Don's Queen is Doing Well in the Little Nuc

The little blue nuc hive with Don's queen is doing well.  I opened it today and saw five SHBs immediately.  I gave them the hive tool treatment.  I checked the AJ's traps (I have two on the hive) and both had lots of SHB in them.  I mixed apple cider and oil and put it in the traps and replaced them on the hive.

The hive was only occupying the bottom box.  However, the queen is laying nicely as you can see in the photos below.  There's lots of brood as well as new eggs.



I am hesitant to feed at this time of year - even inside the hive because of the possibility of robbing occurring in the dearth of nectar.  But I may feed these girls with a sandwich baggie feeder to help them build up a little.



I am pleased they are doing well and only looked at this one frame before closing up the hive.  I thought there would be no point in possibly causing injury to bees or the queen by inspecting further and I had seen what I needed to see.

Mellona as 2010 Bee Season Begins

I've seen a chipmunk under Mellona over the last several days. Today when I went out to open the hive for the first time in 2010, the entrance reducer had been pushed away. Maybe the bees did it in a Paul Bunyan effort, but I'll bet it was the chipmunk!

When I opened the hive, the baggie feeder of sugar syrup was still almost full. I put it on the hive 11 days ago. This says to me that they are not desperate for food, although I have not examined the boxes for provisions yet this year.



The hive looked small from opening the inner cover. The bees were concentrated on one side of the box. I assumed that probably meant the queen was in that area of the hive, so I expected to find brood either in the top or middle box on these side frames (2, 3, 4, 5).

In the past two winters, this hive has never moved out of the bottom box so I also was prepared to find activity and brood down there. However the bottom deep box that I have wanted to replace with a medium for two years was in fact full of empty-celled frames....not even any pollen stored there. I removed the box and will add a medium to this hive probably next week.



The top box had good honey stores still left after this hard, long winter, but I barely harvested anything from my hives last year.


On the outer frames I found never-used comb - I don't think it's this year's comb but the end of their comb-building from last year. If it were this year's comb, it probably wouldn't already be dirty, but with all the pollen they have been carrying in, perhaps it is from this year.



So Mellona is now an all-medium box hive! There were about 3 frames with capped brood on both sides. The brood area was small - about the size of a flattened grapefruit....but at least it was there. I saw some uncapped brood. The sun wasn't out, so I didn't see eggs although I tried and I didn't find Her Majesty - just evidence that she had been there.

Is there a Queen and Is she Laying?

The swarm I collected a couple of weeks ago looked like a secondary swarm and probably had a virgin queen. So the big questions are is there a queen and is she laying?

We've had terrible weather in Atlanta since I got this swarm and you never know how well it will do. The virgin queen had to brave wind, storm, hail, etc. to make the mating flight and get back in one piece. I had no idea if this had happened.

I was thrilled to open the hive today to find capped brood, lots of eggs and tiny larvae on two of the five frames in the bottom medium nuc box! If you can click on the pictures below, there are some good pictures of egg and tiny brood larvae. I was so thrilled!

In such a small hive, I should have been able to see the queen. I looked hard for her on the two frames of brood and larvae but didn't try too hard on the other frames. I was so relieved to see evidence of her.



My goal for this hive is for it to build up enough numbers and supplies to make it through the 2009 winter. We've gotten off to a good start. They are not in the upper box yet. The comb pictured below was all that had been made and the bees hadn't moved into this upper box.



Most of the time, the queen will only lay the amount of eggs that her workers can manage, so I suspect she is going slowly. She'll lay more and more as there are more workers to be nurse bees, and it will be a while before she gets into the second box. I'll bet that I move this hive into a full-sized box at the beginning of June - we'll see.

We have a Blue Heron inspection on Sunday that Julia is leading but we will inspect my hives in the process. We'll get to see if the "made" queen is laying and if the nuc hive is doing well. Decisions will be made about whether the hives need to be combined or if they can stay as two hives.

Good Hive Inspection News

Today was warm and lovely. I took the opportunity to inspect well two of my hives. First I opened Aristaeous2. This hive was a swarm gathered on April 1 last year.

The bottom box held no bees, no brood, no stores. I took it off of the hive. I now have a box of beautiful drawn comb in medium frames to use somewhere else.

The second box looked like this when I opened it. The bees looked good in this hive. It is a very active hive, often flying in temperatures that surprise me. I expect it to have a really good year.



I pulled a frame from the second box and found good examples of what you can see during good brood production. In case you haven't seen them before, the yellow arrow from the yellow number 1 below points to eggs. Seeing these lets me know that the queen is alive and well.

The yellow arrow by the number 2 points to tiny c-shaped larvae. If you click on this photo so you can see it larger, you'll see examples of brood in all stages of development. The arrow from the number 3 points to capped brood. The queen is laying all around the capped brood, filling in the frame.

