Bees in Tower Place

The bees in the nuc (Tower Place) are doing well. Yesterday I opened the hive. I didn't do a deep inspection - I just wanted to see if they were occupying the frames in the deep and that the queen was laying.

She was and they were already using the box above (no surprise, given that they are in five frame boxes!)



Here they are all peeking out at me in the hive drape opening.



I added another box and closed the hive up. I'll check again on Sunday. I'm a little worried about this nuc box tower, as you can tell, but it feels like a fun experiment.



Somewhat Leaning Tower of Pisa, it is up and going and we'll see what the future brings.

Jennifer Berry Bees - Wow!

After my weekend at a professional conference, I got up at 5:30 AM on Sunday to drive to Athens from Rabun County to pick up bees from Jennifer Berry.  I had dropped off my nuc and an 8 frame deep hive box a few weeks ago to get ready for this event.

Here's Jennifer posing with her girls before they leave the farm.

It was great to see Jennifer on this cold morning and so wonderful to get these last bees of the season (for me) to take back to Atlanta.  I planned to put these bees in my own backyard that has been bee-less since the fall.

Actually I put a contract on a house in town the day before I left and enjoyed the grimace of my real estate agent when I wondered aloud if we could put in the contract that I wanted to put bees in the backyard of the new house before closing!  Oh, well, the bees will go to my current house instead!

Don Kuchenmeister loves a hive he runs all year in a nuc box.  It gets taller and taller.  He says it is one of his best honey producers, because it is like a tree to the bees.

So I thought I might keep the nuc in a nuc box and add my medium nuc boxes to it to give them space and grow them taller.

So I installed it with a medium nuc on top of the deep.  As you can see in the photo, I have two waiting painted medium nuc boxes to add over time and another unconstructed one in the basement.  If it needs more room than that, I'll either split it or move them to a regular sized box.

The minute I removed the screen, these bees were all over it.  They were orientation flying, massing on the front door step and generally full of energy.  The second hive, placed under a tree nearby, looked lifeless - not a bee emerged.

To see if there were actually bees there, I lifted the top and there they were, but nobody came out of the door.  OK, I said to myself, it's only 56 degrees, probably too cold for them.  

An hour and a half went by and the action below is the most I saw.  It was still 58 or so degrees, but I'm not happy with what is going on.  Did I get one good hive and one dud from Jennifer?  Surely not.

Here's what it looked like, comparatively:

After some thought and knowing few if any foragers had left this hive, I moved the lifeless-looking hive to a sunnier location near the nuc.

Within ten minutes, there were the bees!  I hope these hives do well.  If they do, then when I move in July or so, I'll split them and take the splits to the new house.

Note:  I had the deck pressure washed today - it's just up above these hives and the steps to the deck are about five feet away from the front of the 8 frame.  I called the guy who did the work to tell him what a good job they had done.

"Did the bees bother you?"  I asked him.
"What bees? !!!" was his reply.

It was 78 or so today so we can know they were flying, but he and his men did not even notice the bees five feet away!

No Bees at Home

I guess the end of this saga at my house is that there are no bees at home. The hive on the left is the huge one that absconded earlier in the summer. The middle hive with the robber screen on it is the one I moved to a clean box to try to thwart the fact that they appeared to be a dying hive.

The nuc box (blue) on the right is the nuc I started with the queen who had been caged for two weeks when I finally realized it and moved her to this nuc. She must have suffered from PTSD after such a long caging and didn't get going - her brood pattern was spotty at best and in the end, the nuc was robbed out and all the bees died.



The wax moths will move in if I don't move the wax into the freezer - which is a project for tomorrow. You can see a wax moth cocoon on the right on frame 3.



To add to the sadness, when Julia, Noah, and I went to Blue Heron today to check on and feed the bees, one of her two hives there had absconded. There wasn't a bee in the place.

So goes this summer. I hope next year will be better for both bees and me. At least I still have the Blue Heron hive, the hive at Valerie's and my hive in Rabun County.

I want to sell my house and move closer to my Atlanta children so that I can be a more active grandma. This will give me an opportunity to move the hives off of the deck and have it pressure washed and maybe stained to help sell the house next spring.

