Preparing Hive Inspection Gear

This week marks the beginning of my hive inspections for my hives in Atlanta. I spent some time on Friday getting my gear in gear. I washed all my hive tools and scrubbed their ends with a brass scrub. The yellow one was caked with propolis and took some elbow grease to get clean. I plan to wash used tools at the end of every inspection this year and I plan to carry a container of Wet-ones with me to wipe them off on site.

This is an effort to prevent disease spread from hive to hive.



What's in my hive bag? Two magnifying glasses are there to help people see eggs when I have people accompanying me on inspections.



I also carry, as you can see in the photo below, a propane lighter for my smoker, two permanent markers to write on frames or hive boxes if need be; a container of Benadryl for a sting reaction, a bee brush, a drape for the hive, some baby powder to use if I wear nitrile gloves; several hive tools, a container of thumb tacks, a pair or two of nitrile gloves, a couple of empty ziploc baggies, some rubber bands; a paper towel or two; and a jar of swarm lure that I made.




There may be a couple of other things in there - oh, yes, my Swiss army knife, a frame rack, some string, my leather bee gloves, a pair of pruning shears.

I bought this container at a knitting class I took at the John Campbell Folk School but I kept losing things in the deep pockets.  It never was a knitting bag, but is actually a tool bag - the knitting folks re-purposed it, but it didn't ever really work for me.  It works great as an inspection bag.



So I'm ready to inspect Blue Heron on Sunday and Topsy on Tuesday.

What You Need to Get Started in Beekeeping

My brother Barry wants to be a beekeeper and I promised him a list of the basics he would need. I decided to post it here for any of you who are curious to get started.

Here's the list - then you'll find descriptions of my thoughts behind it. This is my list and how I would do it if I were starting this year. There are all kinds of points of view and mine is not the only one. I am particularly biased about some beekeeping issues, as you who follow this blog already know!
Basics:
Good beekeeping book
Protective clothing: A bee suit (or long sleeved shirt, pants) and gloves
Hive equipment:
10 medium 8 frame hive boxes
80 frames to fit the medium boxes
Sheets of wax foundation for the frames
2 Telescoping covers for 8 frame equipment
2 inner covers or 2 ventilated inner covers for 8 frame equipment
2 screened bottom boards for 8 frame equipment
2 slatted racks for 8 frame equpiment
A smoker and something to use to light it (lighter, matches, whatever)

A hive tool (preferably 2 - they're cheap)
That will get you started. The descriptive list below includes some description and explanation as well as some extras to add to the basic list above.
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The basics for the beekeeper (the elaborated list):

A good beekeeping book for beginners:
Here are some suggestions:

Beekeeping for Dummies by Howland Blackiston
Natural Beekeeping by Ross Conrad

Protective Clothing:

A Bee suit – if not a bee suit plan to wear long pants, long sleeved shirt and a bee veil

Bee suit thoughts: It's hot inside a bee suit. You need one that you can stand to wear in the heat. The head gear is often a problem for me. My original suit is from Dadant and comes with a hard hat and veil. The hard hat is regulated by a head band that I hate because it never fits right and slips down over my eyes all the time.

The ventilated suit from Golden Bee (504-456-8805) is great in hot southern weather. I don't like the veil particularly – it relies on a headband to keep it centered and that doesn't work well for me, but the suit is cool (all ventilated material) and I can manage the head part. Also the mesh of the veil is painted white which is great for bees not bothering you but hard for someone else to see your face inside the suit. (Matters to me because I wear it for teaching inspections).

A similar suit is made by UltraBreeze although their website says that at the moment they are not taking orders.

I love a hooded jacket that I have from Mann Lake that is great to throw on for a quick visit to the hives or to use when I'm not doing a full on inspection.

Gloves - Many beekeepers work without gloves, but I don't like being stung on my hands – it's inconvenient.

Gloves present their own problems. Most beekeeping gloves are big, making it awkward to grasp things in the hive well. When you order gloves, talk to the company from whom you are ordering to understand how their gloves are sized. If I am using leather gloves, I like the ones I FINALLY got from Dadant that are XXS and do fit.

However, I take pictures all the time I am in the hives and now prefer nitrile gloves because they allow me more dexterity. I have been stung through them (they are used by surgeons and are not supposed to be penetrable by a knife, but leave it to the bees!)