I didn't see her but I didn't need to because the evidence is so present.

I left the hive smaller but stronger and look forward to adding another box on the top of this hive very soon.

Small Swarm Gets its Own Hive Box

Last night I painted the hive box for the small swarm that invited itself to my deck. My plan was to move them out of the deep nuc where they have been living to a medium 8-frame box.

I moved each frame from the nuc, orienting it exactly as it had been in the original nuc. When I first put the swarm in the nuc, the bees were living on deep frames since that is the box they had claimed for themselves when they arrived on my deck.

I have gradually moved out the deep frames and replaced them with medium ones. One I moved because it had wax moths. Several others I moved when I added frames of brood and bees from other hives. So I thought they were living on all medium frames in a deep nuc.

Imagine my surprise when I found that the last frame was still a deep - oh, dear. I examined the frame carefully and found that there were a few capped brood cells but the queen was not recently laying there.

What should I do?

I went to another hive and got a frame of capped brood that was a medium frame and substituted it for the deep. I made sure I didn't get the queen from the hive where I stole the frame. To do that I shook most of the bees on the frame back into their original hive before moving the frame. I needed to get dressed and go to work so I couldn't pick over the frames as I might under different time stress. So the frame I moved also had a lot of drone cells. I hope that won't be a problem for this new hive.

I put it all together, stood the nuc box and the deep frame outside the entry to the hive, put the top on and added the mint plant which has been on top of the nuc.

So now the small swarm has its own home. I hope they will thrive there.

When I pulled the frame from Bermuda, I saw lots of open swarm cells and one supercedure cell - and I only looked at three frames. They are packed into that hive, although I've given them lots of room to grow that they are barely using. I'll need to think about how I might open up the brood box even more.

Freezing Weather in April

Tonight the temperature in Atlanta will be in the 20s as will the temperature be tomorrow night. There are a number of bad things that can come of this:

1. My 2 year old blueberries will freeze (so I covered them, hence the ghostly looking sheets on my lawn). Walter Reeves says that is what to do - and he knows Georgia gardening best.


















2. The tulip poplar just started blooming today. It's a great source of delicious dark molasses-like honey. In Atlanta, it's our best honey flow. What will happen to the nectar with two nights in a row of freezing weather? On this web page the author indicates that late spring frost can have a very deleterious affect on the leaves but doesn't mention the blossoms.

3. Because of the tulip poplar flow, ordinarily I would put on supers tomorrow to allow the bees to store this incredible honey. However, adding an empty super when it's this cold for the next two nights adds to the challenge for the bees of keeping warm, so I'll probably super on Sunday or Monday rather than tomorrow.

The hives are full of capped brood and brood in all stages of early development. It will be a challenge for the bees to keep a large area warm, unlike in winter when the numbers have dwindled. Adding a super adds empty space to add to the area that will be cold in the hive. The bees don't keep the hive warm, rather they keep their cluster warm, but the current tight space they have keeps the warmth in better.

Bees Blooming in Bermuda

Today I got an email that a friend in my bee club has ordered two queens who will be arriving this weekend - she probably doesn't need them and wanted to know if anyone wanted them. I called her right away thinking that requeening Bermuda may help its recovery. She wondered why the hive was weak and I proferred my theory that the varroa mite had taken its toll over the winter. She wondered about unhealthy brood or what else might be wrong. She's coming to look at my hives on Saturday so she can help me think about the problem.

Meanwhile I had a 2 1/2 hour break in the middle of the day and came home to look at Bermuda. The number of bees in the hive has definitely increased since my last inspection of the brood area about 10 days ago. I took some pictures. In the first picture you can see well-capped brood and larvae uncapped in various stages of development. In the upper right quadrant you can see a bee with bright yellow pollen on her legs. She's at about 3:00 on the brood edge.

















I saw this larvae below with a definite Varroa mite on the larvae. See the little orange thing on the left of the C-shape of the larvae? That's a Varroa mite, happily developing with the bee.















I saw the queen (below with the white dot in the center of the picture). She is in the act of laying in this picture.

















If you click on the picture below, you can see in the lower part of the frame, brood in many stages of development. I do think this means that Bermuda is well on the way back. Granted, the queen is not covering the frames with brood - maybe an argument for requeening - but she is laying a good pattern and the bees are coming back. Currently the bees are all in one medium frame box.

Inside the hive brood cells

Here you can see what it looks like on a brood frame. If you double click on a picture you can see it much larger.

You can see the white larvae glistening in their cells.

The capped cells are developing into mature bees.

In the center of the lower picture you can see a bee emerging to take her place in the hive.

If you look closely you'll see some workers with their heads down in the cells