Good Use for the Boardman Feeder

At this time of year, feeding the bees is not something anyone needs to do.  The bees in Atlanta are at the end of the nectar flow, but there is still some nectar to be had.  I haven't fed any bees this year in 2014.  All of my new hives were either nucs and were installed while we were having a nectar flow or the hives had overwintered and were just fine and not starving.

The Boardman feeder is particularly dangerous to use because it is like a billboard on the front of the hive screaming, "EAT HERE.  FREE FOOD!"

It's an invitation to robbing and that is a disheartening thing to happen to a beehive.

Last year at the Morningside Community Garden, we got complaints that my bees were showing up to take a swim at the neighbors' swimming pool.  They have a pool just over the fence from the beehives.  It's like Mr. McGregor's Garden - the bees feel tempted by the chlorinated water and are determined to visit the pool for a treat.  Only instead of going through a hole in the fence like Peter Rabbit, they fly right over it!

So to solve the problem last year, I put Boardman feeders on the front of both hives.  I filled the feeders with water, each with a drop of Clorox in it.  The bees got their water happily from the Boardman's and the neighbor complaints disappeared.

Since that worked so well last year, I've done it again on the Morningside hives.

So far, we haven't heard from the neighbors.  I was away a couple of weeks ago and as I drove home I noticed that the top was off of the hive with the blue markings.  I walked up to check and found the top on the ground at the bottom of the hill.  The hives look in this photo as if they are on flat ground, but actually they are at the top of a hill, the dropoff for which is right by the blackberry bushes on the back left.  

The top was lying face down at the foot of the hill about 15 feet below.  The hive was intact with the inner cover still tightly propolized.  I expect a storm blew the top off, but it seemed weird that it was located where the wheelbarrow and other equipment is kept and not directly below the hive on the ground.  

So far it hasn't happened again, so I feel sure it was the wind.  Maybe someone saw the top and just moved it with the rest of the equipment????

Nuc to Replace Drone Layer Hive at Chastain

On Thursday morning I checked on my backyard hives and was particularly interested in the nuc we are thinking of moving to Chastain as a teaching hive.  Julia gave me a queen cell on a frame for this nuc back on March 18.

As Billy Davis would say, the queen cell looked "medium biscuit" in color which means it was about midway through its development.  So I expected the queen to emerge within a week.  But I left the hive alone, except for giving it honey to eat in a Boardman feeder inside the hive.

On Thursday I opened the nuc to look at the work of the queen for the first time.  Notice the make-shift entrance reducer!  Jeff is making us some better ones.  I have had no confidence in my ability to make a nuc - have never done it successfully - but this year every one I have made is a success.

The queen was laying and so eager, that she was laying in barely drawn comb.  If you click to enlarge either photo below, you'll see an egg in every cell:

The nuc had eaten all of the honey I had provided in the Boardman Feeder, so when I was confident that the queen was there and doing well, I went inside to fill a jar from some honey I had crushed from a deadout.

I filled the jar and then, to my horror, dropped the jar and broke it to smithereens on the rug in my basement honey harvest area.  I took the broken jar and honey out to put it where the bees in my apiary could clean it up:

How I left it was how it looked above.  This afternoon (one day later) when I arrived home, this is what the rug looked like:

All the bees left was the glass!

Since on Thursday when the jar broke, I was leaving for Rabun County before I could crush any more of last year's honey, I gave the bees a jar of local, but commercial honey.  

I'm embarrassed to be feeding them commercial honey, but I wanted you to see what it looks like to use the Boardman as an interior feeder in a nuc.

Depending on the weather, I'll either take this hive to Chastain on Monday or Tuesday morning.  I'll also take a frame of brood and eggs to put into the drone layer hive now over there to help the bees begin to address their ineffective queen problem.  

Creative Entrance Reducers

In Billy Davis' talk to our bee club, he emphasized the importance of entrance reducers.  He stated that the use of entrance reducers and keeping robber screens on the hives at all times stopped robbing in his apiaries.  So I am taking him seriously and trying it this year.

I've had two rather humorous experiences so far.  First at Morningside, the men who live in the house beside the community garden (where my hives are) are complaining that my bees are disturbing their use of their hot tub.  They are nice guys and supply water to the community garden, so we want them to stay happy.  I wrote them that there are five beekeepers within a mile of the community garden and that my bees are highly likely not to be the only ones visiting their hot tub.