Glove possibilities: Dadant has these
My favorite nitrile gloves are 8 mil blue ones from Gemplers I'm not doing surgery so I reuse them (!) and the box of 50 lasts about 1 ½ bee seasons

Miscellaneous clothing items that I take with me to the beeyard:

A bandana (there are about 100 uses for the bandana in the world – several in the beeyard – if only to wipe your brow – but I use it to keep my Dadant helmet from slipping),
A lanyard that I hook my camera on around my neck,
I always wear tennis shoes and socks – the only time I have been stung on my foot by a bee was when I stepped on a dying bee in my house

Basic equipment needs:

Hive Woodenware

Enough for two hives – you should start with two hives – this way you have something to compare to when one hive seems off in some way. You also can kill one hive with over zealousness and let the other survive more on its own!

Most beginning beekeepers start with a deep and a medium box for brood and shallows for honey. This is the old way and if you are starting with nuc hives, unless you've made special arrangements, the nuc will be in a deep nuc box.

However, for switching frames back and forth between boxes and for many other advantages (weight when lifting, etc), I would encourage everyone to do all of their boxes as medium boxes. For two hives you need a minimum of 3 medium boxes per hive and probably a couple of extras for each hive in the event that your bees get going well enough to produce honey the first year. I would also encourage 8 frame boxes – much easier to lift and manage

This means you need 10 medium eight-frame boxes. I would order based on shipping prices for your area. Shipping costs can be as much as the cost of the equipment you are ordering. I like to order from Brushy Mountain Beekeeping because the shipping to Atlanta is less than most of the other companies, but I order from Betterbee which is in New York and Dadant which has a warehouse in Florida. There are many good bee companies and you may be able to find a local supplier from whom to get your equipment.

Here are 10 medium eight-frame boxes from Brushy Mountain.

Like I said, you can order them from any bee company. These come unassembled – you nail or screw them together – keep the sides right side up and the inside on the inside! They should be painted which is a good thing to do while you wait for your bees – the Oops cart at Home Depot is a good source of paint. I paint all of mine the same color and keep a large gallon of paint available to do so. There's a post on my blog showing how to assemble them.

Frames for the 10 boxes:
Each box takes eight frames. These also come unassembled. You'll need 80 frames. I don't use foundation at all any more, but starting out, you'll want to use foundation – wax, not plastic. There's a video/slide show on my blog about how to assemble frames. These frames have a groove in the bottom for the wax foundation and a wedge at the top to nail it into the frame.

Foundation for the frames – I would stick to pure wax. Brushy Mountain offers this. It's less expensive than Dadant for the same thing and if you are ordering your equipment from them, it all ships with one shipping charge. But you can get foundation from any bee company. People will tell you to use plastic, but I've now thrown out all of my plastic. The bees don't like it and wax is natural in the hive. In the end, you'll probably switch to foundationless, anyway, and let the bees build their own. Each hive needs a telescoping cover and an inner cover. You're going to be using 8 frame equipment, so be sure the inner cover and telescoping cover are for 8 frame equipment. Here is a telescoping cover and an inner cover.

Brushy Mountain (and others) make an English garden hive top – which is pretty to look at but not practical for an inspection – feel free to get it instead of the telescoping cover, if you would like. My friend Julia likes (and I want to order) the ventilated inner cover – great for the hot summers in the South. If you ordered it, you would not need the inner cover.

You'll also need a screened bottom board.

Ventilation is the issue in the heat of the summer. The screened bottom board helps with this as well as Varroa mite control. The ventilated inner cover would help as well.

I keep slatted racks (a place for the bees to hang out rather than waste their energy fanning the hive) on all of my hives. Brushy Mountain doesn't make them for 8 frame equipment. Betterbee does.

Smoker:This is an essential piece of beekeeping equipment and you'll use it a lot. Here's a basic one from Brushy Mountain. I rarely use mine except to let the bees know I'm coming by puffing one puff at the door. I don't think it's worth buying one of the fancier ones unless you plan to have so many hives that you'll need to relight it a lot.

Propane lighter: Available at any hardware store (I can't find a picture, but I put one in everyone's stocking for Christmas – cheap and useful)

Hive Tool Another essential piece of beekeeping equipment – buy two so you can always lay your hands on one of them.

Helpful Things to Have that aren't Essential:

Frame Rack: Very helpful – especially if you are looking for the queen, trying to see the differences in the bees, taking photos – I obviously love mine, but everyone doesn’t use them.

Frame Grip I've always relied on my hands – I don't want to inadvertently squash bees – but I'm putting it on this list because almost every other beekeeper I know uses this. I just never got comfortable with it.

Bee Brush I use this a lot – especially when harvesting honey since I remove one frame at a time from the hive. If you are going for crush and strain honey, then this is essential.

