Queenless Hive - How to Move a Frame of Brood and Eggs Without Accidentally Including the Queen

Julia and I inspected our hives at Chastain a week ago.  We discovered to our dismay that my hive was queenless.  There was no sign of queen cells and the bees, while there was no queenless roar, were diminshing in population.  We added a frame of brood and eggs from Julia's hive at Chastain and crossed our fingers.

For best results in adding a frame of brood and eggs, the beekeeper should add a frame weekly until the hive has established a new queen.  Michael Bush talks about this in the queenless hive that has resulted in laying workers, but it holds for any queenless hive:  adding a frame of brood and eggs weekly allows the best possibility of the hive being able to become queenright.

So this weekend I need to move a frame of brood and eggs from one of my hives at home to my Chastain hive about 25 minutes away from here.

As you know, I edit the Georgia Beekeepers Association newsletter with my friend, Gina.  We asked Noah to suggest a question for Aunt Bee, our Dear Abby of the Georgia bee world.  Noah suggested a question about how to transport a frame of brood and eggs to a queenless hive.

I also asked him to answer the question.   He said he had always heard to wrap the frame in a towel soaked in warm water and put it in a cooler to maintain its warmth.  I thought that sounded good.  What I typically do is drop the open brood frame into a pillow case and drive like mad to the far away location.

That is, of course, not the safest plan!

So to confirm Noah's suggestion, I went online "googling."

I found the suggestion on Beemaster forum to wrap the frame in a warm damp towel for transport.  As I explored I found a post from one of my favorite posters on all the bee forum places.  This was from Indypartridge who posts on Beemaster but I found his advice on Homesteader.

Generally the best way to move brood is with the nurse bees to keep them warm.  Most people removing an open brood frame are afraid that they might accidentally take the queen.

This is what Indypartridge said:

"I can understand being nervous about accidentally transferring the queen along with a frame of brood from the strong hive to the weak. ........you can simply shake off the bees and give the weak hive a frame of eggs & open brood. If you want to give the weak hive an even better boost, you should transfer nurse bees along with the frame of brood. Do it this way so you don't transfer the queen:
1) Take a frame of eggs/larva from the strong hive. Shake off all the bees.
2) Put a queen excluder on top of the strong colony.
3) Add an empty box on top of the excluder. Put the single frame in the box.
4) Cover up the hive, leave for an hour or two.
5) Come back, the frame will be covered with nurse bees (and no queen).
6) Put the frame of eggs/larva & nurse bees in the weak hive.

I use this method for making nucs and splits when I don't want to spend time looking for a queen."

You could then put the brood frame with the nurse bees into a nuc box for transport.  Typically a hive will pretty readily accept nurse bees from another hive.

The Bee Tree - Huge Success

Beekeeping is the best adventure I have ever had - every day there is a new wrinkle, something new and exciting to figure out or to learn. I never knew I would be dealing with bees in trees.

Yesterday Eddie, a tree man, cut down a tree near Emory and found that it was full of bees. Being a good person, he preserved the 12 foot part of the tree with the bees and brought it back to his office. He called his friend Roy, who called his friend Wade, who is a Blue Heron Beekeeper. Wade suggested that he call me and that is where this story begins. (It's all in who you know ultimately, isn't it!)

Today I went over to visit the bee tree (see earlier post) and in a panic came home to talk to Wally (Iddee on Beesource and Beemaster) and Cindy Bee, my Atlanta mentor. They both said that the best plan would be to upright the tree and keep the bees in it. It's illegal to keep bees in a tree, but the plan includes putting a hive box on top of the tree section and lure the bees up into it with food and frames and a box that hasn't been through an earthquake!

OK, I went to Eddie's Odd Job Tree removal company and conferred with Annette, who is in charge when the guys are out on jobs. I told her the options:

1. Cut the tree open and remove the hive and hope that the queen survives and that there isn't too much damage to the brood, etc.
2. Save the section and either:

• Leave it at Odd Job as their own hive (which I would manage for them) - they are very near to my house,
  
• Take it to my house or to Julia's house,
  
• Take it to Blue Heron.
  

Annette thought Eddie might like to keep it at Odd Job. So I told her I would return at a break I had in my schedule this afternoon and bring bee veils for the men to wear when they cut the tree into the 3 - 5 foot part that was the hive.

When I brought the bee veils, the men were there and wanted to get started right away. This was an AMAZING process - the slide show speaks for itself. The pictures are a combination of photos taken by me, Julia, and her son Sam.



BTW, I stopped by this evening on my way home from work and the bees were orientation flying around the entrance to their hive!

I'll put a hive box on top of the tree on Thursday morning so the process of moving out of the tree and into a hive box can take place over the fall and winter months.

Let me also put in a plug for Eddie at Odd Job - what a process he went through to save these bees. He's a good person to know - the number for his company is in the first picture on the slide show.

Blue Heron - the Queenless Saga

As you'll remember from earlier posts, my hive at Blue Heron was started with a nuc that had no queen. There was little or no brood in the box and we saw no queen and no evidence of a queen - no new eggs or larvae, very little capped brood, all in all a sad state of affairs.

To cope with this I gave the hive brood and eggs on two frames, hoping that they would make a queen. They made at least one perfectly lovely queen cell and the hive is calm, quiet and seems to be chugging along.

Meanwhile the nuc supplier calls and wants to "make us whole" by giving me another nuc, this time with a queen. I called several beekeepers whom I respect: Cindy Bee, Jim Ovbey, and I posted on Beemaster. Everyone agreed that the hive that made its own queen needed to have a chance.

So we got permission from Blue Heron to install the nuc in a second hive. I will keep an eye on the first hive to see if the queen they made successfully mates and begins to lay eggs. If she succeeds, then we have two good hives and I'll move the newest one somewhere else. If she fails, I will combine the hive I installed today with the first hive since we know there's a good queen in the new hive.