However, to begin to address the problem and hopefully to prevent my needing to move my hives, I put a Boardman bottle of water on each hive.  I put a teaspoon of Chlorox in each bottle and a few drops of lemongrass oil to entice the bees to get their water at home.  However, I also wanted to reduce the entrance as per Billy Davis.  The Boardman bottles took up space and I don't have entrance reducers that short so I did something that I had read about on a beekeeping forum.  I used wine corks:

The bees fell all over themselves as they learned the new entrance but then calmed down.  I also put the same corks on the hive that I made from the Colony Square nuc the week before.   This photo was taken just before I left the Morningside hives.

I do wonder what the gardeners will think of all the wine corks - possibly that I really like wine!  But it is serving the purpose and looks like fun, doesn't it?








After the corks, I was really tired - not from putting in corks, but because we had done a lot of bee work already.  Jeff and I had already done our splits that morning; I went to the Morningside Garden berfore the splits to work on my plot there; and I was anticipating moving the hives in a few hours that night.  I knew the 3-box hive at Morningside needed a new box, but I just wanted to go home for a couple of hours and not do bees.

I sat on a stump by the hives and watched the bees for about 10 minutes.  Then I started for the car, telling myself that I'd get to it another day.  But I was already there and had already carried the box and all my bee stuff up to the hives.

I sat another second and then opened the hive and got to work.  I had brought a box of half empty frames and half drawn frames.  I checker-boarded these frames with the frames in the box below.  As I lifted out the seventh frame in the box on the hive, there was the queen!  What was she doing in the top box and on comb that looked like it was for honey storage - too large a cells for worker bees?

I got a little concerned that the reason she was there in that box was because the bees were running her around to get her ready to swarm.  She does look a little skinny!  However, skinny or not, she is certainly a pretty sight, I must say.  As is the beauty of the brand new wax and the festooning bees.















So I decided it was a good sign to reinforce my staying to add the box.

That was my funny entrance reducer story #1.  My second story happened on Sunday afternoon.  After the big split Saturday, on the next day (Sunday), I drove to Lula, Georgia to get a package of bees from Don Kuchenmeister for our teaching hive at Chastain Conservancy.

First I drove up to Rabun County to see if the bees there had lived through the winter.  Remember the one hive had been destroyed by what, I don't know.  The other was a hive that was populated on its own by a swarm last spring.  Those bees were alive in December, but Rabun county is 125 miles north of Atlanta and they have had a cold winter and some snow.

I found the hive dead, full of honey, with no bees at all in the hive except for about 20 on the bottom board.  I left the hive set up to possibly attract another swarm from the feral hive that lives in the wall of the nearby school building.

Then I picked up my package from Don - actually he had an extra one that I also bought to replace the Rabun hive, since I need a hive there and don't have confidence in my splits.  I couldn't drive another hour north to Rabun again, though, so I took both packages home.

I installed the first package in my backyard.

As I am getting ready to install the bees, I am thinking of Billy Davis.  So before I put in the package, I equipped the front of the hive with a robber screen as close to the one Billy had as I could do with my landing being slightly different from his.

Then I installed the package and stepped back to view my "great job."

And then there was my moment of realization, my Ah-Ha of the day.  A package consists of several pounds of bees (three in this case) and an unknown queen in a queen cage.  These bees aren't attached yet to the queen - they were only dumped in the package yesterday.  So the bees are no different than robber bees.  Without the pull of the queen pheromone, they have a hard time finding a way into the hive.  Attached to the queen, resident bees can negotiate the robber screen and undaunted, enter the hive from the side opening of the robber screen.

DUH.  My bees were flying at the hive in every direction and not finding the hive entry.

So I removed the robber screen and allowed the wayward bees to find their to-bee-queen and will wait to install the robber screen!

But I do plan to put them on every hive this year.  I lost my two biggest hives last summer to robbing and I am not having that happen again, if I have any possible way to influence that occurrence.

Survivor Miracle Maybe???

On Sunday after the robbery on Friday, I walked out of my basement door and noticed this nuc, sitting with four empty frames in it.  There were bees!  And no reason for them to be there.

I think these are the survivors from the robbed hive.  The queen is from Don Kuchenmeister and the bees are tough little small cell bees who should be able to make it.



Quick like a rabbit, I put the nuc up on bricks, gave it an inner cover and a top cover and added an empty nuc as a surround with a Boardman feeder full of honey in it.  I replaced the empty frames with drawn frames from what I think was their original hive, the robbed out one.

I also put two frames in the upper nuc with the Boardman (with a pint jar of honey) in between.  I think I should put those two frames side by side and will when I go back to it.