 I've already ordered two nucs from Jennifer Berry for next year. I'll probably get a couple from Don in Lula as well, but he doesn't take orders until the beginning of the year. I'll put those bees either at Rabun, Blue Heron or wherever I live next!

New box on the nuc

My little "tree" hive is growing. I added another medium nuc box to this hive. I replenished their food and hope the queen is doing well. I haven't really looked into the box - just saw eggs on one frame and closed it up. But I have my fingeres crossed.

At this time of year, this is the only way to use a Boardman feeder. Inside the hive like this, it doesn't encourage robbing. Attached to the front of the hive, it does.





Hannah doesn't seem intimidated by these bees!

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!

Don's Queen is Doing Well in the Little Nuc

The little blue nuc hive with Don's queen is doing well.  I opened it today and saw five SHBs immediately.  I gave them the hive tool treatment.  I checked the AJ's traps (I have two on the hive) and both had lots of SHB in them.  I mixed apple cider and oil and put it in the traps and replaced them on the hive.

The hive was only occupying the bottom box.  However, the queen is laying nicely as you can see in the photos below.  There's lots of brood as well as new eggs.



I am hesitant to feed at this time of year - even inside the hive because of the possibility of robbing occurring in the dearth of nectar.  But I may feed these girls with a sandwich baggie feeder to help them build up a little.



I am pleased they are doing well and only looked at this one frame before closing up the hive.  I thought there would be no point in possibly causing injury to bees or the queen by inspecting further and I had seen what I needed to see.

And What of the Queenless Hives?

In the first hive, Aristaeus2, I pulled out the cork from the candy end of the cage and wedged it in between two frames. There's lots of wiggle room in the eight frame boxes to do this. I'll check it on Wednesday and see if they have released the queen. I'm crossing my fingers and hoping that this queen will appeal to this growing-smaller hive.


Shock and sadness, when I opened the L hive, it was practically a dead hive. There were bees in the box on all the frames, keeping company with slimey small hive beetle larvae (see photo below). The hive was a mess.



My plan was to requeen this hive but now I had a new problem. I took all parts of the hive and moved it about 25 feet away and set the boxes in my yard, as well as the SBB and the slatted rack.

I set up my 5 frame, two story medium nuc as a new hive and prepared to make a split. I placed the nuc in the old L Hive location but none of the boxes, the frames, etc. are from the old slimed hive. I opened my Easter swarm hive which has more bees and brood than it knows what to do with and took two frames of brood from that hive. I checked very, very carefully to make sure there was no queen on either frame. Then from an upper box, I took two full frames of honey from that hive and one frame that had some brood but many open cells.

I put all of those frames and bees into the nuc in the L Hive location. I shook a few extra bees into it from the top box of the Easter hive. My thought was that the bees from the L Hive will return/stay in that location. The new frames, brood, clean honey,etc. will provide a home for the nurse bees that I took from the Easter hive.

The 5 frame nuc doesn't have enough space to wedge the queen cage between the frames and Don had told me not to hang the cage. So I put it on top of the frames and put the second story of the nuc box on top with one frame removed. The other frames are drawn comb.



So here's the set up. When I finished and closed everything up, all of the old boxes (see the yellow box in the background) had been moved away and the nuc stood on its own ground.

I think I'm going to order some nematodes.......

Meanwhile either two frames of honey are being robbed out in my carport or a swarm has moved into some hive boxes I have stacked there!  There have been swirling bees in large numbers there all day.

Still Queenless After All These Days

I installed two new queens, one into Aristaeus2 and one into the L hive, before I went to Young Harris.  The queens were installed on Saturday afternoon.  I had to leave on Wednesday from work so the last possibility to look into the hives was before 8 AM on Wednesday.  At that time at my house, the bees are not flying and it isn't really warm yet.

On Wednesday before I left for the office (from which I was driving to Young Harris), I opened the top on Aristaeus2 and looked into the hive enough to see that the sugar had been all eaten out, so I didn't pull up the cage and left thinking all was well.  I didn't have time to check the L Hive.

I got home on Sunday and opened both hives.  Aristaeus2 had indeed eaten out all the sugar, all the attendants were gone, including the two dead ones who were in the cage when I got the queen, and the now dead queen was left in the queen cage.  Of course, there was no brood nor eggs in the hive.