Here's what our process today looked like:



Now the supplier feels good about coming through with a queenright nuc, I feel good about Blue Heron allowing us to temporarily have two hives there, the whole process provides a great teaching/learning opportunity, and the new queen in the first hive has a chance to prove herself.

Everybody wins!

Creamed Honey on Toast - YUMMMMM

Over Thanksgiving, I went to Virginia for a week and left my thermostat on 55 degrees to save on my heating costs. Well, my gas bill wasn't so high but there was an unexpected cost.

I left all of my bottled honey on a table and came home to find that the jars that were harvested over Memorial Day last year had all turned into creamed honey. People prize creamed honey - it's less drippy and easier to spread. In truth, though, it is honey that has granulated. Creamed honey isn't a solid mass. Instead it is a thickened honey that tastes great and is just thick instead of clear.

I wondered why the honey from Memorial Day harvest had granulated and not the rest of my jars. I posted on Beemaster to find out what the other beekeepers had to say about this. Apparently this batch of honey had just the right amount of glucose and "seed" material (pollen grains, for example, that didn't filter out) to encourage its turning into creamed honey. And the temperature at which I left my house (55 - 60 degrees) was IDEAL for making creamed honey.

Interestingly, this honey doesn't have a sandy feel on the tongue. Instead it spreads like regular honey and is fabulous, in my opinion. You can tell that I am using the honey from the jar below. Actually you can heat the honey in a water bath and the granulation will go away, but I don't want to heat my honey so I am going to enjoy it as is.



You can see the consistency in the picture below.



When it is spread on hot toast, it is exactly like non-granulated honey and tastes, as all my honey does, absolutely delicious!


The bread, if you are interested, is a multigrain bread that I made with my grandson.

Colony Collapse Disorder

As most of you have probably read, bees are disappearing from hives in this country and so far there is not an explanation for why this is happening. The New York Times has a good article on the thoughts about this problem. My computer stays signed in to the NYT, but you may have to sign in to read the article.

Also, Bill Maher has an Earth Day article addressing CCD (Colony Collapse Disorder).

Beekeepers seem to have quite a creative sense of humor. On the Beemaster Forum, people have been playing with outrageous reasons why the bees are disappearing. My three favorites so far are:

"...they joined the army reserve trying to bee all that they can bee."

and

"The Honey Bee internal GPS system gets its directions from Map Quest now..."

and

"The worker bees created a union and decided to go on strike..."

On May 9, the Metro Atlanta Beekeepers Association meeting will have as the guest speaker, Dr. Keith Delaplane from the University of Georgia honeybee research program. Dr. Delaplane will talk about Colony Collapse Disorder.

It's everywhere! It's everywhere!

Honey super for Proteus hive

Last year when I harvested honey, I used the crush and strain method. This means that you cut the comb out of the frame and crush it to get the honey. There's a good description also that I posted on the Beemaster forum.

The frames are left with remnants of comb. I put the frames back in the hive in a super for the bees to clean up. Little remnants of comb were left on the edges of the frame. I then removed the frames and put them in the freezer overnight to kill any wax moth eggs that might be present.

Now I have the frames with the remnants left for the bees to use as guides to draw comb. Below you can see what one looks like.

















Below here is a frame sitting on the other frames so you can also see down into the box to see the frame already installed with a comb remnant on it.

















In the center of the box I put an almost fully formed comb to keep the bees in line.

















Here is Proteus at its taller height with a new box to use for honey.

The Live Hive

The frame of honey below is one of four frames of honey left in the dead hive's medium brood box. The Beemaster folks said I should move those frames to the Bermuda hive and let the bees there use it for stores. I haven't done it yet, but will.

Here are the bees in Bermuda - not a particularly thriving bunch - but they are alive and are beginning to raise brood. We've had strange weather in Atlanta. In February we've had a week of 30s at night and high 60s in the day, followed by a week of 20s at night followed by 40 - 50 degree days. The last two weeks have been in the 30s above freezing at night and in the high 60s/low 70s in the day. I think the bees have had a hard time because of the confusing weather

The bees in Bermuda are making brood. The pattern below is a little spotty, but there are larvae (see the cells with white shiny C shapes in them?) and they are bringing in pollen. Look at the red pollen cell directly below the brood circle. So action is starting for spring in this hive. I also looked really hard at the bees. I saw mostly healthy looking bees. I was disturbed to see one bee with ragged wings, meaning she probably has deformed wing syndrome, brought about by Varroa mites. Michael Bush on the Beemaster forum suggested that I do a sugar shake and a Varroa count on this hive, so that will be what I do on Friday.

(Note: If you click on the image below to enlarge it, you can see bee eggs in the empty cells. The eggs look like grains of rice - the good news is the presence of those eggs means the queen is alive and laying - HOORAY!)

There's lots of activity in this hive, so I put a Boardman feeder out to help them build up for spring. I don't want to be guilty of starving another hive. I also called the local beekeeper from whom I had already ordered a nuc for this year so I could have a third hive and ordered another nuc to replace my dead hive.

Special Visitor to my Hives

I spend a lot of time on the Beemaster Forum where I get a lot of my questions answered and have learned a lot from people all over the world. One of my favorite posters is "Understudy." He lives in Florida where he has done a lot of "cut-outs" in which he goes to places where people have found bees and have not wished for the bees to be there. Examples are boats, trailers, inside roof overhangs and most impressively, in a compost pile!

In addition, he travels for his work and has been in Atlanta this week. So he came to my house to see my two little hives and eat lunch. I loved hearing about his bee adventures. He has a blog as well.

To prove he was actually at my house, here he is between my two hives - lucky me - to be entertained and educated by his bee stories over lunch!