Now THIS is a Beard

This hive started from a package that I got from Jarrett Apiaries at the beginning of bee season.

I got home in the 90 degree June (??? - feels like August) Atlanta evening and found this hive looking like:

And when I went around to the back, there were even more bees consigned to the outside of the hive!

This is a HUGE hive and I have not opened up the screened bottom board.  I haven't done that for the last two summers.  But for this hive, I may have to.

I wanted to give them room to spread out inside the hive but it was 8 PM when I got home.  So I went out and put on two empty boxes - undrawn frames - just to give them some hangout room inside the hive.  (This hive has a slatted rack at the bottom.)

I carefully moved the top to avoid upsetting the bee beard at the back and gently put those girls on the inner cover.  Still it was hard to find a handhold.  I only got stung once in this whole maneuver, though, on the ball of my thumb.  I put the two empty boxes on and closed the hive up.

One bee seemed interested in the salty sweat on my hand:

However, as night fell, the beard was hardly disturbed and no bees appeared to go inside. I expect the space needs to be distributed throughout the hive for them to take advantage of the extra boxes I gave them. 

After a hot night, the beard was only slightly smaller this morning, but there were no bees bearding at the back of the hive.  I'll put some beer caps on the inner cover to lift it up a little and that might help as well.

The nectar flow is over and it's time to harvest and make splits. I'm not certain about this hive because at Jarrett Apiaries, they use oxalic acid, so this hive may not be able to deal with varroa mite on its own.  Still, it's such a strong hive that I will make some overwintering nucs from it for the winter.  

I'll have my work cut out for me for the next couple of weekends!

A Sad Day in the Life of a Beekeeper

Right after lunch today, I inspected the hives at the Morningside Community Garden.  The yellow hive has been washboarding every time I've stopped to check onmy tomatoes and the blue hive looks like in the picture below.  So I've been worried about the state of the blue hive - is it going OK?  Is it dwindling?

Today I checked it out.



The top box on the blue hive has two frames of comb that I moved into it for a ladder, but nothing else.  The box below it, though, is filled with capped and uncapped honey.  The last time I looked, the only honey was capped.  The bees are bringing in something - I don't know what it is, but all of my midtown hives are bringing in nectar - and there are frames being filled.  The frame below is from the blue hive; the next photo is a frame from the yellow hive.





At this time of year, unless I have reason to be concerned, I am only looking in the hive to see:

1. What is the state of their stores?  Are they eating honey or putting it in the comb?
2. Is there a queenless roar, or any other reason to suspect queen problems?

Otherwise I just shut them back up.  The only maneuver I did was to add bottle caps to the tops of the inner covers to increase ventilation.  Wonder if that will stop the washboarding?

Then I returned home to check on SOS1 - this hive has been hard to get going.  We made a split from Colony Square much earlier in the year and because the bees were so mean, we named it SOS (Spawn of Satan 1).  These bees seemed unable to make a good queen.   Their first queen was poorly mated; their second queen while mated OK was a poor layer and slow to build up.  For all I know they even made a third queen.

Last Thursday I went through the hive.  I didn't see the queen (which I should have paid better attention to) and I noticed that the numbers were still way down.  I added two frames of brood and eggs from my strongest hive at my house to help them increase their numbers.  I thought if they hadn't done any better, this week I would combine them with SOS 2 right next to them.

So I opened the hive - no bees.  There were about 30 bees on the inside of the top cover.  I think they were newly emerged bees from the frames I gave the hive last week.  There were no more bees, no honey, no nothing in the hive.  There were remnants of eggs and brood on the two frames I added last week.  The bees were gone and the wax moth larvae were already in the bottom box.

I shook the 30 bees onto the inner cover of SOS2.

I've now lost four hives - and all have absconded.  The only good news is that all of them were free bees - well almost all of them.  The first hive to go was my top bar hive which was a swarm collected in Decatur. 

The second to go was my hive in Rabun County.  That hive was a purchased package from Don in Lula in 2011, but I had assumed they wouldn't make it through the winter and had purchased two packages to replace the two Rabun hives.  Then I found to my joy that one dead hive had a swarm move in (and it was thriving last time I was up there) and the other hive was doing well up until the beginning of June.  I didn't go through it to find out why they had dwindled.  There were still bees in that hive, but I don't think they had a queen and the SHB had taken over.

Last week just before adding a new box and only a week after seeing the queen, my Little Kitten swarm absconded.  They left nothing behind.

And then today I lost SOS 1.  I feel deeply disheartened.  The only saving grace is that most of them were free bees.

Rabun County Hive Check

In the terrible tornado weather in the Southeast on April 28, Rabun County, where my bees are located, suffered two tornadoes. One occurred about 2 miles from the hive at Lake Burton and the other occurred in Mountain City, another two miles in a different direction. I wonder how the barometric pressure changes in such terrible weather affected the bees?

