Another check on the Buckfast bees

The Buckfast bees near Emory are doing fine. In the intervening week between St. Patrick's Day when we installed them and Thursday, the 29th when I last inspected them, we've had incredibly cold weather for Atlanta after the first day of spring. We've had nights in the 30s and day time with only about an hour above 52 degrees.

That is to say that the weather has not been very conducive to bees flying to collect nectar. They have to have nectar to draw wax, so neither of the Buckfast hives (in Emory neighborhood or at my house) had a huge amount of new wax drawn. But these hives are using the wax. In most foundationless hives as soon as comb is drawn, the queen begins laying in it.

The hive at my house had done some coloring outside the lines in their wax building. I tried to get them back on proper course with heavy duty rubber bands.

These hives are doing well and I am pleased. The nectar flow is about to begin in Georgia. There is some nectar coming in, but the big flow comes with the tulip poplar and I had one errant bloom fall into my backyard today. However, in general, the tulip poplar here is beginning to put out leaves but not blooms.

Swarm Hive Intervention

In Atlanta this year we have had a record-setting 53 days of rain.  It rained on April 8 and 9.  Then Atlanta tied a 1980 record with rain for eight straight days from April 12 - 19.

Now in the beekeeper's mind, this has lots of consequences.  First the tulip poplar began to bloom during that period.  Frequently after the many stormy days and nights, I've seen this on the ground:

A tulip poplar bloom on the ground (and there are many) is not providing nectar for the bees.

The swarm I captured twice on April 7 was the third swarm issued by the originating hive. That means the queen was a virgin. And what does a virgin queen have to do when she finds her new home with the secondary (or in this case tertiary) swarm? She has to fly out and mate.

The odds of her mating successfully or well are slim with the constant rain.

This weekend, almost three weeks since the swarm was hived, my daughter and I went up to see the bees. I noticed that the bees in the hive I made from a split of a Mountain Sweet Honey hive that survived the winter were flying in and out with pollen, but the bees in the swarm hive were not.

I started worrying that the queen might have been short-bred or not mated at all.

Today I went up and opened the hive. I had with me a frame of brood and eggs from my neighborhood hive that overwintered successfully. I had wrapped the frame in a warm towel from the dryer because I wanted the eggs to stay warm.

I opened the hive and found bees and comb, but no queen activity in the bottom box. At this point I put in the frame of brood and eggs. 

In the second box also no bee activity - drawn comb that I had given them but nothing was being stored in it. There were many bees in this box. 

The third box had mostly drone brood with a few worker cells. I think the queen was poorly mated. The bees weren't even bringing in nectar, almost as if they knew they were doomed. 

I hope the frame of brood and eggs will give them a new lease on life. I'll add a frame of brood and eggs each week now until they have a successful queen in the hive.

The other hive, the split from Ray and Julie's Mountain Sweet Honey bees, was doing really well. Their new queen had successfully mated and there were eggs, brood, pollen and honey in that hive. The comb they were drawing was lovely and I have high hopes for that hive.

If you zoom in on this photo you can see many eggs in the open cells below the pollen.

A Chastain Quick-Stop

This morning I had to drive to the north part of Atlanta to pick up my tax data from my accountant.  Easy to go by the Chastain hive as I drove back to my office, so I did.  I was in business clothes, no camera, but helpfully, all of my beekeeping equipment was in my car from the mountains this past weekend.

I had an apron to put under my jacket to protect my nice pants.  I lit the smoker, put on my jacket and veil and went up to the hive.

When last I was at Chastain (about a week ago), the hive looked anticipatory.  They were not making a queenless roar, but they definitely did not have a laying queen.  The hive was full of queen cells that had been opened.  The brood cells were not back-filled with nectar but instead were polished and waiting at the ready for the advent of a new queen.

I thought I had read somewhere that it is not unusual for a swarm to requeen once it is settled into its new hive, but I now can't find a reference for that, so I'm not stating that as a fact.  This swarm hive has definitely made that decision.  Clearly the hive had requeened itself and was in no distress except for the fact that I was disturbing their peaceful anticipation.

The top two boxes were all honey - not completely filled.  As a matter of fact, no more honey had been put up than before I left for Memorial Day.

When I got to Box 2 (second from the bottom), there were open brood cells, polished.  So I held the frame with the sun over my shoulder and there they were:  EGGS - tiny new beautiful evidence that these bees have successfully requeened.

I closed the hive back up, took off my bee gear, tried to wipe the campfire smell off of my hands with wipes, and headed back for work.

It was a good day in my bee world.

