Bee Discouraged

This is turning out to be a discouraging bee year.

• First I get this gorgeous swarm from my friend Gina and install it into the top bar hive only to find that they didn't like the accommodations and took off for parts unknown.

• Then I opened my Aristaeus2 hive to find that the lovely queen that was there three weeks previous (photographed, no less) is apparently no more and there is NO BROOD, implying a queenless hive.

• Yesterday I transferred the L Hive to a new hive box and, where there was the prettiest brood I have ever seen on March 27, now there is absolutely NO BROOD.

• I opened the hive at Blue Heron (from the Jennifer Berry nuc) yesterday to add a super. It looks great but I got an email from Jennifer today saying that because of the great bloom we are having, I should expect that hive to swarm.

I transferred the L Hive to a new home, cleaner and in better shape than the one in which they were housed.

I am glad I transferred the L Hive, even in its no-brood state. In the original box, the screened bottom board was closed up with an old sticky board and in the space between the screen and the board lived an ant colony of large winged ants. No air was coming into the hive, thus the immense beards that I have been seeing.


I gave this hive a screened bottom board that is wide open; I put on a slatted rack; and I moved them into 8 frame boxes.



I also looked at every frame because since I was downsizing them to 8 frames, I had to choose to leave out two frames from each box. I of course shook and brushed all bees off of each of the rejected frames.  There was no evidence of a living queen.



So here it sits in its new digs, in all its queenless glory, soon to die out if I don't find a solution to the problem.



OK, so I tried to think positively about this hive and all its problems.

• It's possible that there is still a queen in this hive but she quit laying because of bad conditions....hmmm, not too likely. 
• It's possible that she was killed in the move - a lot of bees were killed in this hive when we attempted to close the entry with screened wire previous to moving them. And a catastrophe can happen when you move a hive with frames sliding and the hive parts moving.
• We moved that hive on the 26th of March.  I found beautiful brood on April 4.  Now on April 10, all of that brood has emerged and there's no new brood.  This would imply with 21 days to emerge, that the queen probably died on moving day.
• It's also possible that the bees, angry with the queen for the disruption after four years of peaceful, undisturbed, albeit poor, living conditions, balled the queen and killed her after the move.

The obvious solution would be to add a frame of brood from another hive and allow the L Hive to make a new queen. But I currently don't have good resources to do that.  Mellona, my one ongoing hive, has only two frames of brood and eggs in it at the moment - the brood is about the size of a coffee saucer and while I did see eggs yesterday, I can't take one of only two frames of brood out of that hive. I took a similar frame out of that hive last week for Aristaeus2.

I haven't inspected the swarm that moved into Bermuda. They've been there just a week at this point. I added a super to them yesterday but didn't explore for brood. I could go deeper into that hive and steal brood from them. I'm a little burned from the swarm leaving the top bar hive and don't want to make these bees want to go away.

I also could inspect the hive at Blue Heron. Yesterday I only added a box to them and didn't go into the brood box. Perhaps I could get some brood from them and see if they have swarm cells at the same time, since Jennifer emailed this moring that I would probably find that. I am also cautious about doing that because I have to open up that hive on Tuesday for a boy scout troop and don't want to disturb them every two seconds.

On Friday, I called and emailed a N Georgia beekeeper in Ball Ground, whom I understand is the only person still selling packages, to see if I could buy two packages from him to fill my top bar hive and the hive I am supposed to install in Rabun County. I've now heard back from him that he doesn't have bees available any more and no possible queens until after April 20.

As I reread this sad post, I think today that I will inspect the brood box of the swarm hive and if I can, I'll take a frame of brood and eggs from it to add to the L Hive.  I'll not disturb the Jennifer hive at Blue Heron until I open it on Tuesday, but if I find swarm cells or a brood frame to spare, I'll take it and move it to either L or Aristaeus2. I'm on the swarm call list for Metro along with tons of other people, but maybe I'll get a swarm call for the top bar hive.  Sometimes I get a call from someone in Atlanta because they find this blog and call me......however,

I "bee" discouraged.

The Sad Saga of the Flying Sugar Syrup

As a beekeeper, I've had lots of adventures that involved dropping. Last year I dropped a hive frame full of bees from my Proteus hive. Then there was the setting down of the small swarm hive in so many topsy turvy ways that the bees finally balled and killed the queen, blaming her for my mistakes.

This year it's sugar syrup. On Sunday I barely had time to open the hives to check on their food supplies. I wanted to replace the Ziploc baggies of sugar syrup. I filled two baggies, one for each hive, and set them upright in a 9" cake pan to carry them out to the hives. I took everything I needed out to the hives and then carried the cake pan and set it on the deck railing behind the first hive, Mellona.

I opened the top of Mellona and as I did, I heard a "PLOP" behind me. The bag of sugar syrup, off balance in the 9"cake pan, flopped over the edge of the pan like a fat Slinky and fell off of the deck. Oh, dear. These two bags represented 8 cups of sugar. I ran, beesuit and all down the deck stairs to rescue the fallen bag. It of course had hit the branches of the red tipped photinia on its fall to the pine straw below the deck.

