Queenly is as Queenly Does

So today was the day to check on the red dot Mississippi queen in Ron's hive.  First I went to check on Sebastian's hives.  The first split hive was doing well.  The queen was laying.  I saw one frame that was almost 100% eggs!  They were also storing honey but not going gangbusters so they didn't need another box.  I gave them a powdered sugar shake and moved to the survivor hive.

The survivor hive over there was also doing really well.  They had completely filled the top box and were putting honey in odd comb formations between the boxes so even though there was one unused frame in the top box, I thought they needed a new box.

I am using the ventilated hive cover to help do powdered sugar dusting:

It's much simpler and faster than using a sifter.  I put one Sierra cup's worth of sugar on each hive on top of the frames in the brood box.  

I took a frame of brood and young larvae from Sebastian's large hive to give to the hive at Ron's.  I put it in a green pillow case to keep it relatively warm; closed up the hive; and drove to Ron's.

At Ron's my first concern was the Mississippi Queen.  Had she been released now that I removed the old queen on Monday?  I opened the hive and found her still in her queen cage.  The bees were acting eager and friendly around the cage and had eaten all but the last sugar barrier.  There were dead workers in the queen cage.  I opened the queen cage and direct released her.  She moved rapidly into the hive box and I cheered her on her journey and her life.  

I also added the frame of brood and young larvae to the same box in the position where the queen cage had been.  That should give a little boost to the hive and keep them busy.   I marked that frame as Sebastian's R's Hive so that I wouldn't give the Mississippi Queen credit where credit wasn't due and left, hoping that the next time I visit, there will be new eggs on a different frame laid by her.

Before I walked away I glanced at the hive box (no bees in it) next to the Mississippi Queen hive.  There on the side of the hive was a newly hatched luna moth.  So GORGEOUS.  She probably had her cocoon on the side of the hive just under the top cover.  They have to dry for two hours before they can fly.  Here she is in her regal glory:

Inspection at the new Chastain Conservancy Site

This year we are holding inspections at the Chastain Conservancy.  We still have hives at the Blue Heron, but with vandalism, critters, and floods, we needed a new site for teaching new beekeepers.  We now are grateful to have use of the land at the Chastain Conservancy.

It's a great site - Noah, Julia and I each have a hive there and hold teaching inspections about monthly during bee season.  It's a sunny spot, near water, the hives face east - only one drawback - it's directly in the middle of the Chastain golf course and I've never inspected the hive there without an errant golf ball flying into the apiary.

Perhaps we should wear hard hats!!!

Here's a slide show of our most recent inspection.  You'll notice me doing a powdered sugar shake and Noah collecting bees to do a powdered sugar roll to count varroa mites (we only counted ONE).



 Be sure to click on the slide show to see the pictures bigger and to read the captions, once I have gotten them up!

The Chastain Conservancy is located in an old Quonset hut.  You'll see it in the background...

Not the Best Bee Day - Zia in Jeopardy

Today I went through my hives in my backyard.  My friend Julie's husband, Seth, who used to keep bees in 1989 and wants to get back to it, came over and went through the hives with me.

We've had rain and cooler weather over the last ten days or so.  And the nectar flow has about stopped.  So I didn't expect much.

We found roly-polys under one hive!  There were also earwigs, I saw one roach, and I smashed three large wax moth worms.



It's the scheduled week for powdered sugar every four days, so I started today.  The bees were not pleased with my effort to keep them healthy!



I only added a new box to one hive (below).  I did shift around some of the top boxes to encourage the bees to build a little more.  I also, to account for drift, add some identifying markings to all the hives.



Below is another hive that I shifted the box positions.



I don't have photos of the bad part of the day.  We went up to the nuc housing the Little Kitten swarm.  I know not to open or go through it for three weeks after installing the new queen (the Zia queen) but I hadn't pulled the queen cage and wanted to get it out.