Both of these hives were started with packages in early April. Both hives have built out the bottom box and one of the hives had started in the second box. Hive One which is housed in 10 frame medium boxes had not built in the second box at all.

In the first box the frames with the most mature capped brood looked like the one below. Pretty good brood pattern, some holes where bees had emerged, and a general good healthy look.



I found some odd laying patterns but still wondered if the tornado and accompanying weather phenomena affected the queen and her laying. The capping was new looking and fresh. Since larvae is capped about seven days after laying and the tornado was less than two weeks ago, I wondered if the odd drone pattern represented confusion in the odd weather pattern when the eggs were laid.



The good news about this hive is that almost every empty cell was filled with eggs or young brood.  Perhaps the queen is back on track or perhaps this drone laying pattern is an indication of a bigger problem for the hive.



I love the yellow tint of the wax in the newly built comb because of all the pollen coming in.  Hive one was only housed in the lower box, so I left it with two medium boxes as its configuration.

Hive two, housed in eight frame medium boxes, had built out all the frames in the bottom box and had drawn out three frames in the second box where they had proceeded to store nectar.  Also in hive two there was an egg in almost every cell.

Actually both hives are about at the same point.  Hive One has built out 10 frames in one box.  Hive Two has built out 11 frames in two eight frame boxes.



I left the hives with bottle caps on the inner cover corners to raise the lid slightly and provide more ventilation.

I'll be back Memorial Day Weekend to see how these bees are doing.

Honey, Brood and A New Aid for Ventilation

In checking on my hives at home today, I was quite pleased with my bees.

I hate it when in the process of lifting a comb, despite my best efforts, some comb is broken open. Of course when that happens, it is always fascinating to see the bees surround the honey drips and put their proboscis to work sucking the honey back up as you can see in the picture below of the Colony Square bees working hard to retrieve spilled honey.




This curious frame in Colony Square was filled with nectar and right in the center there was capped brood???


The queen in this hive has been laying like crazy. Generally in the life of the hive, the queen builds up the population until the summer solstice at which point she gradually begins to slow down and continues the slow down until winter.



At Penny (my Virginia mentor's) suggestion, I am trying to increase ventilation in the hive by putting bottle caps at the corners of the inner covers. I wondered before I did this how the tops would stay in place, but I think I was imagining placing them on the corners of the hive box. Once I realized they would go on the tops of the inner cover corners (duh!), it's clear that they would easily stay put.



Lenox Pointe was doing well too. I didn't take pictures while in that hive, except for the one below, showing a beautiful frame of brood.
The bees in both of these hives are bringing in nectar as fast as they can. We are at the height of the nectar flow in Atlanta so it's prime time for the hives to be building up their honey supplies.



I put bottle caps on Lenox Pointe's corners as well. My son-in-law, Kevin, has been collecting bottle caps for me so I am now carrying a baggie of bottle caps in my hive inspection kit.

Hot town, summer in the city....

It's hot and the bees are bearding. My Aristaeus2 hive I think is half its size. About a week ago outside at 8 PM there were thousands of bees swirling around. I thought robbing was going on and responded accordingly. Now I think that half of Aristaeus2 swarmed, or at this time of year, I guess they absconded.

To help bees who were left behind, I put a baggie feeder of sugar syrup in and closed the top of the hive. They have honey and were even making new honey but I don't know why the hive absconded, so I thought it would be best to take care of those who are left. There is a laying queen. I saw eggs after the swarming/absconding event. But without the ventilation of the propped top, even this small hive is bearding.



Bermuda, my four year old hive, is really bearding. All the girls are out. I just checked and they are still out in the summer night at 9:30 PM. The beard, if anything, is even larger than it was before at 7 when I took this picture.



Mellona has never bearded. It is a hive full of bees, but this is about as big as her beard gets. Given that it is August in Hotlanta, that is quite an accomplishment.

All of my hives have screened bottom boards, slatted racks and I keep the top propped in the summer - but still it's too hot for all the bees to spend the night indoors. So they lounge and dance (washboard) on the front porch late into the night.



"But at night it's a different world
Go out and find a girl
Come on, come on lets dance all night
Despite the heat
it will be alright
And babe don't you know it's a pity
The days can't be like the night
In the summer in the city
In the summer in the city

Hot town summer in the city"....Joe Cocker

A Hodge-Podge Post

This post is full of random hodge-podge from my inspection and harvest this weekend.

Remember the hive where the comb was being built only on 2/3 of each frame in the super? I posted on the Beemaster forum, and I received replies suggesting that the bees would continue in this hive to build comb only in the front 2/3 of the box unless I took action. The recommended action was to turn the box 180 degrees so that the bees would now have the back in the front and the front in the back. I did this and now they are filling out the frames (see below).



