Checkerboarding a hive during honey production

While I was checking on my own hives, I discovered that one needed a new box. I decided to video the process of checkerboarding.

There are two ways to employ checkerboarding to open up space in your hive. First is in the early spring when you checkerboard an overwintered hive to fool the bees into thinking they don't need to swarm because there is plenty of space. In this instance, you move every other frame in the top box of the hive into an empty box and replace their previous space in the old box with empty frames. You do this with the honey box that is typically above the brood nest. This gives the bees more space to use and may interrupt their desire to swarm for more space.

Michael Bush wrote this on Beemaster to explain the basics of checkerboarding:
"For a bee colony:
o  Survival is the primary motivation
  - Survival of the existing colony takes priority.
  -  Bees will not do a reproductive swarm if they perceive it to jeopardize survival of the existing colony.
o  Survival of the species runs a close second.
  -  Generation of a reproductive swarm is the secondary objective of every over-wintered colony.
  -  The over-wintered colony expands the brood volume during the build-up by consumption of honey.
  -  When the colony has expanded the brood nest to the amount of reserve that they consider appropriate, they are now able to move into the swarm preparation phase.
  -  The first activity of swarm preparation is to reduce the brood volume by providing additional stores. As brood emerges, selected cells are filled with nectar or pollen.
  -  Alternating empty drawn combs above the brood nest "fools" the bees into thinking they don't have enough stores yet for swarming and causes them to expand the brood nest, giving both a bigger field force and avoiding reproductive swarming.

During honey production, checkerboarding can help open up room for honey production. In fact the bees will not draw wax or store nectar when there is no nectar flow. I've found during the nectar flow, though, that employing checkerboarding in honey boxes increases the storage of honey. I did this in my hive today (we are still in an ongoing nectar flow).

I use foundationless frames and it is essential to provide checkerboarding when you add a box of foundationless frames. The full frames moved up to a new box provide a "ladder" for the bees to get to the tops of the frames to draw wax.

Here is a video of how to do it:

Heat from Inside Can/not Predict Live Bees in Winter

At GBA this past weekend, Jim Tew suggested that if you wanted to have a good time in the winter, go buy yourself a cheap stethoscope and have yourself a party listening to the sides of your beehives. It probably isn't much of a party if you don't hear anything, but if you do, that could be fun.

We had snow on January 23. Not much of a snow, but it did actually fall white out of the sky and accumulated barely on our yards before it melted by midday or early afternoon. In the morning I looked out of my window and noticed that snow was melting on top of my hives.

OK, I thought, if a hive has melted snow on the top, the bees are generating enough heat to melt it...that would be an indication that the hive is alive. If the snow is totally unmelted, the hive must be dead. Sounds reasonable, right?

So here's the tour:

Nuc number one: made from the tall hive to the left in late July:

Nice hot little melted circle and I have the warm confident feeling that this hive is alive.

Nuc Number two: also made from the tall hive to the left in late July:

This nuc is in a deep with one medium super above it. The snow is unmoved by bee heat, so I assume this nuc is dead. After all, it seemed light and had not taken the honey I had fed them.

Hive Three: Survivor swarm from my neighborhood. This is its second winter. These bees refused to use the entrance once I put a Billy Davis robber screen on and found their way out through a crack in a board on the side.

Again the snow and ice have melted - in a funny slanted pattern, but melted, nonetheless. So I assumed these bees were alive.

Next hive: A Jarrett Apiaries package that I did not harvest from because I wanted them to have enough food to go through winter

Snow covered with no signs of melting. These bees must be dead.

This is a hive that was in a nuc through last winter that I kept in a nuc most of bee season. In July I moved it into a normal hive to overwinter. See the round pattern of melted ice and snow? These bees are going to make it through their second winter.

And finally my "mother" hive who has birthed most of these babies. She began as a split from a survivor hive that I got from Bill Owens. This hive is a swarm from the Bill Owens hive in Tom Phillips' yard. And look at the powerful circle of heat it has generated. This is this hive's third winter.

So, as Paul Harvey used to say, here is the "Rest of the Story." That was the title of his radio show.

So all the hives that I thought were alive are indeed alive. Following Walt Wright's checkerboarding plan, I have been into the top of all of the hives in the last two weeks and attempted checkerboarding. I say attempted because I don't have lots of drawn comb and because some of the honey domes in my hives included honey joined to honey in the next frame so lifting one of those frames would cause a mess of dripping honey in the hive and I didn't want that. So in the eight frames, I moved at least three in each hive to an upper box and moved in drawn comb.

