Checking on the Linda T's Bees hives

I started to call this "Checking on the Farm Hives" but they aren't on the farm any longer, so I decided just to call this group of hives Linda T's Bees since that's the name of our business.  Three of the hives are in my backyard, so this week Jeff and I did an inspection.  We haven't opened these hives in several weeks.

The first thing that caught our eye were small hive beetles.  The disadvantage of opening a hive at this time of year is that the bees in a strong hive keep the small hive beetles corralled at the top of the hive, but breaking the  propolis seal and lifting off the top cover makes the hive vulnerable to beetle invasion.

Jeff and I smashed and smashed with both ends of our hive tools, leaving beetles dead on the top cover.  The bees went after them too so we were challenged not to smash bees in our enthusiasm for killing beetles!

I drew in red on the photo so you couldn't miss them.....they're everywhere, they're everywhere.  We actually saw a sizable number of beetles in all three hives, sending me off to buy sandwich boxes to make Sonny-Mel traps to put on after the rain stops on Wednesday.



We saw evidence of the queen in every hive.  Larvae in all stages were evident and in the spotty brood patterns, the holes were filled with young larvae.




However all three hives were very light on stores and we determined that bee tea will be necessary in the next week or so to get them going OK into winter.  We do not want to lose these hives over the winter.



The hives at my house are in the shade which probably increases the likelihood of SHB, but it is shady in my backyard - so shady that I can only use the solar wax melter in the front of the house.


We used hive drapes throughout this inspection and neither of us got stung.  The bees seemed quite calm.  Well, now we'll get to work making SHB traps and bee tea for the next installment of this tale.

Blue Heron First Real Inspection 2011

I am thrilled to report that this hive made it through the winter and is going great guns! There were lots of bees and lots of brood throughout the hive. They are healthy looking - I didn't see any Varroa and no other bad signs and they seemed nonplussed by my intrusion.



Next time I am going to take a tripod. I didn't get good pictures. I was by myself and didn't check the camera settings. The camera was still set on Kids and Pets from taking pictures of my grandchildren the day before.



I used the purchased hive drape to cover the hive except for the frame I was removing. As you can see on the left in the above picture, I also draped the boxes I removed.

I was concerned about this hive because the bees were still in the bottom box after the winter with a solid box of honey above them. Often the queen will not cross a honey barrier like that and she is said to be honey-bound. I looked at the old capped brood in the bottom box. All but the outside two frames were being used for brood. One frame had a perfect football shaped pattern, all the center had emerged and new eggs and larvae now occupied the space.

I took off the second box - it's full of honey and the comb is often cross-combed with two frames joined by comb between them. The honey in that box is all composed of "bee tea" syrup driven honey so it is only good for bee food. I took the box off of the hive and set it aside to decide what to do with it.

I was so surprised to find that Box three contained lots of beautifully drawn comb and new capped brood as well as young larvae and eggs. I didn't see a queen cell anywhere, nor any drones. In this third box, however, I did see some drone brood (see the picture below).


And then I saw her. I so regret that bad picture - I took THREE bad pictures! Anyway, I outlined this absolutely gorgeous queen so you could see her. She was large and long with an all golden abdomen. If you click on the photo below, you can see that I've outlined her in red.

 Right in front of me, she lowered her abdomen and laid an egg....privacy notwithstanding. She was beautiful and brave - she had crossed the honey barrier to continue her egg laying in the box above it where there was space for the taking.



Every frame in every box was being used so I added a fourth box of foundationless frames. I actually put it in position 3. I took a frame of nectar from the side of Box 2 and put it in the middle of Box 3 (the new box) to help the bees know how to build the comb in the frames.

I replaced that frame in Box 2 with a foundationless frame.  I also marked all the frames as per Housel positioning.

Julia is inspecting this hive on Saturday and we'll see if they have built any comb out by then.

I then decided to put the honey barrier box on as Box 4 and wrote on it in magic marker "Bee Tea Honey" and "Cross Comb". I will not harvest this honey for eating because of the bee tea. If the bees don't use it, I'll probably collect it and feed it back to the bees so that I can make use of the honey and straighten out the cross comb.

And now I'm going to enter my adventure on Hive Tracks and go to the kitchen and wash my hive tool which is gunked with propolis as often happens in the first inspection.

