Painting boxes Efficiently

OK, I know we all say that in the winter is a great time to paint boxes and read bee books. Somehow I always manage to get all the way to spring without accomplishing this.

So it's time to move my overwintered nucs into boxes and to make splits and to move some bees around. There's a good chance that a camera person will be in my apiary this year, so I wanted my boxes to look slightly more like Martha Stewart. (As a well-known blog states, I am NOTMARTHA)

The GBA newsletter had an article this month about painting boxes in a stack using a paint roller. The author had found the method on YouTube. I went and looked at several videos on YouTube an set about trying this out for quick, efficient box painting for the procrastinating beekeeper.

You start by stacking the boxes one on top of the other, upside down. An adorable boy on a YouTube video explains that putting them upside down means that when you paint the handholds, the paint collects on the ledge instead of dripping down. I painted the boxes on top of dirt, mildew, whatever.

First I painted the hand holds since I wanted them to be a different color: green. Then I painted the boxes blue with a roller. The whole process was quick as a wink - took less than 30 minutes. I only know because I was baking bread and started when the bread went into the oven and I was done by the moment the timer went off to tell me the bread was done!

So yesterday I ended up with delicious homemade bread and lovely boxes all in the same day. By afternoon, it was warm enough and the paint was dry so I moved one of the overwintered nucs into its new home.

Possible Good Swarm News

Bermuda is my hive that died. When it did, I moved the box that had honey in it into my house and froze the frames. The other two boxes I left on the hive, planning to clean it out in the next couple of weeks. There are dead bees all on the screened bottom board and near the entry. Earlier I posted pictures of the sad loss of the hive.

I noticed a few bees flying in and out of this hive early last week. As the week moved toward Friday, the numbers of bees flying around the hive increased. Yesterday there was increased activity all day. I wondered if these were scouts looking for a new home for their hive as it reproduced via swarm or if these were robbers, going for honey I hadn't noticed.

Today the hive was full of activity. Bees were doing what looked like orientation flying all day long. I began to think a swarm had moved in while I was at church this morning. As the afternoon progressed, my thoughts that this might be a swarm got firmer.

I noticed that a lot of housekeeping was going on. As you can see in the next few pictures, dead bees are littering the ground. Robbers don't usually do housekeeping and bees that are moving in often do.






So we'll see tomorrow. After dark I put my hand on the side of the hive and thought it felt pretty warm. I also thought I heard buzzing but didn't want to do anything disturbing as of yet. Cross your fingers for me! I want this to be a good swarm story!



I installed my first bee hives on Easter Sunday five years ago, so it would portend well for a hive moving into Bermuda on Easter Sunday 2010.

Loss ..... and Gain

We had wondered about the hive with food that we set up at Blue Heron - were the bees there homeless or were they robbers from the neighborhood? Yesterday Julia and I went over and removed the empty boxes.

Under my box which had had the most activity was a clear sign of robbers. When robbers open honey cells, they rip the cell open, leaving ragged edges on the comb and dropping wax shards carelessly below. You can see the wax shards on top of the cinder block.

The reason there are shards on one block and not so much on the other is that some of the frames we put in the wrecked hive had dead brood and some had capped honey - so the honey must have been on that side.



We left the cinder blocks to inspire us for next year and to remind us that once there were bees thriving at Blue Heron.



From a practical point of view, last night I decided to look at the cost of what was lost.

Hive Body - 2 per hive $24
Telescoping Top $20
Inner Cover $10
Screened Bottom Board $15
Frames $20
Slatted Rack $11
Original nuc bees $75
Replacement Purvis Queen $50

Total $225

That's a lot of stuff floating down the river. Since there were seven hives there, each with approximately the same equipment, that means the total losses at Blue Heron for all the beekeepers there amounted to about $1575. Goodness -

While the whole thing was and is very sad, I spent some of Sunday afternoon with a young woman and her family who wanted to learn about bees to see what it would be like to start keeping bees in the spring.

Here's Annie in one of my beesuits, happily opening and exploring beekeeping as a possible new venture for herself.



So I tell myself there is balance. The bees and hives may have washed down the river, but there's at least one new beekeeper who wants to bring the tiny insects into her life.

And next year there will be more beehives and more beekeepers in the world.

Burning out Old Equipment

Tonight I am going to work with the members of a Girl Scout Troop who are getting ready to set up their own beehive and to make an effort to keep bees. In the process they are developing a "Try-it" for the Georgia scouts. They have ordered their bees. A good friend of mine who had bees 30 years ago is cleaning out his barn in north Georgia and gave me old hive boxes for these girls. To try to kill any spores for AFB (American Foulbrood) the interior of the boxes has to be burned.
Beekeeping for me has expanded my home construction skills - non-existent before this endeavor. To burn out the hive boxes, I purchased a propane torch. It took me all morning to get the courage to figure out how to use it. (The hardest part was how to get the white top off of the propane container, but I was finally successful). I burned the interior of each box. It was a little scary - the flame is very hot and outdoors I could hear the flame but couldn't see it. I had a bucket of water sitting ready in case I needed to put out a fire.

The package says menacingly not to do this on concrete (see the floor of my carport) because some concrete explodes with heat. I certainly wasn't going to flame inside my house, so the concrete carport was the place of choice and I simply crossed my fingers. Well, I didn't really - it took both hands - one to hold the torch and one to steady the hive boxes.

In the end I burned out a deep, a medium and three honey supers as well as a telescoping cover and an inner cover.

Squirrel Discovers Bee Products

A squirrel on my deck decided to eat what was left on this deep frame, propped outside my door. He thought it was a gourmet treat.

He moved on to a hive box that I had hopefully inviting swarms at the corner of my deck and used his teeth to get to the frames in the box before I discovered what he was up to.

What a fine set of teeth he has! He left a pile of gnawed frame and comb which I discovered under the hive box when I moved it and covered it. Last year I was on the watch for bald-faced hornets and yellow-jackets. This year we can add squirrels to the list.