However, all the hives I thought were dead were not. The nuc in the deep is so concentrated in the deep and have not used the box above it at all. I had an inner cover on it with a surround nuc box and an interior Boardman feeder of honey in the top box with the top cover on that. I assume that the heat generated by the hive was dissipated by the time it made its way through the empty second box and the inner cover.

The hive totally covered with snow was indeed dead. I opened it and it was full of honey that had not been slimed by the SHB. This means they went into winter with honey, but had died for another reason. The bottom of the hive was full of dead bees. I did not see deformed wing, but I'm sure the hive died by something vectored by the varroa mite. I did not use the honey left in the hive to feed any other hives because I did not want to transmit disease and all of the other hives had plenty of honey.

The one hive short on supplies (or at least I thought so because they had no honey in the second box) was the deep nuc covered with snow. I filled a feeder jar with honey and put it in the surround nuc box and by the next day the bees had moved all of the honey into the nuc box below.

So while looking at melted snow does tell part of the story, it doesn't necessarily tell the whole story.

Checkerboarding for honey production

Today I noticed that one of my hives had a lot of bees on the front porch.  I thought they probably needed a new box, so I opened the hive.  Sure enough, the top box was packed with honey - every frame was being used.

The bees had no space and it was hot in there, so they had moved to the front porch.

Both the hive needed a new box as a place to put new honey, and they needed to come inside and work for me instead of hanging out.  You can see glimpses of the fat honey-filled comb in the photo below.

On most frames there was both capped and uncapped honey.

So I took the new box and set it on the upturned telescoping cover and the inner cover.

In the box on the top of the hive, I took frames 2, 4, 6, and 8 and moved them one at a time to the new box waiting on the inner cover.  Now the new box has honey-filled comb in those positions.  I took the empty frames from 2, 4, 6, and 8 in the new box and moved them to the top box of the hive.

Now the box on the inner cover has half of the honeycomb from the old box and half empty frames.
When I set it on the top of the box, the bees now have double the space to store honey and it is evenly divided between the two boxes.

Moving Bees from Sebastian's House

Sebastian has a new (5 wk. old) baby boy and he and his wife have decided that they would like to send the bees back to us.  So on Monday night after dark, Jeff and I moved the bees to my backyard.

The hive seemed small, light and the bees seemed particularly uninterested in our efforts to move the boxes.  We strapped up the hive with no incident.  We stapled (Jeff did) a screen wire cover for the entry.

We had fed these bees bee tea (one feeder full - about 2 quarts) going into winter and had thought they might not make it because they had almost no stores before we fed them.  So when the hive seemed light, it was what we expected.  We were thrilled that they had survived despite the winter and low stores.

There were bees still in the empty rapid feeder cone when we removed it, so we covered it with a pillow case hive drape and set it in the smoker bucket for the trip to my house.







We set these bees up on Monday night.  Then on both Tuesday and Wednesday it was unseasonably cold in Atlanta.  I did see a moment of activity on a warmish part of one of those days, but not much.  I was thinking it was a small hive, so I wasn't surprised.

Today it was in the low 60s and I had a 2 hour break in the middle of the day, so I came home to look at the bees.  OMG, there were thousands of bees orienting to this hive.  I've never seen so many - thousands more than are in my strong hive.

There was brood in this hive from the bottom to the top.  The hive was only three boxes and a feeder above the inner cover surrounded with an empty box.  Bees, bees, bees.

I looked in the bottom box and saw brood, capped and uncapped and eggs in almost every empty cell.

I always use hive drapes and I have never seen so many bees landing on the drapes on top of the boxes.

The photo above is what I saw when I opened the middle box.  What a hive!

I covered it with a hive drape and again found brood, capped and uncapped, nectar being collected and lots of eggs.  I also saw many drones - not too many but compared to what I have been seeing (one or two in each box on a hive), there were twenty in each box that I saw.

I didn't see any swarm cells (yet) but I didn't go through every frame.  These bees were just orienting and I didn't want to disturb their home completely.  But that will be my next goal with both of the hives in my yard - to make a split or two from each of these strong hives.

When I got in the third box, again it was built out from one side to the other and included brood as well as honey.  I decided to turn the feeder surround box into a hive box and checkerboarded the frames from box 3 to box 4.