Robbing Peter to Pay Paul and the Taste of Honey

The front hive at Tom's house is desperately queenless, so on Thursday I went over to Stonehurst Place to steal a frame of brood and eggs from one of the deep boxes over there.  The new Ray Civitts hive was looking good and needed a new box.  I checkerboarded them top box into the new box and then went into the lower box.

I put the beautiful frame of mostly eggs and young brood into a pillow case and put it in the back of my warm car (it was 87 in Atlanta that day).  I drove to Jeff's office and picked him up to go to Tom's.  We opened the hive.  

Inside the hive, the frames had some brood but it was all drone.  I think after the swarm the queen must have either been short bred (a Keith Fielder term meaning that she only mated with a couple of drones - not enough to allow her to function as a good layer).  Anyway we pulled a frame from the bottom box that had a baseball sized circle of drone brood in the center.  The rest of the frame had all the worker cells back-filled with nectar and there was honey at the corners, as is typical in a brood frame.  

We added the beautiful Stonehurst brood/egg frame to the hive.  I am crossing my fingers that they will now be able to make a successful queen.  

Jeff and I couldn't resist sticking our finger hive tool into the corner of the frame to taste the honey.  Yum - it had a sweetness followed by a spicy end note - delicious.  We didn't have anywhere else to put the frame, so I put it in the back of the car to take home.

I let Jeff out at his office and he went in to tell the staff that we had a taste of honey in the car.  At least six people came running out of the building brandishing spoons!  I didn't get the camera up and running fast enough.  

All six of them had a taste.  Jeff works at a casting agency and they know how to have fun!  All of them enjoyed the honey adventure, I think.  And I had a great time sharing our honey moment with them as well.

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.  

Another Bee Day - at Jeff and Valerie's House

Today I went to Jeff and Valerie's house to check the hives there.  I started with Five Alive.  Look at the beautiful wax they are drawing.  This is the last frame in the box so it is drawn out the least.



The hive was full in every frame except the outside frame, so I decided it needed a new box.  I put the new box under the top box and took two frames of brood out of that box to make a ladder in the new box.  (A ladder allows the bees passage to start drawing wax from the top bar.) When I took out a full frame, I replaced it with a foundationless frame with a wax strip as in the photo below.



This is what Five Alive looked like when I closed it up - and it's only April 3!



I then went to what we've called the swarm hive but is now Lenox Pointe 2 because we moved the queen by accident into that hive.

They aren't going crazy and aren't building up as fast as other hives, but they are storing lovely honey.



And they are equipped with a laying queen.



If you enlarge the photo below you can also see eggs.






Then I went to the original Lenox Pointe - remember the queen was only laying drones.  Well, that was just how she started - now she is laying beautiful brood - you can also see larvae in the photo below.



Her frames are arranged just so - with honey in the corners, pollen next, and capped brood.



Last but not at all least, I opened Colony Square.  The top box is a full box of honey and I know they need a new box.  Instead of going into the hive (because I knew I couldn't lift the fifty pound full box to position six (over my head), I opened it and added a new box above the top box.  I didn't make a ladder with their own frames, but did have two fully drawn frames that I put in the center of the new box to provide ladder facility.

And this is what Colony Square looked like when I left.

The State of Lenox Pointe

I've been worried about Lenox Pointe because the last time I opened it up, the frames were all back-filled with nectar and the only frame with brood was filled with large drone cells with eggs in them.  I have been worried that the queen was poorly mated and wasn't functioning.

However, to see what was really going on, I gave this hive a box of empty frames.  They immediately went to town building comb (see below).



In this frame which had drawn worker comb (small cell), the queen had laid an egg in almost every cell.  If you have the capability of magnifying this photo, the best focus is in the center right area of the photo where you can see the eggs in the cells.



She still may not be much of a layer, but I certainly feel better.

The "new Lenox" where we accidentally moved the queen from Lenox Pointe is making gorgeous light honey.



And Five Alive is going great - in these cells of brand new wax there are eggs, eggs, eggs.  She was laying in four boxes - and there are now five boxes on this hive.



Look below at the lovely eggs.....go Five Alive.

Stonehurst Place Saga

Today I did a deep inspection of the hives at Stonehurst Place Inn.  I knew one hive was dead and wanted to find out why they had died.  I suspected they starved/froze in the cold few days we had when it was 19 degrees here after a warm spell.

I also wanted to check the first hive to see if they appeared to have swarm plans.  I had given them a new box when I was here a couple of weeks ago and discovered that the second hive was dead.

I always get stung a couple of times working these bees.  Today was no exception - three stings - left hand little finger, upper left arm, lower right leg.  These aren't really mean bees compared to Colony Square but aren't bees I want to work on gloveless.



