Bees in the Mountains of Rabun County

My friends Robin and Mary have a farm in Rabun County near my house in the mountains.  Years ago Robin had bees in the Appalachian mountains of East Tennessee where he was a physician.  He tells the story about the day his queen bee arrived and he went to the Post Office to pick her up.  A whole row of men were sitting on the rockers on the front porch of the Post Office, waiting to see his queen!

I am no longer keeping bees at the community garden in Rabun County, and Robin and Mary offered for me to place hives in their large farm garden.  I was thrilled.  It means I get to see them more and that I will have a place for the bees where they can be watched better than at my house in Rabun when I'm only there about once a month.

A couple of weeks ago I installed a hive from Jarrett's Apiaries in Robin's garden.  Then a week ago I picked up a nuc from Mountain Sweet Honey and installed it right beside the other hive in the garden.

First we made room for the frames in the hive box.  This is a medium nuc so we are putting it into a medium box.

Then we opened the top of the cardboard nuc to begin moving the frames.

 We used hive drapes to minimize the disturbance to the bees and placed the drapes on both the nuc and the hive box (once it had some bees in it).

The first frame is moved and then placed in the exact position in the hive box that it occupied in the nuc.

  It's usually easy to find a queen in the nuc box because there are so few bees compared to a full hive in full swing.  So we looked for her as we worked.

And there she was!

Because these are medium frames in a deep nuc, the bees who were ready for more space, had started building comb on the bottom of the frames.  I removed all of that and gave them a new box.

We closed up the hive.  A nectar flow is going so we didn't feed the bees.  

I'll go back up this Thursday to check on both hives.  To stave off the bears, Mary and Robin are going to strap the hives (a method encouraged by Ross Conrad in an article in Bee Culture a couple of years ago.

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!

Nine Honey Apiary Visit near the border of Latvia

Nine Honey Apiary Visit near the border of Latvia, a set on Flickr.  To see the slides with labels, click here.  To see the slides, look at the slide below.

The pictures tell the story of this lovely visit to another apiary in Lithuania. This apiary is very near the border of Latvia. We went to their bees and watched them take frames of honey for harvest. We had fun talking to them about bees and getting the feel for their beekeeping approaches.

Like Solys, they also use chemicals in their hives. They treat with Amitraz every two or three years. They have about 30 hives in their apiary.

If you click on a slide, you can see the label.

Created with flickr slideshow.

Billy Davis' Quiet Box

Billy Davis respects his bees, his "critters," as he calls them.  I learn so much from him every time I hear him speak.  The first time I heard him was at EAS in Boone, NC.  From him I learned about the reason to use hive drapes and have used them ever since.  We employ hive drapes in our inspections at Chastain Conservancy and the bees are so much calmer.  We light the smoker and rarely use it.

 Billy Davis spoke to the Metro Atlanta Beekeepers last night about his nuc sustainability program in Round Hill, Virginia. Billy said that a beginner can learn more from raising bees in a nuc than any other way.  He said something like, "Anyone can find a queen in a five frame nuc!"  He also emphasized the importance of taking notes and said people in his apiary have to prove they can take notes before they can manipulate any hives.

Billy has been keeping bees since he was a kid - over 50 years.  He stressed the importance of having a mentor as well as the importance of using nucs.  He does not like the idea of buying a commercial nuc but rather creating a nuc from your own splits.  A nuc is

• a great learning tool, 
• a generator of drawn comb, 
• a generator of honey, 
• a source of brood queens.  
• Splitting colonies into nucs is a way to increase your apiary.  
• Nucs are also a way to practice swarm control.  If you take the queen and enough bees to support her, the colony thinks they have swarmed and you have stopped the swarm.

Billy's approach is that we need to help the bees survive by promoting hygienic queens and raising local queens.  He has an extensive program in Virginia in which he runs nucs and raises queens.  He went through his methods for the nuc program in explicit detail, more complicated than I can repeat here, but essentially he is making nucs over and over; overwintering the nucs; culling out queens who are not certifiable breeder queens.  And then he does it all over again.

He railed against artificial insemination and said that it had ruined many aspects of farming - breeding cattle, breeding hogs, breeding all kinds of animals.  He thinks the bees should raise their own queens.  He selects for hygienic queens by systematically killing capped larvae and seeing if the bees remove it within 24 hours.  If so, he uses that queen as a breeder.  As a result he does no varroa treatment and said the most number of mites he has seen this year is THREE.

He is a wood-working guy (in his non-bee life, he works at Home Depot) and makes his own equipment so that he can keep these nucs on a common base.  He has entrances on opposite sides and faces his nucs so that the prevailing winds are not blowing toward the entrance.  You might notice that he uses all medium equipment - no deeps or shallows for him.

He keeps a robber screen and an entrance reducer on every hive.  I was interested in his robber screen - not complicated like mine, but rather a simple screened wire, looks like #8 hardware cloth or maybe a little smaller.  He says it needs to extend 4 inches on either side of the entry to be effective.  He simply staple-guns it to the hive body and the landing.  It's folded into a squared edged to create a tunnel to the entry hole.  Boy, I plan to do this on every hive after my terrible robbery at two different great hives last year.

We have used hive drapes at Chastain Conservancy since I heard him speak about them at EAS.  Now I'd like to try the other item he uses during an inspection: his "Quiet Box."  The Quiet Box is the green box in the photo below.

Billy said that anyone in his apiary who took out a frame and leaned it against the hive would be in big trouble with him.   In our inspections, we typically use a frame rack that may or may not be under the hive drape.  It is his contention (and he's obviously right) that being out in the sun like that is very disturbing to the bees.  

I often find a clump of bees on the outside wall of the hive box when I remove the frame from the rack to return it to the hive.  They left the frame and crowd together on the hive box, probably trying to get into protected space where it isn't very light.

Instead of this disruption, Billy uses a quiet box - the green box in the photo.  It is equipped with a built-in hive drape.  He puts the first frame removed from the hive into this box where there are a couple of other frames.  If the frame is alone in the box, he might also put in the frame on which he finds the queen.  These frames remain in the "Quiet Box" until he is finished with his inspection and then he returns them.

If he chooses not to return them to the hive, with those two frames, he has the beginning of a nuc.  He just needs to add frames of honey and pollen, capped brood and bees.

We could easily take an empty nuc box to our inspections at Chastain (and at my private hives) and use that as the "Quiet Box."  I am anxious to try this and see how we do with it.  Our first inspection there is on the 23rd, so I'll let you know how it works for us.

Billy feeds all of his bees sugar syrup all the time.  He says that they will quit taking the syrup when there is nectar available.  He uses the rapid feeder from Bee Works in Canada that I also use.

He likes this feeder because it is inside the hive and because the bees are protected from drowning when using it.

Billy employes nematodes to control the SHB.  He says the first year you need to do three applications (Julia and I only did one the year we did the nematodes) and thereafter you need to do two applications.  I need to get back in touch with SE Insectaries and order some more to do that again.

At the end of this wonderful talk, Billy was surrounded by members of the Metro Atlanta Club who wanted to ask him questions and thank him for all the information.  I went up afterward to thank him personally and had such a lovely surprise.  He looked at me and said, "I'm so glad you came.  I was hoping you would be here.  I do go to visit your web site sometime, you know!"  I was bowled over and honored - who knew that he even knew who I was?