We opened the top of the nuc.  The bees are quiet and calm - there are lots of them thanks to the nuc I created a week ago.  There between the frames was the queen cage, with the queen still inside.  The bees weren't attacking the cage or biting it.  The queen was not released but was alive and seemed vigorous.

That's when I did the stupid thing.  I thought, "At this point I should direct release her."  So I opened the cage and she walked down into the rest of the bees.

THEN I thought, "Wonder why they hadn't released her…..could there already be a queen in this hive?"

Too late to retrieve her majesty.  I guess I just cross my fingers that they accept her and life is good rather than my other thought which is that there is a competing queen who will kill Zia on sight.

And how will I know later what queen is in the hive, if there is another queen already present?  I can't say, "Will the real Zia step up."  I have no idea what she looks like compared to any other.  I guess I can add this to the growing long list of my bee mistakes………….

No Use Crying Over Spilt…..Powdered Sugar!

I'm good at spilling things. I like wine glasses without stems for that reason. If something can be spilled, I'm your woman…..I can do it in a heartbeat.

Today I went over to Stonehurst Place to check on the bees. According to the research at UGA, if you want to treat the bees for varroa mites with powdered sugar shakes, then you start in January, treat four times, three days apart and then repeat the process every other month.

 So it's January and time to get started.

Today I treated my hives at home and then got in the car to take the Dustructor to the Stonehurst Place Inn to treat the hives there. When I opened the back door of the car to get the Dustructor, the cap came off of the canister and powdered sugar went everywhere.

There was powdered sugar in every crevice near the door of the car. What a mess!

I gathered up what I could and returned it to the canister.

The good news is that on this day with 69 degree temps around noon, the bees were flying with enthusiasm out of both hives. I am relieved that they are alive and have high hopes for their making it through to March.

On each hive, as I had done at home, I slid the end of the Dustructor into the entry to about the middle of the hive. Then I gave five large puffs of powdered sugar into the hive with as much vigor as I could muster.

Down with the Varroa Destructor! Long live my bees!

Keith Delaplane on Powdered Sugar as a Varroa Mite Treatment

This weekend the Georgia Beekeepers Association met in McDonough, Georgia just southeast of Atlanta.  Our Metro Atlanta Beekeeping club had the highest number of people there.  It certainly made me appreciate the quality and level of programming our local club has.  The speakers' topics for this meeting were not available ahead of time. I much prefer to know what to expect when I go to a meeting.  There also was no food available except by leaving to go to a fast food restaurant and that made the whole process feel less nurturing.

The two speakers I learned something from were Keith Delaplane and Kim Flottum.  Today I am going to tell you about Keith's talk on the results of the powdered sugar study done by Jennifer Berry at the University of Georgia Bee Lab.

Keith Delaplane talked the most specifically I have ever heard him speak about the results of the powdered sugar study done by Jennifer Berry at the University of Georgia Bee Lab.  Jennifer took the position that it might be more effective to try to address the varroa mite at a break in the brood cycle such as in the winter.

Her study compared a number of factors.  They looked at treating with powdered sugar beginning in January or beginning in March.  They compared using a top sifter (a flour sifter) to using the Dustructor - a contraption they built that blew in the powdered sugar from the bottom of the hive.  Then they compared how often to apply powdered sugar.  Some hives they treated every two weeks for a year.  The others they treated every other month.  On the treatment months they did four applications of powdered sugar with three days between the treatments.

First they found that winter bee populations are better in the spring if treatment begins in January.  They also found that treatment is better with the Dustructor.  Finally the timing of treating every other months, giving four treatments at each treatment month, three days apart was the most effective timing of treatment.

I own a contraption from Brushy Mountain called Varroa-Dustructor and plan to use it regularly on every hive beginning in January.  I"m going to follow the plan for four treatments every three days and do it in January, March, May, July, September and November.  We'll see if I have healthier bees!

Hive Inspection at Blue Heron on September 25

Noah and I took about a dozen people on the inspection of the Blue Heron hives on Saturday at 11.  It was a little cooler (thank goodness) and we looked through the two remaining hives.  You'll see the slideshow below.