What this means is that I took frames 2, 4, and 6 from box 3 and replaced them with empty foundationless frames.  I put frames 2, 4 and 6 in those same positions in box 4 and put empty foundationless frames in box 4 in positions 1, 3, 5, 7 and 8.  I didn't do 7 and 8 because there was a slight cross comb in box 3 on 7 and 8 and I didn't want to risk breaking the honey comb and tempting a robbing situation.

I turned my attention to the other hive in the yard, my Northlake swarm from last year.  They were putting up nectar but had not used up the space in the box I added recently, so I left their hive as is.

I believe I can make a split from each of these hives next weekend or the next and will not change the honey production of the hive.  I won't do an even split, but will take five frames and make a split or if I find swarm cells, I may put my new queen castle from Brushy Mountain to use.

Also a neighbor across the street came over to ask if I could help her with a bee problem.  Bees (mine and I'm sure others from the six beekeepers who live within blocks of me) were going in and out of a large potted plant by her mailbox.  I stuck my hand in and obviously it was a water source for the bees.  I turned it over and water absolutely poured out of it.  She was amazed that I didn't get stung nor did she and that there was so much water in the pot.

To encourage my bees to get water in my yard, I put a round bread pan on top of my empty nuc box and floated wine corks in it.  I had fantasies about little bees being like loggers and trying not to roll the cork as they went for water, but it was the best I could do on short notice!

Morningside Honey - Gorgeous Bee Work

When I got back from Rabun County this afternoon, I went straight over to Morningside.  I've taken frames of brood and eggs out of that hive, but I haven't really inspected the survivor hive in about a month and I haven't ever opened the split hive up there.  The split was made on March 9.

I started with the split.  The queen, if they successfully created her and she mated successfully, should be laying by now.  She would just barely be laying.  When the bees make a queen from an egg, it takes 16 days for the queen to emerge.  Then she spends four or five days in the hive to reach sexual maturity.  (We're up to March 29 at this point).  Then she may mate over two to four days, making more than one mating flight.  (We're up to April 2).  Then she returns to the hive to begin her forever job as an egg-laying machine.  (April 3).  So she may have been laying for about 9 days at most.

Here is the opened queen cell, so when I got into the bottom box (first), I was pleased.

I was pleased to find that she is indeed laying and the bees seem happy.  They have lots of empty drawn comb and have drawn some nice comb.

In the second picture you can see stored pollen and a little capped worker brood.  In every empty cell there is either an egg or larvae.  Really good results of this split.  Since larvae is capped at about 7 days, those capped larvae in the center are probably her first capped brood!

The Morningside survivor hive I first inspected this year on February 24.  I haven't looked deeply into it since then (horrors!).  I have opened it to steal a frame of brood and eggs to help other hives.

Well, it is boiling over with bees.  While I was lighting the smoker (before I put on my veil), I got stung twice in the head by bees blown into my hair from that hive!  I opened the hive planning to add a box but ended up adding two.

The top box was filled with almost fully capped GORGEOUS white comb honey.  I marked the box as a possible cut comb honey harvest with a magic marker.  I brought a box of foundationless frames to give them for more honey.   I put it beneath the white capped honey box because I didn't want the honey to make the queen think the hive was out of room.

I was so overwhelmed that I forgot to take a photo of the white capped honey.


I then went into the next box and both it and the box below it were full of brood.  The queen had nowhere else to lay.  This is a real problem.  So I took another hive box and checkerboarded the brood frames with empty frames in hopes that I can prevent a swarm.  I didn't see swarm cells but I didn't go into the bottom box.  


The photo below was an interesting frame - it was drone brood on either side with worker brood in the center.  I think it must have been a drawn frame that I put in the box to act as a ladder so the queen used the cells by virtue of the size of the cells....the large ones for drones and the small ones for workers!

Perhaps if I have time this weekend, I'll make a split (or two) from this hive and take one of them up to be the second Rabun hive.  I was hoping for a swarm from the school wall hive but today when I walked up there, the school bees that have been there for years were dead and gone.

It's March and Colony Square is Bursting at the Seams

Today I gave a talk at the Riverside West Garden Club in Sandy Springs (part of Atlanta).  I reviewed the talk last night and packed the car this morning.  Yesterday I volunteered at the Publix Marathon in Atlanta (5:30 AM - 1 PM); worked the bees with Jeff in the afternoon; and went to a bee course planning meeting over dinner.

I wasn't functioning on all cylinders this morning.

I put my computer in the car, the LCD projector, some honey and crackers for them to taste, a box to take to Colony Square after the talk, and my bee gear.  I drove 25 minutes to the meeting site, set up all my equipment (computer and slide projector) and then discovered that I had left my flash drive back at home with the whole talk on it in Power Point.

