Swarm Hive Intervention

In Atlanta this year we have had a record-setting 53 days of rain.  It rained on April 8 and 9.  Then Atlanta tied a 1980 record with rain for eight straight days from April 12 - 19.

Now in the beekeeper's mind, this has lots of consequences.  First the tulip poplar began to bloom during that period.  Frequently after the many stormy days and nights, I've seen this on the ground:

A tulip poplar bloom on the ground (and there are many) is not providing nectar for the bees.

The swarm I captured twice on April 7 was the third swarm issued by the originating hive. That means the queen was a virgin. And what does a virgin queen have to do when she finds her new home with the secondary (or in this case tertiary) swarm? She has to fly out and mate.

The odds of her mating successfully or well are slim with the constant rain.

This weekend, almost three weeks since the swarm was hived, my daughter and I went up to see the bees. I noticed that the bees in the hive I made from a split of a Mountain Sweet Honey hive that survived the winter were flying in and out with pollen, but the bees in the swarm hive were not.

I started worrying that the queen might have been short-bred or not mated at all.

Today I went up and opened the hive. I had with me a frame of brood and eggs from my neighborhood hive that overwintered successfully. I had wrapped the frame in a warm towel from the dryer because I wanted the eggs to stay warm.

I opened the hive and found bees and comb, but no queen activity in the bottom box. At this point I put in the frame of brood and eggs. 

In the second box also no bee activity - drawn comb that I had given them but nothing was being stored in it. There were many bees in this box. 

The third box had mostly drone brood with a few worker cells. I think the queen was poorly mated. The bees weren't even bringing in nectar, almost as if they knew they were doomed. 

I hope the frame of brood and eggs will give them a new lease on life. I'll add a frame of brood and eggs each week now until they have a successful queen in the hive.

The other hive, the split from Ray and Julie's Mountain Sweet Honey bees, was doing really well. Their new queen had successfully mated and there were eggs, brood, pollen and honey in that hive. The comb they were drawing was lovely and I have high hopes for that hive.

If you zoom in on this photo you can see many eggs in the open cells below the pollen.

What does 2 + 2 add up to in these two hives?

I have two dead hives in my backyard that needed my evaluation.  I went through the first hive - the Northlake Swarm hive - which died in the second hard freeze week we had in February.  Temperatures were in the 20s most of the week.  In addition to a box full of capped honey, here is what I found in the second box:

You can also see part of the other side of the cluster on the frame below this one.  As you can see the bees were clustered over honey and they died despite more capped honey just four inches away on the same frame.  This often happens when the temperatures are below freezing in Atlanta for days.  The bees have to make a good initial decision about where to locate the cluster.  If they miscalculate,  they die.

These dead bees had a whole box of honey above them and more honey on the frame on which they died.

In addition there were a ton of dead, molded bees on the screened bottom board:

The second lost hive was Tom's swarm #2.  There were two medium supers completely filled with honey and the hive looked like it was in relatively good shape - no wax moth damage, no small hive beetles.  In the next to the bottom box (this hive had four boxes), I found a tiny tennis ball size group of bees in a semi cluster.  The queen was in this group.  

They were not head down in the cells.  The queen was thin and looked what Keith Fielder would call "short bred."  Because these bees look as if they dwindled and the queen was so small, my guess is that they replaced their queen just before winter and she did not mate well. There were probably few drones around when she went on her mating flight. There was a little scattered capped brood.  

There was no mold in the hive because it didn't go into winter with bees creating heat/moisture in the hive.  The honey held up because we had a pretty cold winter for Atlanta - I wore my coat from November 2014 through February 2015, and in 2013 only got my coat out after January 2014 began.  

The bees simply dwindled and died out.

So it's a new year; my foot is healed; let's hope for a better bee season.

Bees are Now in Rabun County

Yesterday was a tough decision bee day.  I was going up to the mountains for the weekend so the queen I was supposed to get from the supplier couldn't be brought back to the Chastain hive.  I couldn't move the Chastain hive to Rabun county because it is a failing hive now with few bees since the drone layer queen is not replacing the bees.  I'm only up there about once every 3 - 4 weeks so I wouldn't be able to intervene if it didn't go well.