On the inspection we did a powdered sugar shake and fed the bees with baggie feeders.  The participants asked good questions and seemed to have a good time learning about the bees at Blue Heron.

Kitchen Supplies and Beekeeping

In addition to its many other troubles - SHB, a queen that isn't laying, a hive that isn't thriving, Mellona has ants. I see a steady stream of them marching up the sides of the hive and into tiny spaces between boxes.

Cinnamon is supposed to be a deterrent so I sprinkled it on the stone base of the hive where the ants appear to gain access.

I don't see ants on the other side of the hive but for preventive medicine, I sprinkled the cinnamon there too.

I'm struck by all the kitchen supplies I am using for the bees. I realize now that the reason I bought the enormous cinnamon container at Costco several years ago must have been unconsciously in preparation for this moment. I also frequently purchase huge bags of sugar both at the grocery and at Costco.

There is no nectar in Atlanta and none of my hives are in good shape for winter. I know Sam Comfort would say that I should see which hive survives without my feeding any of them, but I can't stand it this year. I have often not fed going into winter, but this year, it's sugar syrup all the way.

And the other kitchen supply not picture here is powdered sugar that I start using about this time of year to help the bees go into winter with few varroa mites.

Blue Heron Inspection August 1, 2010

Before I left Atlanta, we ran a Metro Atlanta hive inspection at the Blue Heron preserve.  The goal was to do a powdered sugar shake on the hives there and to see how they were doing since we are having such a bad year as far as nectar is concerned.

We opened my hive and all was well and did a powdered sugar shake.  I almost forgot to do it, but one of the participants reminded me!  Then we opened Julia's hives.   Both were doing well.

Kevin and Peter who own the fourth hive were on the inspection so they opened their hive for the group as well.  Their third box on this hive was a medium that they had fitted with mostly shallow frames.  This meant that the bees were building comb between the bottom of the shallow frame and the top of the frames in the next box.  If left like that, the two boxes were likely to get stuck together in a real mess.  So while they had the hive open, we helped them transfer the shallow frames to a shallow box.  They took the two medium frames that were also in the box home to harvest the honey.

Click on the slide show below to see what we did.  We did not use powdered sugar on Kevin and Peter's hive because they don't have a screened bottom board.

For captions and/or to see the slideshow larger, click on the photo and everything will enlarge and you can read the captions.

Jennifer Berry Speaks to our Bee Club

Tonight we were privileged to hear Jennifer Berry speak on IPM management of the varroa mite. It's always fun when Jennifer comes to speak both because she is so entertaining and is so full of good information.

First she talked about the Varroa mite and how it reproduces. As most of you probably know, the mite enters the cell just before the cell with the larvae is capped (on about the seventh day). Within the cell, the foundress mite lays her first egg, a male, and then follows with female eggs. She has 13 days in a worker cell to procreate effectively. She has 16 days in a drone cell, so the varroa mite prefers the drone cell.

Jennifer first discussed the ways varroa has been addressed chemically. Beekeepers used a chemical approach, first with apistan (fluvalinate) and later with coumaphos. With the Apistan, mites quickly developed a resistance to the chemical. With coumaphos there were many issues including bad queens who laid poor brood patterns and didn't live long. She had slides from studies showing that drones survived better in hives with no chemicals and that queens had better, more long lasting reproduction with no chemicals.

Thus, we use integrated pest management or IPM, as it is known in the bee world. There are four main IPM approaches: biological, cultural, genetic and chemical.

The biological approach has not worked with the varroa mite. The idea would be to develop a fungus that kills the mite but it has not been efficacious to follow this approach.

The second approach is the cultural one. This includes screened bottom boards, drone brood trapping, powdered sugar shakes, and brood cycle disruption.