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.

Blue Heron Check up on September 18, 2010

A Metro inspection is scheduled for Blue Heron on September 25, the last one of the year. We went over this weekend because we wondered how the hives were doing and if they needed feeding. We took sugar syrup in preparation.

When we got there we discovered various problems. Julia's first hive did have some honey and we saw the queen, but the hive was light and needed feeding. Her second hive, BP of the oil trap spill, had absconded - nary a bee in the place. My hive looked like it had been robbed, and it had some other problems which you can see in the slideshow below. We addressed the problems, were sad about the loss, and fed the bees with hope for the future of the two hives that are left.

Both of the hives that are left were low enough on stores that we will need to feed heavily throughout the rest of September and October.

Click on the slideshow to see it full size - also there are captions for each picture.

Big Bee Day Part Two: The Blue Heron

Sunday morning after inspecting the Rabun County hive, I drove back to Atlanta for an inspection at the Blue Heron at 2 PM. Noah, Julia's son, led the inspection and did a really great job. We had a small group of beekeepers for this inspection, which made it easy to move around the hives and to be a part of it.

Noah is about to open the first hive and is explaining about the smoker and our foundationless frames.



He takes the ventilated hive cover off of the first hive.

There were a few hive beetles on the inner cover and we smashed them with our hive tools. This hive had been chock full of hive beetles, but the numbers have significantly diminished since we put the nematodes all around the hives at Blue Heron.



There's no nectar so the bees have no resources for building wax. But to be sure they wouldn't fill the empty space with wax when Julia and I took two frames out of this hive this past Monday for my nuc, we filled the space with newspaper. We would not have left the hive like this, but I didn't bring shallow frames with me when we took the frames. I only had mediums.



Noah is showing the participants the brood and eggs in this frame.



When we moved to my hive, I wanted to try using hive drapes as I had in Rabun County that morning.

In this hive, even though it faces east, the bees are putting the brood, the honey, etc at the back of the hive.  This probably means that the sun hits the back of the hive first in the morning.  Bees like to let the natural forces heat the hive so they don't have to work so hard.  The queen in this hive is laying well despite the lack of nectar resources available.

Finally we moved the the third hive at Blue Heron where Noah decided to try the hive drapes as he worked on it.  All of the Blue Heron hives are light and have very little stored honey.  We are worried about them and put sugar syrup or honey on my hive and the hive below.  The first hive we looked at has stored honey so we didn't put food on it.

This is the first Blue Heron inspection when we didn't see the queen.  These hives all feel a little fragile to us because they are so light on stores and we didn't want to disturb them as much as we would have needed to to see the queen.  So we looked but we didn't find Her Majesty in any hive.

At the end of the inspection Noah and Julia shared with us some delicious creamed honey they had made after the three of us took Keith Fielder's workshop at Young Harris.

Big Bee Day - Part One Rabun County

I drove up to Rabun County in the pouring rain yesterday, planning to visit the bees and inspect the hive. Last time I was there on August 8, they were angry and had a field day with me (no smoker, only a jacket).

Although it poured all day yesterday, today the sun broke out and I broke out my Golden Bee suit - no stings for me (it's almost impossible to get stung in the Golden Bee suit). Fully prepared with smoker, Golden Bee suit, and curiosity, I opened the hive at the community garden this morning.

The hive is full of bees. Box one is mostly brood. Box two is mostly honey. Box three is comb and little else. There were no hive beetles, the bees looked healthy (no DWV, no sign of varroa mites), and there are still a few drones in the hive.



At EAS Billy Davis really advocated using hive drapes, so I brought flour sack towels that I buy from Walmart to cover the boxes. These towels are all cotton, light, and lint free. Using them I'm not likely to leave any reminder of the towel behind in the hive and the bees won't get caught in the material as they might in terry cloth. This accomplishes two things: it disturbs the bees less because the box is not suddenly exposed to the bright light of the sun and it keeps the hive from advertising its honey stores to any potential marauding bees from other hives.



I am dying to see what their honey tastes like since I've only gotten honey from my backyard bees in Atlanta. These bees can get nectar from sourwood and from kudzu neither of which is available to my Atlanta bees. So I took two frames of honey from box two and replaced them with drawn wax from a box in Atlanta.