The L Hive is doing very badly.  There were dead bees on top of the ventilated hive cover, bodies bitten in half:

The hive wasn't robbed.  There was nectar in the hive and no torn wax cappings.  I wondered if this were the work of bald-faced hornets because I do see them around my hives.  I haven't seen any this year but last year they were always lurking in the bee yard.  They are carnivores and cutting the bees in half seems fitting for how they might carry bee bodies to their young.

The top box had slime on it from hive beetle so I took the box off and plan to render that wax.  I pulled out the queen cage.  She had not been released and the queen and her attendants were all dead.  The sugar had not been eaten at all.  I expect these bees have given up - they are from the abandoned hives that we rescued earlier this spring.

I am very distressed.  I feel like the L hive queen death was beekeeper error because I didn't check the cage at all before I left.  I don't know why the bees killed the queen in Aristaeus2.  The man I got the queens from guarantees his queens, but both queens were in cages with at least two dead workers in the cage when I picked them up.  I don't know how long they had been caged before I received them.  I don't feel good about these queens and don't want to get more from him.

I called Don (www.fatbeeman.com) in Lula from whom I got the great packages for Rabun County and the top bar hive at Valerie's house.  I am driving up to Lula to get two queens from him on Saturday afternoon. 

I plan to introduce one to the Aristaeus2 hive.  In the meantime, I put a frame of brood and eggs in that hive from the swarm hive.  A hive doesn't lose hope (and develop laying workers) if they think there's a chance of a queen.  I'll check to see if they have made a queen cell after work tomorrow.  I also put a frame of eggs into the L Hive.

The L hive I'm going to move into a nuc.  I am going to take the queen from Don and put her in a nuc with medium frames.  I'm going to shake the bees left in the L Hive into the nuc and see if they can make do with a new start.  Bees are supposed to expand in the spring.  This hive has contracted and now it is going to be a nuc.....

Isn't beekeeping amazing - new challenges at every turn!

A Visit to the Queenery and Jennifer Berry's Apiary

This morning Julia, her son Noah and I left Atlanta at 6:30 AM to drive to the Queenery near Athens, GA, to pick up Julia's nuc for the Blue Heron's last hive.  We had a great time and learned a lot.  One thing we learned that is not evident in the slideshow:

Jennifer's hive tool was immaculate and shiny (unlike either of ours).  She cleans it between hives which lowers the chance of transmitting disease or other issues between hives.  We vowed to take Clorox wipes in our equipment carriers to be able to clean our tools between hives.

Here's the slideshow of what we saw and how we got the last nuc for Blue Heron.  Remember that if you click on it, you'll have an opportunity to read the captions and watch the show full-screen.

Homes for the Homeless Bees

Today was an amazing day. One of Julia's friends called her from Chastain Park (about a mile from the Blue Heron as the creek flows). She had seen a hive box in the creek over at Chastain. Julia and two friends met there and really got down and dirty.

They pulled hive boxes and hive parts out of Nancy Creek and in effect salvaged whatever they could find.

Then they went to Blue Heron and found another stash of hive stuff cast into the brush on the creek bank by the flood. Julia said there were even bees flying around.

I couldn't get there until 2, so Julia and I met there, suited up and tried to fashion a home for these homeless bees. We called Cindy Bee who said to put together a dry hive box with drawn comb frames and feed honey to the bees in an effort to gather them in one place.

The hardest part was seeing the survivor bees. Julia and I each suited up for fear that in their confusion they would want to sting us, but it was like being in a swarm - the bees had no inclination to sting - they had nothing to protect. We saw a few live bees that were muddy and trying to just move and it was awful to watch. Heart breaking, really.

We did everything Cindy said and the results you can see in the slide show below. Julia took most of these pictures. If you click on the slideshow, you can view it in a larger size:



We'll check in a few days and if the bees are in any organized position to be moved, we'll move them home and combine them with a thriving hive. Cindy said if enough moved in, we could order a queen and start another hive.

This whole event has been so sobering for us as beekeepers. The thought of "here today, gone tomorrow," is not one we have considered often as beekeepers and it made us sad.