So what I decided was to take a split from my backyard to Rabun.  They haven't made their own queen yet, so I could put the replacement queen in it.  Then I could keep giving the Chastain package brood and eggs until they finally make a workable local queen.  Michael Bush says that when you have a drone layer, just give the hive a frame of brood and eggs every week until they successfully make a queen.

I went over to Chastain to retrieve the drone layer queen, but in the process and in talking to Julia, I changed my mind.  I've had two angry/mean phone calls from the supplier and two angry/mean emails from him and the idea of driving to Lula, an hour away, to allow him to say critical comments to my face just wasn't appealing just to get a queen.  And since he and I will no longer be doing any further business, what investment would he have in giving me a good queen?  For all I know, he would give me another unmated queen.

So Julia was very generous and gave me a frame of brood and eggs to put in the split I was taking to Rabun.  I had given it a frame of brood and eggs about five days ago, but didn't see a queen cell, so wasn't too hopeful about them.  I put the frame in the split hive and drove to N Georgia, feeling great relief as I passed the turn off to the supplier's house without even considering turning off.

Also the place where I collected the huge swarm on Tuesday was unhappy that there were still a baseball sized bunch of bees still clustered where the swarm had hung, so I stopped there and sprayed those bees with vanilla flavored sugar syrup, shook them into a Tupperware container and when I got to Rabun, added them to the hive split that I had brought.  The vanilla allows the bees to mask the pheromone and generally they will combine without killing each other.  Cindy Bee taught me that years ago.

So Rabun County now has bees at the community garden with plenty of bees, honey and the resources to make a queen.  I left the dead out hive in place there so that perhaps a swarm from the old school nearby where there are bees in the wall might move in as they did last year.

Weather with tornado watches was predicted for Rabun and as I drove into the county at 6:45 PM, the rain started.  I installed these bees in the rain, carrying the hive by myself about 50 yards to the bee site.  As soon as I had shaken in the bees from the swarm, then the rain started to pour down in full force.

What I have learned from this experience:
 
Always ask your supplier what their policy is should the queen fail in the establishment of the hive.  I did not do that and when I said the queen had failed, his response was that his queens were proven layers.  That was a terrible position for me to be in, since I had a failed queen purchased from him.  It set the situation up for his stance that the problem was with the purchaser rather than the seller.  And this queen was a drone layer from the beginning on March 18.  When selling bees, for good will and for continued support from the purchaser, the supplier should assume the customer is always right.

We will leave the drone layer hive at Chastain so that when we are doing teaching inspections, as we do there for new beekeepers frequently over the spring and summer, we can talk about drone layers, demonstrate how to handle a drone laying hive (hopefully), and talk a lot about how to choose a better bee supplier than we did.

Meanwhile so that we will have three good hives over there, I'll move a split I have made with a queen from Julia's yard to Chastain to be up and running since the queen is already "proven" and laying.

Another Queen Failure - this one from a Fatbeeman Package

The queen in our package installed at Chastain Conservancy was not released by the bees.  I picked up three packages from Don Kuchenmeister (Fatbeeman) for Julia and two for me on March 17.  I dropped Julia's by her house and drove home with my two.  On that same afternoon, I installed one package at my house and saved the other to take to Chastain the next day.

In most packages, the bees cluster around the queen cage and hang like this in the package (generally clustered around the queen cage suspended beside the feed can:

The bees in the package for Chastain were all over the place completely filling the box - not hanging around or organized on the queen cage.  That should have given me pause.  But I didn't think about it at the time.

I checked the newly installed hive for food needs two days after installation.  The queen hadn't been released and I gave them more honey.  Then the temperatures dropped into the 30s and low 40s for about eight days or more.  As soon as it was warm enough, we had our first hive inspection and the queen had still not been released.  So we made the decision to direct release her and she walked into the hive happily.