I keep a stick in the back of my telescoping covers to add ventilation to the hives. When I do my inspections, the first thing I remove is the stick.....and then I lose it because I put it down just any old place. Today I decided to keep the stick in my hand until I take off the top cover and place the stick inside the telescoping cover before I take the hive apart. Seems simple, but it's hard to remember to hold onto the stick while I remove the cover. However, it pays off. I was much less frustrated since I could easily find the stick at the time to close up the hive, and I made myself remember to do it with each of the eight hives. Hooray!



Hyron, my first swarm, has been lagging behind the other hives. There is definitely a queen, but although she has a beautiful football shaped laying pattern, the swarm has not been building up as I would like it to. They haven't even considered the upper box. To find out how they really were, I needed to go into the brood box. I opened up the top box and set it on the inner cover.

I removed a frame from the brood box (the only box with any bees in it.) The bees were hot and not happy with me. Immediately they flew out of the hive and fastened themselves onto my jeans. It is so hot that I had opted to use my jacket with a veil that I love from BeeWorks. As a result I was wearing my blue jeans. There were at least 50 bees on my legs. I felt the stings start; put the frame against the hive; and headed for the house.

I could feel the stings through my jeans and tried to brush all of them off. When I finally counted the stings, I had 15 including one that crawled up my jeans and stung my knee and one that slipped under the elastic band on my wrist. Note to self: If I want to wear the veil for an inspection and not my full suit:
1. Don't inspect Hyron, the hot swarm hive
2. Wear loose jeans like my overalls instead of well-fitted jeans.

I don't know why this is such a hot hive, but I get stung every time I open it. Beekeepers will say that I need to replace the queen. I think I'm going to ignore this hive for a while and maybe replace the queen going into fall.

Meanwhile, like a true Southern woman, I felt inspired to feed these bees (we Southern women feed everyone). Maybe they haven't experienced me as hospitable as they expected here in Georgia. I haven't been feeding any of my hives because we've had a good nectar flow going, but these girls must be hungry. The jar which was totally full, had about an inch of feed taken from it since I installed. Maybe this will tame their spirits, but meanwhile it will be a cold day in ,.........before I open Hyron again.



While I was in the hives today, I took off about 9 frames of beautiful capped honey - some pretty enough to cut comb, all of it good for chunk honey. I took the wax cappings/crushings out of my filter from last weekend to make way for the new harvest. I washed it to get it ready for the solar wax melter. Here's the beautiful wax, ready to go outside and melt. There's a lot of it - will take about three different days in the SWM.



That's all for the hodge-podge post!

Hyron Doesn't Like Me to Be A Homewrecker

Hyron, the hive made from the swarm I caught in the office parking lot, is not particularly pleased with me. As swarms go, Hyron was a small swarm. I brought it straight home and put the swarm colony in my lure hive on the deck. The lure hive was composed of old yucky frames in an old box, but it was the only place I had to house the bees on short notice.

Immediately you may remember, the bees began housecleaning. I wondered how they would think of the beekeeper since I had supplied them with a rather lousy place to live. At the end of the day, they had swept the hive clean of clutter and set about bee-ing bees.

My own theory about this swarm is that they had a virgin queen. Often a hive will "throw" a swarm in which the old queen leaves with half the hive population. After the original swarm several after swarms may occur with a daughter of the now-absent queen. These queens are usually virgin queens.

This means that the queen has to fly off to be mated and successfully return to the new hive before any real action starts.

Hyron besides demonstrating excellent housekeeping, showed little growth at the beginning. I never fully checked for eggs because in the disreputable hive I gave them, there was a broken frame and this was the frame on which the population seemed to be concentrated. I just assumed that the queen was laying on that frame and went on with life.

Before I went out of town at the beginning of May, I put an extra box on Hyron but still didn't check for eggs. The hive was installed on April 1.

If the queen were a virgin, then she would have had to orient to the hive, fly away and return safely. She would then start laying, but her first eggs would not be bees for 21 days. At best, we might have had new bees emerging at the beginning of May.

When I looked truly into the hive this past weekend, I did see eggs and a beginning of brood build-up. This was the first really "deep" inspection I had ever done of this hive in the two months it has been in my beeyard.

Hyron's bees were not happy. One sneaked onto my sock and zapped me on my ankle. Another stung me on my knee through my beesuit. They head-butted me throughout the time I had the hive open. They are used to being left alone, so they must have experienced me as quite the homewrecker. I never smoke the bees, but I smoked these just so I could see what I was doing.
I am delighted that they do have eggs and brood. So best wishes, Your Majesty, live long and lay lots of babies.

I also noticed that in the hurry of a previous inspection I had failed to slide the next to the bottom box on Mellona all the way back flush with the bottom box. You can see the slight jut-out on the hive in the right side of the picture between boxes 1 and 2.



