I put bungee cords around the nuc with the old frame and a split's worth of bees. I didn't block the entrance, figuring that home was only a short drive away and the girls would probably make the trip inside the nuc. Sure enough, they traveled inside the nuc and there were only about 6 bees in the car when I arrived at home.



As I said in an earlier post, when I found the queen, the frame on which she was walking had an almost perfect queen cell on it. The cell was a dark peanut, perfectly shaped and looking ripe for an emerging queen. I assume the bees knew they needed a new queen and made one. When she emerges, I guess one of them will be killed.

I brought the nuc home to my deck apiary. I put it beside the box they had lived in at Blue Heron. I thought it might make them comfortable and reminded of home. If a new queen emerges and this hive does well, I might move it to the larger hive box and keep it over the winter.

We'll see what happens. If their economy gets better, maybe they can move into more upscale housing again!

Ants and I visit the Bee Tree

The bees are calmly and regularly going in and out of their knot hole entrance to the bee tree. They seem settled in their new home. Julia put a sugar syrup bag on the hive box on Tuesday, so I thought they'd need a new one today.


The sugar syrup was almost completely gone. I removed the bag and after I did I pulled a few frames to see if there were any action in the hive box. I was thrilled to find that the bees were festooning off of the bottom of the frame just over the central hole in the tree trunk. This probably means that they are building wax and comb to allow them to move easily into the box.

I hope over the fall they will make the hive box more homey by working on some of the frames.


I put a new sugar syrup baggie on top of the frames and slit the baggie in two places. This is 2:1 syrup which is what you are supposed to feed this time of year.



The Odd Job people had reported that they had seen ants all over the tree and around the hive box. I put down a ring of cinnamon around the hive box. The ants can't get in below the plywood because I ran a ring of silicone caulk around the hole before I nailed the plywood down, but they can enter under the hive box. "Folks" say that cinnamon is an ant deterent, so I hope it works.

Hot town, summer in the city....

It's hot and the bees are bearding. My Aristaeus2 hive I think is half its size. About a week ago outside at 8 PM there were thousands of bees swirling around. I thought robbing was going on and responded accordingly. Now I think that half of Aristaeus2 swarmed, or at this time of year, I guess they absconded.

To help bees who were left behind, I put a baggie feeder of sugar syrup in and closed the top of the hive. They have honey and were even making new honey but I don't know why the hive absconded, so I thought it would be best to take care of those who are left. There is a laying queen. I saw eggs after the swarming/absconding event. But without the ventilation of the propped top, even this small hive is bearding.



Bermuda, my four year old hive, is really bearding. All the girls are out. I just checked and they are still out in the summer night at 9:30 PM. The beard, if anything, is even larger than it was before at 7 when I took this picture.



Mellona has never bearded. It is a hive full of bees, but this is about as big as her beard gets. Given that it is August in Hotlanta, that is quite an accomplishment.

All of my hives have screened bottom boards, slatted racks and I keep the top propped in the summer - but still it's too hot for all the bees to spend the night indoors. So they lounge and dance (washboard) on the front porch late into the night.



"But at night it's a different world
Go out and find a girl
Come on, come on lets dance all night
Despite the heat
it will be alright
And babe don't you know it's a pity
The days can't be like the night
In the summer in the city
In the summer in the city

Hot town summer in the city"....Joe Cocker

Beekeeper Error and the Walk Away Split

When I set up the walk-away split (three frames of brood and eggs, two frames of honey and pollen), I truly walked away, but I kept worrying. Did I put enough bees in the nuc? Would they be able to sustain themselves and build a queen cell?

I worried so much that on Wednesday, I decided to feed them. I'm not feeding my other hives. They all have stores of honey left over from winter and don't need anything from me. So I put a Boardman feeder on the nuc, planning to remove it on Friday, add the second medium box (empty) to the nuc, and put in a baggie feeder.

Today I cam home to robbing and bees flying frantically all around the nuc. There are shards of wax on the ground, indicating that the bees have been shredding the caps on the honey frames in the nuc.



And even when I moved the bottle from the Boardman, the bees clung to it for several hours afterward.


At the end of the day, great destruction took place. My beekeeper error was being lazy and putting on a Boardman feeder instead of making the effort to set up the baggie. I've posted on Beemaster to see if I can redeem myself in some way. I'll let you know.

A Miserable Day for Bees

It's March in Atlanta and guess what! We have snow. It snowed all day long. This picture was snapped around 1 PM. The snow fell thick and beautifully all day. I imagine the bees wished for sun and temps over 60, but instead, in Atlanta's inimitable spring way, the temps were a little above freezing all day long. Tonight it will drop into the 20s. I hope for the best for the bees.

If you're wondering about Bermuda back in the corner with five (5???) boxes, there is an explanation. You'll notice the hive is in all medium boxes. Wintering in mediums requires three full boxes - sometimes four. This hive went into winter with the bottom three boxes full of bees and honey. The fourth box was skimpily filled but did have honey that I never harvested. Above the fourth box is a ziploc baggie so the last box is simply empty, surrounding the baggie.

Nurturing Blue Heron

The Blue Heron bees are vigorous and HUNGRY. We put a quart of syrup on each hive last Saturday, another quart on each hive on Monday (the previous quart was empty) and gave each hive a baggie filled with 2 quarts of syrup/hive on Wednesday when we installed the hives.

Julia stopped by this morning (Friday) and found that the bag on my hive was empty and the bag on her poetic hive was almost empty. So she between raindrops filled two more half gallon bags and put them on the hives. I'll check again on Sunday - bet they will be out of food again!