I didn't look for the queen, but the bees acted like a small swarm does.  I'll check for a queen in a couple of days.  Bees were orienting and flying in and out.



I reduced the entrance so that they would be safe while I'm off to the mountains to the Asheville conference.  I hope they'll make it.  I'm inclined to consider keeping them in the nuc for the winter if they can manage to get a hive going.

Miscellaneous Bee Tid Bits

This morning there were still bees clumped in one of the flowerpots.  This makes me think even more that there is no mated queen.  But I set up the nuc with a Boardman feeder and the bees went into the hive.  I have no idea what to think of this swarm.  I can't check on it until Monday so hopefully they will have gotten their act together by then.



This little clump is pretty connected to the flower pot.


Another miscellaneous topic:  when you buy a package of bees, there are going to be a certain number of bees that die in transit.  This happens simply by the attrition.  In a hive a number of bees die everyday, but in the package, random bees have been shaken in together.  For some of them, their time is up in transit and they die.  In the particular package that I installed in this hive below, there were stacks of bodies on the floor of the package.



Bees don't like to have dead bees in their hive. So the bees quickly moved out the dead bodies. Compare the scene in front of the hive above with the small number of bodies on the ground in front of the other package hive installed the same day pictured below.  The package for the hive below had very few dead bees on the bottom of the package.




And the last miscellaneous bit, the tulip poplar is blooming in Atlanta evidenced by the bloom on the ground below.  This signals the beginning of the nectar flow in Atlanta - much earlier than usual.  Typically in Atlanta the tulip poplar blooms from mid April - mid May.  Now with everything blooming earlier, the question is how will the early spring affect the honey crop this year.

Blue Heron Hive is Warm and Fed

Yesterday I went over to check on the Blue Heron. This incident with the vandal has left me really nervous. I pulled up to the garden parking lot and I was the only car there, so despite Roswell Road traffic in full view, I turned my car to face toward the street before getting out of it.

Then I walked up to the hives to feed them and was so nervous that I did something by accident to my phone so that all the photos were black and white - not nearly as illustrative as color, but certainly a sign that I am massively uncomfortable at the Blue Heron alone - which never used to be my truth.



The hive was still locked up and undisturbed.


The boardmans were empty and bees were flying in and out of the hive.


I reloaded the Boardmans with lovely amber colored bee tea which you cannot begin to appreciate in black and white.


The aster is still blooming, the bees are still flying in and out. I will probably move these bees home next week when the weekend cold will still the aster bloom.

Blue Heron in the Dark of Night

As you remember, on Sunday I moved the Blue Heron hive into a nuc for the winter.  On Monday night Jeff and I planned to move the nuc to my backyard - it would take two of us because it's a 2 story nuc. (Not to mention that he has the straps required to keep the thing together in the process of a move.)

On Monday in the middle of the day, I went over to see how the nuc was doing.  The bees were blissfully flying into the nuc with pollen on their legs and full honey stomachs from the field of aster in bloom just outside the apiary in the garden.

I looked at the garden, at the football field's worth of land, covered in white aster with some purple in the mix as well.  Each plant was weighed down with bees.

I couldn't justify taking this already damaged hive to a new place right now - it would be like saying they had to eat at MacDonald's when Godiva Chocolate was free for the taking.  So I decided I had to leave the nuc there until the aster bloom is finished.

The other glitch was that I was going to Santa Fe for a professional conference (where I am right this minute) and wouldn't be able to oversee the hive, so we needed to do something to protect them.

I wasn't free to do this until after dinner on Monday and Jeff agreed.  So in the dark of the night, we drove over to the Blue Heron.  It WAS dark.  We had flashlights and made lots of noise getting out of the car to scare the honey thief, or any other vagrant who might be around (there are supposedly two homeless people who live at the Blue Heron).

Jeff suggested that I leave the car unlocked so we could make a quick get away if we needed to, but I wasn't comfortable with that - his suggestion points to how unsettled we both felt.

Our plan was to lock up the hive with a bicycle lock as Julia had with hers.  We set the combination in the car - we had to hook two locks together to be able to completely surround the hive.  Then we headed for the hive.

We set everything up first - put the two boardman feeders I had brought together (set the jar of sugar syrup on each of them); prepared the nuc box that would serve as a surround for the feeders so we could place them on top of the inner cover; figured out what each of us would do to make this happen.

Jeff started to unlock the bicycle lock.  "Don't say the combination out loud," I said, still worrying that someone might be hiding in the bushes listening.

The pictures are below.  We did lock the hive up as best we could, but someone could still push the boxes out from under the lock, as they could at Julia's as well.