The bees have been using this as a mid-entrance! The next two pictures were taken close-up from the top
of the hive looking into the opened crack.

You can see the glee of the bees, having a new entrance to their hive.

Ventilation and the Screened Bottom Board

I am short a couple of screened bottom boards. I didn't mean to have seven hives, but two swarms came home with me and I had ordered three new nucs this year, feeling sure that one of my hives would die over the winter. The hives lived, the nucs came and I brought home two of the three swarms I caught. As a result two of my hives are on solid bottom boards and they are hot.

My first year when I saw the bees bearding, I was sure a swarm was about to happen, but I wasn't acquainted with Hotlanta beekeeping at that point. Now I know that slatted racks and screened bottom boards make all the difference. Most of my hives have both but the equipment I have ordered to fix the situation on my other hives has been back-ordered for a while.

This morning at 6:30, it is already hot in the less-ventilated hives. Below you can see my apparently queenless hive with bees all over the front porch, even hanging off the front edge. I love the way they cling to each other like circus acrobats. You can see this ability in the close-up of the entry. This hive has a solid bottom board - not good for either ventilation or varroa mite control.




One of my hives out in the yard is on a solid bottom board. The bees here are also gathered on the front porch.



You can really see the effect of the SBB and the slatted rack in Bermuda. Bermuda is teeming with bees, but it has plenty of ventilation so there are less bees on the front of the hive. The bottom narrow piece of wood at the bottom of the stack is the slatted rack on this hive and the whole thing sits on a screened bottom board. Makes a real difference!

YOU can spend the night outside!

It's starting to be warm at night in Hotlanta and the bees are beginning to feel it. It's the job of the house bees to keep the hive around 93 degrees Farenheit. If there are too many bees inside, the heat will rise above that so some are relegated to spending the hot nights on the front porch.

Walt Wright wrote an article last year on the need for hive ventilation. I do have the top propped which provides some air circulation but I do use a purchased inner cover, so the center opening isn't very large. This may slow down the air circulation through the hive. We'll keep watch as the summer goes into hotter times.

Below you can see the Proteus bees on their porch.

The bees from Mellona are also on the porch tonight.

Even little Bermuda has too many bees inside and has made this tiny effort at bearding. Bearding is what it is called when bees gather like a bee beard on the front of the hive. These beards are quite minimal - I'll keep showing the development of the beard as we get into REALLY hot nights....so watch for hotter night pictures.

Back Doors for the Bees

Since the weather is getting hotter, it's time to consider the hive's ventilation. For air circulation through the hive, it helps to give the bees a propped top. I usually find a stick to put in between the telescoping cover and the inner cover. Today I propped the tops on all three of my hives.

In addition to providing ventilation, the propped top gives the bees a back door. I do see them using it as such - perhaps it shortens the distance to the delivery of nectar when the top box (just under the inner cover under the propped lid) is where the bees are storing honey.

I also added a new box to both Proteus and Mellona. Proteus has brood in the bottom box and the medium above that was filled with almost completely capped honey in every frame. This is the box where they made confused comb. Mostly the comb is fine now and the box is almost completely capped. I want to encourage the queen to lay in the medium, so I put a new medium between the bottom deep and the honey-filled medium.

In the interest of giving these confused bees the best possible chance of building straight comb, I used Housel positioning in my starter strips and included two full frames of small cell foundation. I also wrote the name of the hive and the number of the box on the outside of each box. Proteus now has from the bottom up: Brood Box, Box 3 - new mostly SC starter strip frames with Housel positioning, Box 1 filled with capped honey; Box 2 - foundationless frames with starter strips.

In the version of Housel positioning that I used, I did not incorporate a center frame. For understanding what I mean by Housel positioning, see this earlier post.























Meanwhile, Mellona is going gangbusters with honey making. Mellona, the Roman goddess of the bees, is obviously working on this hive. When I checked the status, Mellona has beautiful comb throughout the hive. They have fully built out all of the boxes, so I added a fourth. When I checked yesterday, Mellona had a filled brood box on the bottom; a medium that they drew out from starter strip frames that is completely filled, a shallow (actually painted for another hive) that is already filled on 8 frames with almost capped honey. I wanted to add another honey super - a shallow using Housel positioning, so I did that today. I also labeled and numbered the boxes on Mellona in the order in which they were added. Unlike Proteus, the boxes on Mellona are stacked in the order in which they were added.
























I thought someone might like to see how close Proteus is to my sunporch. This picture was taken with me standing beside the other two hives looking at the back of Proteus.

And here is a picture of my grandson who spends every Friday with me, looking out of the sunporch door from the inside. This is the Dylan's-eye view of my beeyard on my deck.