Harvest Equipment (Hopefully you'll have a harvest!):

Bucket and Filtering system

This is all I need for harvesting and filtering honey. I also use a sharp knife and some basic kitchen equipment. You'll also need jars, but that is your preference. What kind of honey your produce dictates what type of jar you use. You are going to be able to cut comb (the foundation you are ordering will allow crush and strain as well as cut comb honey) or produce chunk honey (comb in a jar of honey)

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OK, I think that is what is needed (at least what I would need) to start beekeeping. This is my list and others out there will want to add or suggest other things. There are other items that you will find useful – a sifter from the kitchen for powdered sugar and a few other things that I carry in my bee basket, but you'll come up with what works for you.

You'll notice that I didn't put any medication or feeding systems on this list. I don't use any medications or poison of any kind in my hives. I also tend to feed with Ziploc baggies inside the hives. A Boardman feeder may be useful for water for the bees, but there are other ways to provide water. I also didn't put an entrance reducer – not going to be necessary in the hot South but would be in other parts of the country.

Note: I did this post in Word's blog post section and uploaded it from Word....never again. The margins are awful - many apologies!

Giant Honeycomb in foundationless frames

In Bermuda I had noticed a huge honeycomb and knew I had to take it out of the hive today. The bees had taken advantage of the foundationless frame and it looked to me as if they had built comb hooking it to two side-by-side frames.

Instead what they did was to build one huge honey comb attached to the first frame and fattened through the second frame. The comb was not attached except in one place at the top to the second frame. Here's the comb hanging on my frame rack on the outside of Bermuda. At the lower right you can see the broken comb at the top where they had attached to the second frame.



The other side of the comb was beautifully capped honey - I wish it had looked like this on the other side. I could have boxed it for cut comb honey. Looking like it does, I can crush and strain or cut it for chunk honey in a wide mouthed jar. I'll probably do the chunk honey so I can remember what this huge comb looked like as I enjoy the honey.



Here's a side view and you can now easily see how the comb was expanded under the second frame but not attaching to it.


There's another comb in this same box with the same configuration (two frames with one very fat honeycomb), but they hadn't capped it enough to take it off of the hive. I'll fill the empty spaces in this box with frames WITH foundation to get these bees back on track.

First Signs of Spring

At my house one of the earliest signs of spring is when the rosemary bush begins to bloom. Now not only is it blooming, but the bumblebees have begun to visit it.
Another sign of spring in the south is the budding of the azalea bushes.
In Atlanta one of the most obvious signs of spring is the blooming of the dogwood which began this week. We think this is such a sign of our spring that we have had an Atlanta Dogwood Festival every year for 72 years. But if you are a beekeeper, the first sign of spring is when you observe a DRONE in the hives. When the male bees begin to emerge in the hives, the business of making queens and making new little bees becomes a serious spring activity. This drone circled in red in the picture above, is from March 27 of 2007 . You can see him best by clicking on the picture to enlarge it.

I saw my first drone this year last Saturday on March 22, just after the official first day of spring. He was walking proudly through the hive. I think he felt more territorial since he was the only one I saw.

I was in an awkward position when I saw him, balancing the frame in one hand and putting the frame rack on the hive with the other and couldn't take his picture. He was actually more handsome than the 2007 first drone, but I can't always snap what I want to snap. In the early spring, the new drones stand out because they are so much larger than the worker bees. However, later in the season when there are at least 100 drones in most hives, the lone drone is not a spectacle but part of the ordinary.

I find it so interesting that the bees push the drones out of the hives to starve to death in the fall. The hive then lives through the winter as a circle of women. In the spring the queen begins to lay eggs in drone cells again and the process starts all over.

The drone has a grandfather but not a father. Workers and queens develop from fertilized eggs. They have genetic material from both the drone with whom the queen mated in midair and the queen bee.

Unlike the workers, drones develop from unfertilized eggs. The eggs from which they come have only half of the genetic material - their mother's genetic material. So drones have grandfathers (the queen's genetic material) but not fathers. They are haploid beings.

The drone has no stinger, so he is a good practice bee for the art of picking up a single bee. I'm hoping to do this this year so that someday I, having practiced with drones, can pick up and mark a queen.

But I have a hard time picking up dead bees from the deck - speaking of dexterity, not squeamishness - so I don't think this will be an easy challenge.

Inspecting the second hive

Here you see me beginning the inspection of the second hive, Bermuda. I have lifted off the top cover, the inner cover and the top super which is pretty well drawn out and filled with honey.

I've placed a hanging rack on the side of the hives to help me hold the frames as I work on the super.
I lift out the first frame which is heavy with honey and in addition has some brood at the bottom. I found that several of the frames in this super had brood at the bottom of the honey frames. Most of the brood cells looked like drone cells.
You can see a frame hanging on the rack. This makes it easier to slide the other frames over to look at them. The frame I am looking at has lots of honey at the bottom and some brood over in the corner.
I inspected each frame in this honey super and am pleased with how the frames are filling up with honey and how many frames are capped.