I suppose we needed another cable lock to make a "gift package" approach which would indeed secure the hive.  Jeff's suggestion was that we do some sort of hinge lock system on hives that aren't in our backyard.  Sounds like a plan to me.

BTW, Jeff was right about the car.  When we got back, I fumbled with the keys and took forever to get the thing unlocked - good we weren't being chased or threatened!  I don't believe we'll visit the Blue Heron at night again!

Oh, but we will have to go again at night to move the nuc when the asters are done......

As always, click on the slideshow below to see the photos full sized:

It is SO hard to make 2:1 Syrup

About half the time I succeed; about half the time, it crystallizes. It is such a frustrating process. And the hard part is you don't know it's going to crystallize until after it has cooled off.

I made 2:1 syrup (actually bee tea - chamomile and thyme added to the 2:1 syrup) early this morning to take to Valerie's house today. I poured it into jars while warm, put it in the car and delivered it to Topsy around noon today. The third jar that I filled is crystallizing tonight. That means that the syrup I put on Topsy will also be crystallizing.....GRRRR.



According to this site, saturating the solution with sugar to the point at which the water can take no more is an invitation for crystals to form.  This is why so many commercial beekeepers use high fructose corn syrup.  Fructose does not crystallize.  But sucrose (sugar) does.  You add lemon juice or cream of tartar to candy to keep it from crystallizing.  I will look into whether anyone ever adds lemon juice to 2:1 sugar syrup.

You can see the crystals forming at the bottom of this jar.  Once it gets started the crystals beget more crystals and on and on like Genesis until the entire bottle is solid sugar again.



Another view of my frustration.



The two bottles of 2:1 that I took off of Topsy also had been busy crystallizing, as you can see in the picture below with crystals forming around the top of the jar (the bottom as it is set into the Boardman inside the top bar hive - I don't feed with Boardman feeders on the outside of any hive).  The bees had pretty much emptied the jars despite the crystals, thank goodness.



I have all kinds of objections to high fructose corn syrup, but adding a tablespoon is recommended to keep crystal formation from starting.  I think also adding a small bit of lemon juice might accomplish the same thing.  I may try this in my next batch.

After one of the comments below, I looked up Honey B Healthy and it does have lemongrass in the mix - maybe the acid of the lemongrass in it is what keeps the syrup from forming crystals because the sugar in it is sucrose.

Tomorrow when I make more bee tea I'm going to try to add a teaspoon of lemon juice and see what the effect is on the crystal issue.  BTW, I found a post on Beemaster where someone recommends adding a little lemon juice to the mix.

Blue Heron Visit on November 9, 2010

Julia and I stopped at the Blue Heron to feed our hives and get a feel for how they are doing.  Her hive is still questionable, but we added food to the hive top feeder that still had a good bit of food left from our previous visit.  We worried that the food was below the duct tape line but it was not.  We did see (and I took pictures of) bees inside the mesh to drink the syrup.

My hive was full of bees and they had emptied the baggie, but not the Boardman jar.  I replaced both the baggie with a new full one and the jar with a full one.  The hive was quite heavy and I am hopeful that they are using the most recent box I added for syrup storage.  I did not pull up a frame to see, but will the next time I am there because there's no point in leaving an empty box on through the winter.

Here's the slide show of what we saw at Blue Heron. Remember you can click on the slide show to see the captions, to change the speed of the picture changes, and to see it full sized:

New Topper for Topsy

When I arrived at Valerie's house today, it was 64 and the bees were flying in and out of Topsy. I saw one bee with pollen on her legs. I don't know what the others were doing. With the severe cold nights over the weekend, I imagine there is no more aster nectar.

You can see the bees at the entry in the photo below (if you can't, I put a red arrow pointing to them). There was a constant entry and exit at that end of the hive the whole time I was there.



Both jars of syrup were empty. Since we are having flying temperatures every afternoon this week, the bees are likely to be able to use this syrup, so I replaced both jars.

As a nod to the colder weather, I moved the follower board closer to the actual hive to help shrink their hive space. I didn't get it as close as I'd like but I'll get that done next week.



I traded out the wavy plastic cover for this newly constructed hive top. It was awkward and a little heavy, not like the wavy plastic. I may not like having this on top of the hive. When I tried to put it on the first time, I knocked against one of the top bars at the unused end of the hive and the bar dropped into the hive, necessitating my removing the top, replacing the top bar and essentially starting over again.

Doesn't it look more effective, though, than the white plastic one?



Here's a side view so you can see the supports and the amount of air space between the top and the top bars. I hope this helps the bees stay warmer than that flimsy plastic.