• Bottom screens allow mites to fall or be groomed off of the bodies of the bees and when they fall through the screen, they can't get back up into the hive and onto the backs of a bee. 
• In drone brood trapping, the drone brood is cut out of a frame or a whole frame is pulled and then the brood is either destroyed or frozen. Since the varroa prefers to breed in the longer developing drone cell, this rids the hive of a lot of varroa. 
• Powdered sugar seems to be effective, especially when the sugar is sifted over the hive pre-spring brood build-up. This means that the most effective time to do powdered sugar shakes in Atlanta would be between January and March while it is still winter. 
• Finally brood cycle disruption means doing something to stop the queen from laying. This could include doing a split so that half the hive would be queenless while they make their own queen. It could also include caging the queen for days - Jennifer has done it for seven days; Brother Adam did it for ten. These approaches stop the laying in the hive and since the varroa mite needs larvae on which to lay her eggs, it also disrupts the varroa cycle.

The third approach is the genetic one.  Jennifer encouraged us to buy good queens from breeders who are breeding for hygienic behavior, especially when it comes to varroa mites.  (Varroa Sensitive Hygienic queens are those who breed for hygiene that includes clearing out cells in which varroa lives).

The final approach is chemical.  Jennifer pointed out that she doesn't use Coumaphos or Fluvalinate.  There are a few chemicals that are essential oils with a thymol base that she would consider using.  Jennifer also talked about oxalic acid which is WOOD BLEACH.  She asked would you want that in your hives with your bees?  She also felt similarly about formic acid which is caustic, corrosive to equipment, dangerous for human's eyes, lungs, etc. and hard on bees and brood.  She was not in any way positive about the use of these caustic substances. 

Part of IPM includes understanding the economic threshold.  IPM recognizes that there are pests in the hive and rather than focus on eliminating the pest, the IPM approach is about recognizing when the level of pest in the hive is above a manageable level to a point called the Economic Injury Level, where the hive will be harmed because of the presence of the pest.

Jennifer suggested that at this time of year in general a mite drop in 24 hours of 60 mites or 125 in a larger, more thriving colony, is at the economic threshold.  If your colony measures at that drop level, then you need to do something such as one of the previously mentioned IPM approaches.

In the UGA bee lab, Jennifer is now doing research on the effectiveness of powdered sugar shakes, looking at the timing (doing them before the queen starts laying brood for spring) and the delivery method(top down or bottom up - blowing sugar into the hive from the bottom).

Julia and I left the meeting and decided to put a sticky board under one of the Blue Heron hives with the plan of looking at it on Sunday at our Metro Hive Inspection.

 

Yet Another New Queen at Blue Heron and Powdered Sugar Shake

When I was last at Blue Heron, our third hive, the one the supplier gave us to replace the queenless nuc we got from him, didn't look good. The hive was not bustling with activity or bees and the numbers seemed small.

I was disappointed to find that the bees I saw on the tops of the frames had many shriveled and deformed wings, indicative of Deformed Wing Virus vectored by the varroa mite. I decided that I would return this week to do a powdered sugar shake.

Before shaking the powdered sugar, I pulled each frame to see how things are going in this weak hive. On the second frame I saw this opened queen cell. This is at least the third queen for this hive. Their first one failed and I don't think the second one was doing anything. Now they apparently have created yet another queen. Hopefully she'll be a good one.




I found two frames full of eggs and brood which was reassuring. The hive had good honey stores in the deep in which they live. The box above was completely empty and I removed it to give them more security (less space to defend).

The powdered sugar shake was quite an event. Here are the bees, covered with sugar clinging to the frame.

Here's how the whole box looked!

I took off the inner cover and put it on the ground and I removed the top box before doing this. When I lifted up the inner cover to set it back on the hive, the bees who had not experienced the powdered sugar shake surrounded one of their sisters to see what was going on with her and all this white powder!

Major (but easily fixed) problem with the Freeman SHB

A few days ago, I removed the Freeman trap on my Bermuda hive to allow the bees to have more ventilation. I'm not seeing any SHBs in any of my hives right now so using the trap didn't seem necessary for the moment.