The bag was leaking on all sides from the photinia slits. I folded the cuts to the center and raced into the house where I put this baggie inside another baggie and then emptied the remaining contents into the new bag. I carefully zipped the baggie shut and put what was left on Mellona.

This happened way too fast for pictures! Ah, the saga of my beekeeping adventures continues.

Inspection Today

Bermuda has been slow to build up. Today every frame in the brood box that I pulled looked like this - covered all over with capped brood and with a section of drone comb somewhere in the center. They had drawn every frame but one in the second box.

In the first box I took the two outside undrawn frames and moved them in to the center of the box with drawn comb on either side.

The ladies in this box sit on the front porch all the time and don't seem to be foraging like the other hives. Given how much they sit, I thought there would be no work product in the hive, but they have been busy. I left them with a new medium with starter strips of SC. We'll see how they do.

I did a powdered sugar shake on this hive as well as the other two that I inspected.

Mellona, my largest, most productive hive, is buzzing with bee work every time I go near it. These girls have been working hard and have a number of supers filled with capped honey. Here's an example of their beautiful honeycomb drawn completely by them from starter strips. Looks yummy, doesn't it?


When I inspected Proteus, I was tired and didn't do a thorough job. I needed to look into the brood box at each frame to see if there had been a supercedure or if there were swarm cells. The hive has been moving very slowly - filling supers very slowly and drawing wax like molasses in January. I have wondered if they still have the original queen and if they are making wax and brood.

Proteus has quit drawing crazy comb, and did have at least one very heavy, very full of honey super. They only have brood in the bottom box, which surprised me. However, I had been stung once by then and was tired and very hot, so I'm saving a thorough inspection of Proteus for another day.

Right before I began looking at Proteus, I had scoured the deck trying to find the bee that had been in the center of the bee-ball from the gift swarm yesterday. I remembered the bee because she was all black and not striped like my other bees. I found her dead and I am pretty sure this is the queen. She is probably a virgin queen because her lower abdomen is small.

I'm hoping that she has a sister in the new hive who is queen, but I'll wait to inspect this "extra" hive until the end of next week. That this queen is dead took the wind out of my sails - which is probably why I had little energy for the inspection of Proteus' brood.

Surprise Swarm on Deck!

Today I was the Granny-Nanny for my adorable grandson, Dylan. Unlike the Granny in the NY Times article, my grandson lives in Atlanta and spends every Friday at my house. It's the most fulfilling part of my week.

He was at my house today and he loves to stand at the sunporch door and look out through the door to the bees. While he and I were standing there, I thought about a post on Beemaster from Robo, one of the members, who had gone home and found a deep box that he had left near his hives, filled with a swarm.

You may remember that I found Bermuda to be a very weak hive at the beginning of the bee season this year. I moved the medium box in which the four or five frames of bees left in the hive were living onto the hive stand and took off the deep box. Like most things with the bees, when you change any configuration, some of the bees are reluctant to leave the original. So I had left the deep standing on its side with the frames vertical, diagonally facing Bermuda.

Remembering Robo's post I thought, "I ought to move that deep and set it upright and maybe I'll get a swarm like he did." So I left Dylan watching through the door and went onto the deck and picked up the deep and carried it about six feet across from its current location and set it down.


It dawned on me that the deep felt kind of heavy for an empty box. I looked down and the box was at least half full of bees! Unbeknownst to me, a swarm had moved in - either one of my hives had swarmed or they appeared from somewhere else! I looked over where the hive box had been and bees were circling looking for their deep box. Oh, dear, I thought in panic, and picked the box back up, took it back to its original location and set it back on its side.

I went back into the house and looked with Dylan through the door and realized that I had set the box on yet another side so the frames were now stacking on each other, probably killing bees and maybe injuring the queen. You can see the fallen stack in the first picture. I couldn't suit up or light the smoker or even go back to the bees until Dylan left around 5 PM. I wish I approached situations like this in a calmer fashion because I could make less mistakes if I weren't so distressed when something like this happens.

When Dylan left, I suited up and went out with the plan of putting the box to rights and setting it on an extra hive stand that I had. When I arrived at the box, the bees were "balling the queen" - you can see the bunch of bees in the lower right of the third picture.

I took my bee brush and brushed the "ball" onto a plastic sheet. Most of the bees left and the four who remained looked like three workers and the queen. I held the plastic over the hive box and I hope all of them returned to the box. Otherwise this will be a queenless hive.

I set the hive box upright, put it on a bottom board, and a hive stand and covered the top with a plastic bottom board as the rain began to fall in Atlanta.

I left and went to Lowe's where I bought a 2' X 2' square board and when I returned, I put this on top of the hive with a flower pot weighing it down.

Immediately I ordered another screened bottom board, and two hive covers (see, I'm an optimist!)