Now, three weeks after installation, I went to do an inspection with Julia on our own (not teaching).  To my alarm, the only brood in my hive was drone brood.  Egg cells had two to five eggs in them as if there were a laying worker.  I found several cells with two tiny c-shaped larvae in the bottom.  However, instead of a laying worker, we found the queen and watched her put her bottom in a cell to lay.

What this means is that the queen was barely mated.  She was mated enough to think she could lay but she must have only mated with a single drone, if that.  The bees weren't clustered around her in the package because she wasn't giving out queen pheromone and they didn't release her because of that as well.  Don said you couldn't tell by how they hung in the package, and said that I must have bumped the package.  I didn't - it's how the package looked when I got it from Don and also the next morning before I had touched it in any way.  Jerry Wallace, a well-respected local beekeeper, said that the bees weren't clustering around the queen cage in the package was a sign she wasn't mated.

When you purchase a package, if you get to pick it out yourself, you look for a package that has as few dead bees lying on the bottom of the package as you can.  Also since they are filled by estimate, look for one that is pretty full.  Now I know to look for how the bees are hanging in the package to make sure the queen is fully functioning.

Because there is no replenishment of the numbers in a hive that starts as a package, the number of bees is now greatly diminished and this formerly 3 pound package now only occupies a sparse three frames in the hive.  If the queen were properly mated and laying, this would not be an issue because she would have replacement brood and more ready to emerge by this point, but without any replacement bees, this hive is in jeopardy.  The remaining bees will not live for the three weeks it takes for the queen to lay brood and have it emerge.

I called Don and he questioned everything I had done with the hive.  He said I should have called him when the bees had not released the queen.  I didn't call him because once before I had purchased a queen from him; she had not been released and when I called him, he said, "Release her directly."  So rather than bother him, we just released her directly.

He said all of his queens were proven layers and that if I wanted him to replace the queen, I would have to catch the faulty queen and bring her back to him and then he would give me a queen - "I still have three or four," he said.  I said I thought he should give me some bees as well because the $95 I paid for the package is all for naught with no replacement brood at this point.  He said, "Bees are not guaranteed to live."

I told him that I have a hand tremor and that I have never picked up a queen.  He said with a tone filled with contempt, "You are a Master Beekeeper and don't know how to pick up a queen?"

When I went over to Jerry Wallace's house today, he lent me his queen clip and also told me how to "herd" the queen into a queen cage without having to pick her up, so I'll try that first tomorrow and then the queen clip if I can't "herd" her.

I have bought bees from Don for four years and spent a lot of money with him.  I have put him on our supplier list that we give out to new beekeepers (over 100 of them) who take our short course.  Every time anyone asks me where to get bees I recommend him highly.

No more.

I wish he had just said, "Gosh, I'm sorry, Linda.  With this cold beginning to the spring a lot of queens have been poorly mated.  Come by and get another one, no problem."  But instead he was angry that I was unhappy and seemed resentful that he would have to replace my queen.

I guess he would rather be angry at me and make a poor business decision in how he handled my problem instead of being nice and helpful to me, a steady customer who has sent him many, many customers.

I told him that in my business, we call what he was doing to me "blaming the victim," and he told me not to lecture him and to get another supplier.

But now that's done, as far as I am concerned.  I will not be giving out his name any more to anyone.  Julia and I are in charge of the MABA short course next year so I will remove his name, since he has essentially suggested that I do so, from our recommended suppliers.  I can't imagine a new beekeeper having to deal with what I had to deal with yesterday and today in my interaction with him.

Post Script:  Jerry Wallace has been in touch with a number of bee suppliers in south Georgia where Don's packages are raised.  Jerry reports that they tell him that many of the queens coming out of south Georgia as early queens are poorly mated because we have had such a cold March throughout the state.  Our winter months were not any of them as cold as the first three weeks of March were in Georgia.  So many of the queens who flew out were not able to mate as often or as well as they would need to in order to be a success in their hives.  I imagine I am not the only one who has called Don to say that the package they received from him had a bad queen.