Tomorrow I'm checking on Blue Heron.

Blue Heron Going Into Winter

Julia and I made a quick feeding/question answering trip to Blue Heron today to feed our hives and see what's going on with them. Noah came too.....he's got a creative way of thinking about things, so it helps so much to have him with us.

Julia's remaining hive at BH is weak in numbers and we are quite worried about it. She took the hive top feeder off and set it on the ground. Since there are three hives of active bees there, we covered it with a cloth to keep robbing or drowning from happening while we checked on the hive.

We wanted to pull up some frames to see if the bees are storing anything. You can see that there are few bees here in this hive. The frames in this box have some stored honey but given how much syrup has been available to them, the minimal storage in this box probably points to the low numbers of bees in the hive.

Our nights have been cool and we were loath to fool around too much with these hives, respecting the bees' winter plan for themselves, so we elected only to check the top box for stores and do nothing more. There was some storage, but not a lot and the food in the upper feeder hadn't been touched much.

I've heard from other beekeepers in the area that their bees are slowing down in taking syrup. This could be because we have a good aster flow going and it may be because the hives are getting enough stored for winter. This hive, however, is not at all ready for surviving the winter.

We filled the hive top feeder. Julia brought a solid inner cover to substitute for the ventilated cover that has been on the hive all summer. When we put it on, Julia was worried that bees might come through the hole in the inner cover and drown in the hive top feeder. Noah, in a moment of brilliance, suggested that we put the ventilated cover back on on top of the inner cover, thus closing the inner cover off to bees entering the hive that way.

When we opened my hive the bees had only taken 1/2 of the pint bottle and about half of the baggie feeder. The baggie had been on the hive for 10 days at this point and I think they should have taken it all by now. I had replaced the pint jar on Thursday because I wondered if the previous jar had clogged holes in its top.

Noah didn't know I was using bee tea (which has thyme floating in it). He looked at my baggie and said, "Something has started sprouting in there!"

I've been wondering if this hive were out of room. Unfortunately I forgot to take any more pictures. We took off the Boardman and gently lifted up the baggie so I could look at the frames in the top box. This hive has a deep and a medium. It's an 8 frame hive so really it needs to have another medium on it going into winter to have enough stores.

I had brought with me a box of drawn comb to add to this hive. I pulled up - with great difficulty both because of its weight and because of the amount of propolis these girls have generated - the second frame from the outer edge. It was full of honey. I decided to interpret this as the hive has no more room to store their syrup/nectar.

I went ahead and added the second medium since it is drawn comb and the bees can go right ahead and use it. I won't be able to check this hive again until early in the second week of November. If they haven't made use of the drawn comb at that point, then I'll take this extra box off and hope they can make it through the winter with the deep and medium 8 frame all full of honey.

Since our first hives at Blue Heron died in the flood of Sept 2009, these hives are the first possibility for having a second year hive at Blue Heron. Kevin and Peter (the owners of the third hive) have a very active, apparently thriving hive, so there's a good chance theirs will make it through. Julia's first hive died and her remaining hive is weak. I so much want this one of mine to succeed.

Maybe they'll make use of this new box to store the bee tea syrup and will have enough resources.

I know I'm keeping my fingers crossed (toes too).

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.

Bee Tea for Blue Heron

On Thursday I checked on the Blue Heron hive. They had emptied the Boardman (interior) and had emptied the baggie feeder. It is increasingly cooler at night. As winter approaches I may start feeding with an upturned jar but instead of the Boardman, simply balance it on two end bars.

Jennifer Berry talked about this at our bee meeting on Wednesday. She feeds her hives through the winter. Most of her hives have a larger (jar accommodating) circle cut out of the inner cover and she has a cut in the top cover on which she can upturn a jar. So she can feed the hive without opening it. However, an alternative she suggested would be to use a box as a surround for a jar feeder sitting on end bars just above the cluster so that the bees can access it easily. To access a Boardman, they have to leave the cluster and walk into the feeder, a challenge when you are a cold bee.



I brought bee tea to this hive both for the baggie and in a jar. I lower the bag gently and slowly to allow the bees to get out of the way into the cracks between the bars.

Still going very slowly down (I even had time to take a couple of pictures, as you see!)


Once down I left this hive for the weekend, fed with the interior 1 pint boardman and a baggie with about 2 1/2 quarts in it. Julia's second hive at Blue Heron is not doing well - small hive beetles everywhere - so we are concerned about all the Blue Heron hives and their ability to get through the winter.