Luckily I had another talk actually saved on the computer that covered the topics, but didn't have the lovely bees on flowers pictures that I always take to garden clubs.   Despite all of that,  I think the talk went OK.  Then I drove to Jeff's to add a box to Colony Square.

We've made two splits from Colony Square and it is still bursting at the seams.  I got fully suited and lit my smoker and opened the hive.  This hive is so angry all the time.  Bees head butted me throughout the small intrusion.  I decided I should name the two splits from this hive (also angry bees even in their new location at my house) Spawn of Satan One and Spawn of Satan Two (SOS1 and SOS2).

All I did to them today was remove the top box (about 50 pounds full of honey) and add another box under it.  I took two frames of comb from Box #3 and put them in Box #4 in the center.  I put foundationless frames in their place in Box # 3 (see below).

With the addition of the box below the top box and with the two ladder frames in the center of the hive, the bees are supposed to build comb more easily.  In a hollow tree, for example, the bees start at the top and build down.  So putting the box below is a more natural way for the bees to build their comb.



Bees were so in my face that all the photos I took were like the one below with a bee obscuring your view as she flew toward my veil in front of the camera!



In the end I left Colony Square with FIVE boxes - it's only March - and met Julia at the Blue Heron (see next post).  If things continue to go well, this hive will produce a record amount of honey.  It was so difficult to lift that fifty pound box by myself into the top position.  The second they have capped that honey, we are harvesting it.



Jeff showed me a unique way to stop the air flow to the smoker and I employed it today.  We'll call it Jeff's acorn method:

Happier Bee News on the Old Home Front

Yesterday I taught Hive Manipulation at the Tara Beekeepers' Short Course in the morning. In the afternoon it was warm enough to open my hives at my old house and I have been so anxious to see how they are doing.

Five was ALIVE!
 (I loved this movie when my kids were young).

The first sign that Five was alive was this bee with full pollen baskets entering the hive. Bees laden with pollen don't come in to rob out a hive.

I saw another who missed the entrance and was on a stick on the ground.

Inside there were lots of bees. This is the bottom box but the one above had bees as well.

Here we can see signs of a laying queen - brood and eggs. I was so thrilled with this - so much more fun than opening up my dead-outs at home. Oh, and BTW, I saw drones (at least 10 in this small hive) and some drone brood.

Inside the swarm hive I found a different story. Three full boxes of honey, no brood and just a baseball sized group of bees….but there was no sign of a queen. I felt impressed that these girls had made it through the winter and had not been robbed out by a larger hive. I thought I would take a good frame of brood and eggs from both Lenox Pointe or Colony Square and give it to this hive to see how they would do.

Really the smarter decision would be to combine this hive with Five Alive and maybe I'll do that next weekend.

Lenox Pointe has had less bee traffic than I would like to see, but they had brood and eggs in the bottom box. I couldn't move this frame to the Swarm hive because it's a deep and the swarm hive is in all mediums. Here is a strong argument for uniform frame size, but I started Lenox Pointe from a Jennifer Berry nuc last year and it was established in a deep, as a result.

They had good honey stores, as well. This hive is going to be fine.  I did take a frame of brood and eggs from their Box #2 and put it into the swarm hive.  My plan was also to take one from Colony Square.

Then I opened Colony Square. I didn't take many pictures and the ones I took were blurry. It was filled with bees. There are as many bees in that hive now as in its strongest day last summer and it was a powerful hive then. Jeff was helping me and he called out the pollen colors he saw coming into the hive:  red, orange, yellow.

As we lifted the top solidly filled with honey box off of the hive, we uncapped drone brood that they had put between the boxes. The bees were hopping mad.

I had on a veil and jacket. I also had on gloves because my hands were stung in the swarm hive (queenless and angry with my intrusion).  Jeff just had on a jacket and veil as well. He helped me lift off the second box (also heavy but with brood as well as honey), and again we tore up drone brood between the boxes.   Jeff had company who came to see the new grand baby, and wasn't expecting to work the bees with me, so I encouraged him to go be with his guests.

Meanwhile I was using hive drapes and smoke but these bees were so unhappy. Suddenly I realized at least three were inside my veil. I walked away from the hive and killed at least one of the bees inside the veil by pinching her, but not before I had been stung three times.

Why didn't I just stop the inspection?