A man who works at the Blue Heron headquarters stopped by while we were working:

"We loved having the beehives," he said. "I hope this won't discourage you from putting them here again."

And we talked about the probability of another 100 year flood!

Below is the graph of the level of Nancy Creek - it's remarkable to see the difference in the flood yesterday and the level today:

And in the Home Beeyard, my Troubles Continue

My strongest hive, Bermuda, I opened to inspect on Saturday, the 5th. There were a ton of hive beetles under the top cover. I wanted to go into this hive to see what is what as I get them ready for winter. This hive is full of bees, but as I inspected, it is also full of troubles.

There are little to no stores in this hive. I only took one super of honey from this hive and they had heavy boxes and still have five boxes on the hive. The bottom box held almost nothing but pollen filled frames.



The second and third boxes each had three frames of a beautiful brood pattern - especially this late in the year. The two sets of three frames of brood were not on top of each other. Three were on the right side of the second box and three were on the left side of the third box.

There was almost no honey in this hive. I haven't been feeding it because it had two full boxes on the top, but those are almost empty now.



So my plan for the bees in Bermuda is to rearrange the hive. I plan to take the six brood frames and put them all in the same box. I am going to move the empty-of-brood-but-full-of-pollen bottom box up and put the created brood box on the bottom with some of the pollen frames in it and any frames of honey I can find. While I'm at it, I'm going to put the Freeman beetle trap that was on the now defunct Blue Heron hive on the bottom of this hive.

I'm going to reduce the hive to three medium boxes and feed it like crazy between now and the first frost which in Atlanta is around mid November. The three boxes will be a brood box on the bottom, a box of pollen and any honey frames I can find, a box of empty drawn frames in which to store sugar syrup. I'll put a fourth box on the hive to surround a baggie feeder and will feed this hive like mad.

Then I opened the nuc that I brought back from Blue Heron with the other (inadequate) queen and a queen cell on one frame. Cockroaches ran out of the top of the hive. The feed bag which had not been emptied the week before was still full with sugar syrup hardened over one of the slits and a dead bee on it (I didn't take pictures....when I find depressing bee news, I often am so shocked that I forget about the camera).

There was no sign on any frame that these bees had a queen. And the queen cell that was on one frame on August 20th was nowhere to be seen. They had a full deep frame of honey (I operate no deep boxes at home).

I'm going to open that hive up today and if there is still no sign of a queen, I'm doing a newspaper combine to put these bees in the hive next to the nuc - Aristaeus2 - which has been thriving all year.

I hope it all works. At this point, I'll be lucky to make it through the winter with maybe 2 hives surviving.

"Well, we're moving on up, to the east side...."

The nuc I created with the combination at Blue Heron appears to be doing fine. I didn't open up the bottom box today, but I did look down into it to see so many eager little bee faces. The five frames in the box are fully built out and mostly used. There are three brood frames (one with some pollen) and two solid honey frames. Only one of the brood frames has much space in it, so first I gave the nuc hive a medium box to move on up into.



Then I wanted to feed them since it's only a short time until winter and they are weak and small. So I put a third medium nuc box on top of the hive body and put a ziploc baggie feeder on the tops of the frames beneath. Because it is a quart instead of a gallon bag, I'll need to check on it more frequently.



So here's their new "deluxe apartment in the sky..." Doesn't it look like a row house!

But I think the girls may have the capacity to fill the second medium box before winter hits. Several beekeepers I respect keep bees in nucs through the winter in much colder climates than here in Hotlanta - Michael Bush in Nebraska, Ross Conrad in Vermont. So I am having hope for the future, especially if the new queen emerges and gets well-mated.



The only problem is that the nuc box on the bottom is poorly built and a little warped. I didn't match up the sides well and it's uneven on the top, so the bees are using the space between the bottom box and the first blue medium box as a middle entrance.

Swarm is Settling In to New Home

I borrowed a frame of honey from another hive to fill the empty space in the medium nuc.



I opened the nuc to find the bees busy at work, cleaning and settling in. I was easily able to insert the frame of honey to add to their jump start.



My grandson came out to watch the settling in process.



I have a reduced entrance and the bees are falling all over themselves as they enter and leave their new home.