The top box which I had given them at the end of February had three frames of drawn comb, two frames of barely drawn comb and one frame with comb being built from the bottom.  This is because I just threw this box on top of the hive and didn't give them a full frame from the box beneath to act as a ladder.  I moved this bottom drawn comb to the edge of the box.  If they don't fill it out, I'll take it out on my next visit.

The second box was heavy with capped honey and uncapped nectar.



When I lifted off the box to look at the one underneath, I broke open honeycomb they had built between the boxes - they were distressed and immediately began re-gathering the honey because the bees will store this again.  They do not waste something they worked so hard to create.



The capped honey was what is called "wet cappings" because the bees lay the wax cap right on the honey creating a wet look.  I wonder what influences their choice to make wet or dry cappings?  Anyway, this hive is on track to make a lot of honey.  We'll probably need to harvest early and maybe more than once.



So the top box was empty but newly drawn comb.  The second box was all honey and nectar.  The third box was full of brood - and it was pretty as well.  Here you see what brood looks like on newly drawn comb.


There are both drone cells (the highly rounded tops) and worker cells on this frame.  Some of the drone cells are not fully capped and you can still see the larva through the opening in the top of the cell.



I thought it was interesting that they put drone cells occupying one whole side of this frame.



In this comb you can see worker brood capped to the left, and uncapped larvae just to the right of that.  Then in the open cells there are eggs.  You may have a hard time seeing the eggs in the cells with the light behind them, but in the cells with the darker background, you should be able to see a lot of eggs (at about 1:00 in the photo).



I was planning to remove the bottom deep but the bees had drone brood between box 1 and box 2 as well as between box 2 and box 3.  When I pulled up frames from the bottom, it's true that they weren't fully using the frames, but there was brood as well as nectar stored there.  The good news is that I didn't see a single queen cell or even an opened one, so these bees must not be planning to swarm - at least not right now.



When I opened hive #2 it was clear that they had starved.  The bees were flying around in January when I did the powdered sugar shake and the hive looked healthy.  Right after that, though, we had a string of four or five days with weather too cold for the bees to move or fly.  These bees died then.  There was a baseball sized cluster of bees - you can see the top of the cluster in this picture.



The frames were sickening.  They were clustered through three frames.  A sure sign of starvation is to see their little rear ends up in the air, heads down in the cell, getting the final sip of honey before all dying together.



We've ordered two nucs for Stonehurst - a nuc to replace this one and a new nuc to make a third hive.  It's going to be really crowded back there, working the bees, but the Inn will be glad for the opportunity to make more honey this year.

The Amazing Queen Bee

In this morning's email from Naturebee, there is an interesting piece of trivia about the queen bee (assuming a life span of three years).  Times have certainly changed - note the length of the chicken egg used for comparison in this 1895 article is 1 1/2 inches - just dawned on me from the photo below (not with the article) that they may have measured the breadth of the egg - I assumed end to end since they referred to the length of the bee egg.  There are no eggs in my refrigerator this morning shorter in length than 2 1/4 inches.  The queen would still win out by a very long distance:

* A queen will lay a half mile of eggs
in her life time (three years), while a
hen in the same time, allowing 200 eggs
a year and one and one-half inch to the
egg, will only lay seventy-five feet of
eggs. A queen bee's egg is one-fourteenth
of an inch in length.

Source:
Homestead
Friday, March 22, 1895 Des Moines, Iowa

Queen Release at the Blue Heron

As I returned home today, I stopped at the Blue Heron to see if the new queen had been released. Remember, she had not quite been released on Tuesday. The hive seemed calm and happy. I left my smoker in the car, so it was nice to discover that the bees were calm.



In the second box, the queen had been released and the queen cage was empty. I guess it just took them longer because there was more fondant to eat through.



I didn't check to see if she were laying. I would have been so disappointed if she were not, so it was simply enough that she had been released.



The hive started with the nuc was very quiet - no bees on the landing. I decided even though they were feisty bees and I was without my smoker, I'd still give them a look. As you can see in the photo above, it's a hive in only one deep box.

I am not a foundation user, and this is the first time I've ever looked at black plastic foundation. Wow, can you see eggs and brood well. You can have the same experience looking at the photo below. There is lots of brood and c-shaped larvae on this, the only frame I looked at.

Don't worry, I'm still a foundation-less beekeeper, but I'm glad I've had the experience now of looking at eggs and larve on black plastic - no wonder people like it.  I still think the bees like having the opportunity to make their own foundation and I'm sticking to that!

I am relieved - this hive may turn out to be a good one after all.