This was a day when I could work the bees, the temperature was finally right, and the drone brood between the frames pointed to a need for space. These bees are going to swarm unless I really work hard to keep them contained and I knew one way would be to checkerboard the brood box to expand the brood space.

So….I put on my Golden Bee suit - just happened to have it in the car. My friend Julia had been using it until she got one of her own and had conveniently just returned it to me. I think I'll keep it in the car on bee visits!

I took a new box with a few drawn frames and some strip frames and went back to Colony Square,  waiting for me, draped but angry. The bottom deep had brood in it, but I needed to do this with medium boxes. The next box (#2) had brood as well, so I checkerboarded it with the new box I brought with me.

I completely forgot about the swarm hive and did not pull a frame of brood and eggs for it.

Checkerboarding means that in Box #2, frames 1, 3, 5, 7 were left with brood in them and frames 2, 4, 6, and 8 are now empty comb or undrawn frames. In Box #3, frames 2, 4, 6, and 8 are brood frames moved up from Box #2 and frames 1, 3, 5, and 7 are now empty comb or undrawn frames. This expands the brood nest as per Michael Bush (he calls it unlimited brood nest) and gives the queen more room to lay.

You can only do this if the hive has enough nurse bees to keep the brood warm and this hive is bursting at the seams...so no problem there.  Next Sunday, if the weather is good, Jeff and I are going to make two nucs from this hive.  

This is how the hive looked almost an hour after I was done....and it's February!  This hive is bound to swarm unless we do something.

Pick myself up, Dust myself off, and Start all over again…..

For days I had been seeing lots of bees flying in and out of my one remaining hive at home. I assumed they were alive and well and given the Atlanta extra warm winter, I should be ready to checkerboard to help expand the brood nest as Michael Bush talks about in his book and on his website.

So last Monday, I went out, bee bag in hand, planning to expand the broodnest.

I took a box of empty frames with foundation strips, ready to do the job.

I opened it up, went through every box, and found that in fact, the hive was dead - no bees, no brood, just stored nectar and a few bodies on the screened bottom board (AGAIN).  The bees flying in and out of the hive in great numbers were not residents, but rather either robbers or scouts……I had to go back to the office and was so upset that when I returned to my business clothes and got to my office, I looked down and I had on two different shoes!

Well, who can blame me? This was quite upsetting. I now have no hives alive at home.

The only possible good news is that bees continue to go in and out of that hive in large numbers. They don't appear to be robbing so I am hoping a swarm will move in in a week! Fingers crossed.

I do have five packages ordered from Don K and 2 nucs ordered from Jerry, so I should be OK in the start all over again department.

Note:  This is my 950th post - that means I'll pass 1000 in 2012!

A Look at Blue Heron and I Miss the Smell of the Bee Hive

When I had the table at the science fair at Montgomery, I drove around for a couple of days with bee equipment in the back of my car.  I had a nuc with old comb in it; some honeycomb; some drawn frames out loose in the car.  Even my grandson, when he rode in my car a couple of days after the fair said, "Oh, Grandma, your car smells just like the bee hive!"

I miss that smell that goes with bee season, but spring is bursting out all over in Atlanta.  The flowering trees like cherries and pears are beginning to bloom.  Tiny red blossoms from the red maple are blowing down on the streets.

I went to Blue Heron and opened the hive for the first time.  I didn't do a deep inspection but did look at each box.  The top box was a surround for a baggie feeder and a Boardman (inside the hive).  The sugar syrup had not been touched.  The bees had not needed it despite our harsh winter.



I removed the empty box, put the sugar syrup baggie into a bucket, and removed the Boardman.  Of course that means for a couple of days until I took it out of my car, the car had that warm wonderful bee hive smell!

The top box had a little honey stored but the box below it was completely full of capped honey - and heavy as could be.  The bees were still living in the bottom 8 frame deep.  There was lots of capped brood and although you can't see it since my camera was operating at less than optimal, the open cells are full of brood.



I only pulled up two frames but felt great about the capped brood and larvae.



Concerns about this hive that must be addressed:
1. The full honey super above the brood box means that the queen is honey bound.  I need to checkerboard with empty frames or at least move the full box up to the top and switch the mostly empty top box with the second box.
2.  The honey box needs to be marked since that honey was made with "bee tea" and I don't want to harvest honey that isn't informed by nectar, but is condensed sugar syrup.
3.  This hive is doing well and I need to consider the possibility that it will swarm (thus the need to checkerboard).

Julia and I will inspect it and try to address all of the above issues.