This hive had great stores of pollen as you can see in the picture below.



Also the queen has been hard at work as you can see in the brood below. I think the picture below is upside down, but the brood is still visible to your in the cells either way! The larvae look healthy as do the bees in this hive where I have never seen the queen.



The two frames I took were frames of drawn wax from last year that I had put in the hive. I brought it home to crush and strain. This is the first time I have tried crushing wax that isn't brand new. It wasn't easy. Actually there were two problems. I couldn't find my pestles and remembered that someone had suggested on this blog that I use a potato masher.

The two problems were that the comb was old and the potato masher really didn't work well. The comb got all smashed into the holes in the potato masher and it was completely gunky in minutes. I ended up smashing the comb with the insert for my Cuisinart! It was the shape of the pestle and solid on the bottom which was the problem with the potato masher (it wasn't).

One of the frames I brought back had popsicle sticks as starter strips rather than wax.  The cut popsicle stick showed up in the crushed wax and at first I had no idea why wood was in the honey.  Then I realized what it was!

I let the crushed honey drain all afternoon and the wax at the end of the day looked like this:

Because it was old wax, the crushed wax looks dark and stiff, unlike new wax that I usually see.

Then I tasted the honey - WOW - it tastes a little like grape which means that there is definitely some kudzu in the honey.  It's only a small bit - maybe six pounds if I'm lucky - but I am thrilled to get it.

Rubbing Elbows with Well-Known Beekeepers

One advantage of going to EAS is the opportunity to rub elbows with well-known beekeepers. I learned from each of these men pictured below during my week at EAS.

Billy Davis is from Virginia and is a well-established beekeeper. I went to a talk he gave on making nucs. I learned so much from him about beekeeping in general in addition to what he shared about making nucs.

 For example, he uses hive drapes when he inspects the beehives and this cuts down on robbing. He said it was foolish for a beekeeper to lean a frame against a hive, uncovered. It's an invitation to robbers.  I came home inspired to use a hive drape going forward.  I have some old quilts that aren't good quilts but are sort of ragged.  I may cut sections from these quilts and make dowel casings so that they can become manipulation cloths for inspections.



Learning about the bees through managing nucs helps you manage colonies. He advocates using powdered sugar every other week in the middle of the day when the foragers are away from the hive.

And he had fun at the Brushy Mountain BBQ (see below!)


The next well-known beekeeper I was privileged to hear was Clarence Collison. When I was studying for the Young Harris Master Beekeeper exam, I studied every page of his book, What Do You Know? He has written a column in Bee Culture for years titled "What do you know?" and challenges beekeepers to stretch their knowledge about every aspect of beekeeping.

His talk was on pheromones. Most of what he talked about was material I had already studied in his book for the exam I took in May. One interesting thing he said that I didn't know was that if you removed the mandibular glands in the queen, she still would produce queen substance from the tergite gland on her abdomen.



He had fun at the BBQ as well and I took the opportunity to thank him for all I learned from his book to prepare for the exam.

In this picture on the right in navy blue is Dennis van Englesdorp.  Dennis is one of the foremost researchers in what's happening to bees today.  In his talk he said that if you had a hive with a "queen event" during a 50 day period,  then that hive had a 2.71 higher chance of dying than a hive that didn't have a "queen event" in the same 50 days.  A "queen event" means the hive was queenless, made an emergency queen, lost their queen or was requeened, for example, during that period of time.

My friend Phillip, standing with Dennis, and I asked Dennis to explain more about that to clarify it for us.  Dennis was accessible and friendly and gladly talked to us about our concerns.  I had misunderstood what he said and thought he meant that if a hive had a queen event, it was more likely to die.

He did say that, but that was in comparison to another hive that didn't have a queen event during the same time period.  The way I heard what he said, I thought every hive was highly likely to die since most hives have some sort of queen event during bee season.  But the issue is if that queen event hive is compared to one that doesn't have a queen event.  Make sense?

So I feel very lucky to have rubbed elbows with these particular three beekeepers during the week of EAS.  I also met Wyatt Mangum, writer for ABJ and keeper of top bar hives, but I have so much to write about what I learned from him that I am saving it for another post!