And on to Stonehurst Place

Well, after a kind of rough start at Sebastian and Christina's house, I went on to the Stonehurst Place Inn where I installed two more nucs.  This went smoothly.

First I put the nucs on top of the hive bodies where they would live and opened the screened wire.

The bees seemed delighted to be freed from captivity.



These bees looked good although there weren't as many bees in the nucs as in the first two I installed.



I did not see either queen but the brood looked good and I saw new eggs in both installed hives.



Above and below you can see brood frames.



They are happily ensconced in their new homes.



I did see one bee in one of the hives that I installed here with definite deformed wing virus.  We'll keep watching for other varroa vectored problems.

While there I inspected the one hive that made it through the winter.  It was full of bees and full of drawn wax filled with honey.  I added a box recently to that hive on March 20, but it was full, so I added a new box.

Wings and the Bee

Today on Beemaster there is a discussion of k-wing virus in the bees.   When we open our hives in the spring, we are first hoping to find the hive alive.  If it's not alive or struggling, then the beekeeper wants to know what's wrong.

A hive may have starved to death.  Frequently this is why a hive has died.  The bees got too cold and the cluster could not move to where the honey was stored.

A struggling hive may have bees with various diseases.  The k-wing virus refers to a viral caused problem with the bee's wings.  The bee wing is made in two sections which are held together with hamuli (tiny hooks).  When a bee is infected with k-wing, the hamuli no longer hold the two wing sections together and the wing looks like the letter "K"  Below is a picture I found on the Internet taken by Danny Jensen:

You can see that the bee's wings are not connected.  This is a bee that cannot fly.

I've had examples in my own hives in other years, but couldn't find a picture as good as this one.

You also may find bees with deformed wing virus.  The bee emerges with shriveled, useless wings.  This is a different disease from k-wing and looks like this:

Being able to fly is essential to the community of the beehive.  If the bees are unable to fly, they are useless to the hive and the hive will fail to thrive.

In the normal life of the bee, the wings are essential for survival.  Old bees have ragged tips on their wings and seeing a bee with such wings on a flower in the summer, lets the observer know that she is almost at the end of her useful life.

Randy Oliver has an interesting article on "Old Bees"  in which he notes that the bees have a 500 mile warranty on their wings.  They wear out at about that point on average and the bee's useful life is then over.  So even if they aren't impaired with disease as in the photos above, when the foraging bee has flown her 500 miles, she's done.

Toll the Bells - One Hive Dead

Today the bees were flying and happy in Mellona and Aristaeus2. In each of these hives the sugar syrup I put in at the last warm moment about three weeks ago is all eaten. Bermuda, my oldest hive, was a different story. None of their sugar syrup had been touched. The top box was full of stores but the hive is dead and gone.

Scattered through the hive boxes (3 mediums) were dead bees lying on the tops of frames. There were also dead hive beetles throughout the hive and no evidence of hive beetle damage.




I found one tiny indication of starvation on two frames in the second box. A small cluster of bees were head down in a few cells back to back on two frames. These bees obviously starved while the frame next to theirs was totally full of liquid sugar syrup. This sometimes happens with a sudden cold snap when the bees make a bad decision about where to locate the cluster.



Keith Delaplane talked at our bee meeting in February about hive decline and said that across the country, beekeepers tend to lose 30% of their hives from year to year. Well, sadly, here's my 33% to add to the average. This was my first beehive and had made it through the previous winters, including its first winter when at the end of the winter most the bees in this hive had DWV or k-wing.

Because there were dead bees scattered throughout the hive, I wonder if this hive were weak and lost its queen during the winter or going into winter. Then the hive got robbed out because that's the way the bees scattered, dead throughout the hive look: like bees killed in the process of robbing. So when I put sugar syrup in the hive at the end of January on a 50ish day, they either were already a goner hive or they didn't have the resources to use the sugar syrup. The last little cluster died of starvation, with good stores beside and above them.

I am sad to lose them, but I still have two great hives. Mellona is three years old and Aristaeus2 is a two year old swarm hive from a swarm I got in 2008. And I am building a top bar hive this weekend to be optimistic about swarms coming my way in 2010.

Yet Another New Queen at Blue Heron and Powdered Sugar Shake

When I was last at Blue Heron, our third hive, the one the supplier gave us to replace the queenless nuc we got from him, didn't look good. The hive was not bustling with activity or bees and the numbers seemed small.

I was disappointed to find that the bees I saw on the tops of the frames had many shriveled and deformed wings, indicative of Deformed Wing Virus vectored by the varroa mite. I decided that I would return this week to do a powdered sugar shake.

Before shaking the powdered sugar, I pulled each frame to see how things are going in this weak hive. On the second frame I saw this opened queen cell. This is at least the third queen for this hive. Their first one failed and I don't think the second one was doing anything. Now they apparently have created yet another queen. Hopefully she'll be a good one.




I found two frames full of eggs and brood which was reassuring. The hive had good honey stores in the deep in which they live. The box above was completely empty and I removed it to give them more security (less space to defend).

The powdered sugar shake was quite an event. Here are the bees, covered with sugar clinging to the frame.

Here's how the whole box looked!

I took off the inner cover and put it on the ground and I removed the top box before doing this. When I lifted up the inner cover to set it back on the hive, the bees who had not experienced the powdered sugar shake surrounded one of their sisters to see what was going on with her and all this white powder!

Bringing In the Pollen and Bringing out the Dead

It's warm and the bees are flying from both hives. They are both bringing in bright yellow pollen (see first picture) and bringing out the dead.
In looking at the dead in both the second and third picture, it's clear from the deformed wings that I have a Varroa problem. I don't how early I can begin powdered sugar shakes. I'll post on the bee forum pages and let you know what they say.
I also wondered about the white dots in front of both hives. I assume it's bird feces from a bird eating the hundreds of dead bee bodies, but I don't know if I should worry about something else instead.

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.

Winter hives and Linda's Bees

Linda's beehives in the late fall/early winter (it's Dec 1, 2006)

We've had warmer days so I wanted to go into the hives before the cold weather moves in tonight. It's about 60 degrees this morning, so I decided to inspect the hives. Destin had a lot of bees on top of the extra super that is above the inner cover. I looked through the super and found that the bees have moved more of the honey down into the hive (or consumed it). They seemed to be storing pollen there, which is also important for their lives. I wanted to move this extra super back below the inner cover.

I only saw one small hive beetle in Destin and there were no bodies in the vinegar trap, but I refilled the trap with new vinegar anyway and put the hive back together with the extra super below the inner cover.

In Bermuda the bees were busy and angry that I had opened their cover. I didn't use smoke today. When the bees are smoked, they engorge themselves with honey and it didn't make sense to me to encourage them to deplete their winter stores for my comfort. It wasn't too bad - they flew around my veil more than usual but didn't seem particularly attacking.

The vinegar trap in Bermuda contained about ten bodies. I poured them out on the deck rail - maybe birds will eat the bodies - and refilled the vinegar. I saw about 4 beetles in Bermuda that I squashed with my hive tool. I also saw about 2 on the inner cover. These are much lower numbers than before. Does the SHB hibernate for winter?


I inspected all the bees I saw to see if the Varroa mite had given them deformed wing virus, but I didn't see any unhealthy wings on any of the bees. So far, so good.