Atlanta Temperature Today Will be 106!

We have a dearth of nectar, supposedly, in Atlanta and it's hot as H____.  The high today is supposed to be 106 and I think it must be close right now.  My dog Hannah, whose preference on summer days is to be outside in pursuit of squirrels, is camped out by the air conditioner duct.  (I know it's the return duct but for some reason, it's a very cool spot on the floor)

I did worry about the bees, though, and checked my hives at home on Thursday.  After all, if the Top Bar absconded, could the others be far behind?  My goal was to see if they were eating up all their stored honey and if I might need to consider feeding them.

In every hive I found stored honey and uncapped nectar.  The bees have been working the porcelain berry really hard lately and maybe it is a nectar source.  I don't see them with pollen on those vines, but they are all over the flowers.  The bloom is almost over, though.



I found frames like the one above in every hive.  I also found boxes full of capped honey like the one below.



I even found some newly drawn wax....



By way of management, I removed one box from the hive below because it is a small hive and they were not using the space.  I am most worried about this hive.  They do have a queen who is laying, and they have some stored honey, but this is the weakest hive in my apiary.  This was a split off of Colony Square and has not done well - they've had two queens since the split that they made from frames of brood and eggs.  I should move some frames of brood and eggs into this hive to bring up the numbers, if nothing else.  This hive will never make it through the winter at this rate.



Other management tasks:  I put bottle caps under most of the top covers to help with ventilation in this heat.  Also if the bees were not using their newest box addition, I moved it to the top of the hive so its empty space could also help with ventilation.



The little kitten swarm is living still in nuc boxes (three of them).  I wondered how they were doing.  I looked and easily found the queen - she's in both photos below.  I was so relieved and she looks like the queen who ate the honey off of my fingertip, so I am going to believe that she is the actual queen of the hive.



If you don't see her right away, she's near the bottom of the frame just to the right of center.



So for now, I'm not worrying about the strength of my hives' stores - they all seem OK for the moment.
Although if the nectar is done for the year,  I'll probably feed going into September....it's funny because my general stance is that I want survivor bees and don't want to feed them if they can't manage on their own, but with this many hives, I feel a lot of responsibility not to lose my investment in addition to not wanting to lose the bees.

Temperature record set in Atlanta today at 106.8!

Bee Mad, Bee Mean

On my way home from EAS on the 7th, I stopped in Rabun County and spent the night so that I could check on my bees there.  I didn't take my smoker with me on the EAS trip - it makes the car smell like a campout and I was traveling for a week.  I thought the Rabun bees are so gentle - I usually work them without smoke, so no worries.

Well, I went to the Rabun hive on Saturday afternoon.  They were orienting and it had been almost three weeks since I had been there.  Those bees were mad.  They didn't take kindly to my visit and stung me about three times.  So I packed it up and left until Sunday morning.

Sunday morning I returned, again with no smoker which was still back in Atlanta on my deck.  I opened the hive around 10 AM.  I always move slowly and gently around bees, but this time it didn't help.  Those bees were loaded for bear.  I immediately got stung at least 10 times just for lifting up the top cover.

I must have smelled like banana from the stings after that because I dropped my bee gear and moved rather quickly toward the car - bees stinging me the while.  One got inside my veil and tattooed my neck beautifully.  Another flew into my hiking boot and went to town with her stinger.  When I got back to the cabin and undressed I counted 12 stings, not to mention the 20 or so stingers in my jacket that didn't get me.

I wonder if they are hungry or just hot and bored.  I couldn't open the hive that weekend and simply stopped back by and picked up my gear on my way back to Atlanta.  I'm going up this Saturday for a smoker accompanied inspection and we'll see what gives.

I was relieved, if they are hungry, to notice the kudzu blooming in the trees above the hive.  Kudzu has a nectar that the bees like and it results in grape flavored honey.  See the purple blossoms in the center of the picture?

And that wasn't my only recent bee-mad experience.

Remember how my only hive left at home was queenless? Remember how I drove to Lula to buy a queen from Don K at Dixie Bee Supply? I brought her home and put her in the box (see below) and left for EAS.



When I got home from EAS, I hit the ground running. I teach at Emory in the summers and I had 63 grad students about to take my final exam, so I looked out at the bees but didn't open the hive. They looked happy.  I had left the robber screen on.  Bees were moving in and out.  Life in the hive looked fine from my sun porch and I had Emory students on my mind.

Two weeks after installation, I opened the hive to get the queen cage out.  She was not released.  OK, I thought, this must mean that there is still a queen in the hive.  There are lots of bees in that hive, no brood, very little stores, lots of pollen.  I examined the frames in the bottom box and finally, there she was.  The old queen was indeed in this hive that I had requeened!

Ooops.

Today Julia generously gave me a couple of frames from one of her Blue Heron hives and I added to it bees from my Blue Heron hive in a nuc box.

All of the hives at Blue Heron were light with few stores and little brood.  I fed my BH hive with a baggie of sugar syrup.

The weather in Atlanta has been horrendously hot, with no rainfall, and no nectar.  We took a frame of honey from one of Julia's Blue Heron hives to move it to the other one.

I picked up the honey frame to hand it to Julia, and was immediately attacked by the bees.  I'm sure they were thinking, "Hey, that's the only honey any of us have seen in a coon's age and you can't have it."  So six more stings later through my blue jeans and jacket, Julia installed the honey frame in the BP hive at Blue Heron (named for the oil spill).

I brought the nuc home ( I won't tell you the bad parts of the story - about how I didn't block the entrance of the nuc and there were bees all over my car - or how I remembered that it might be good to spray these bees from two different hives with sugar syrup, so I sprayed them in my car, coating the back of my Subaru with sugar syrup - or how in a huge hurry to get the uncontained bees onto my deck, I didn't take the time to unchain the gate and instead carried the nuc through the house to the deck, dripping bees onto the floor as I went).

I set the nuc up on my deck and put an empty nuc box on top of it and fed them.  I put the queen cage on the top bars beside the food.

Cross your fingers - after this fiasco of a bee day, that's certainly what I am doing.