To my horror, I pulled the trap out and there were hundreds of dead bees in the trap. I was so upset that I pulled the trap out and dumped the contents in a cookie sheet before I remembered to take a picture.

The picture below shows about 1/3 of the bees that were dead. My hands were shaky - they are all the time but the camera wasn't adjusting for it for some reason, although it has that capability. Anyway you can at least see the bodies.


This morning I could see many bees exiting the hive from the back. Bermuda is a huge hive - seven boxes - so I didn't want bees in my face and just held the camera down and took a picture without looking myself. You can see in the picture that the screen part of the screened bottom board is just hanging down about 1/2 inch - allowing the bees easy exit from the hive.

They were even using the back entrance they created to removed a rubber band from a frame. However, I guess that when the trap was in place, bees who entered or left that way also often fell into the vat of oil below the screen and they drowned.



I knew even with the honey flow in full force, I would have to take the hive apart and address this problem today.

I opened up the hive and took off all the boxes and stacked them. When I got to the trap, I took it off of the hive and turned it over.

As you can see the screen isn't attached to the frame. That was true all the way across the frame. The screen wire in the front entry was stapled with a staple gun to the wood beneath so this problem does not occur in the front. I got out my trusty staple gun and attached the screen to the wood frame, turned it over and began to restack the hive boxes.

I do hope I didn't injure the queen or kill too many bees in the process. The hive is boiling over with bees and honey.

The beetle trap is very effective on beetles although it was hard to see the SHB bodies for looking at the dead bee bodies. I don't see SHB in this hive and in between the dead bees were lots of dead SHBs.

I do think this is a major problem in the use of this trap and caught me by surprise. Although the trap works for the SHB, it should also be bee-friendly.

Jerry should not send out the traps without both screened edges being affixed to the wood. Perhaps in his eagerness to send me mine as a tester, he neglected this one thing and other traps he has sent out have both edges stapled.

As I did on all my hives today, I did take the opportunity to give a powdered sugar shake to the brood boxes for this hive.

Powdered Sugar Shake at Blue Heron Hives

Yesterday (before the current monsoon rains hit Atlanta) we went to the Blue Heron preserve and did a powdered sugar shake on the hives there.

The idea of using powdered sugar is to cover the bees with sugar and encourage their grooming. In the grooming process, they knock off the varroa mites on their bodies. The mites fall through the screened bottom board and can't get back to the hive.

While there is research to suggest that this isn't really an effective mite control, I still do it because by using it in my oldest hive that almost died from Varroa vectored disease, I could really see a difference. The hive is quite healthy today.

Randy Oliver is trying to research this in three articles. Here's the first one and you can find the others on his site.

We used powdered sugar on all three Blue Heron hives. Sam, Julia's youngest son who is in the FOURTH grade, took amazing pictures of the process. I have labeled his pictures with his name on the slide show.

We found two things during the inspection - one great and one not so good.

Great: Julia's hive that appeared to have no queen at our Sunday inspection actually has a laying queen. We didn't see her but saw a good frame of brood and eggs - Woohoo!

Not so good: Our first nuc at Blue Heron came from a supplier who gave us the nuc without a queen . To make good on this he gave us a second nuc - this one had a big beautiful queen. We installed her in another hive, since the first queenless hive had successfully made their own queen.

In the second hive the bees were doing a lousy job of comb building in the second box. We cut out the bad comb, put a drawn frame in the center of the hive (instead of the frame of foundation that was originally there) and moved the frames around so that the badly drawn frames (without the badly drawn comb) were on the edges.

Here's the slide show. Click to see it larger and to be able to read the captions.

Powdered Sugar and the Bees

Yesterday I did an inspection of all of my hives to make sure they have enough supplies for winter. I added a Ziploc feeder baggie to Persephone because that hive has been low on stores. I considered doing what a friend on Beemaster's Forum calls the Robin Hood principle: taking a full super from Bermuda and giving it to Persephone, but the drought and dearth being what they are in Georgia, I was hesitant to take any of the Bermuda bees' hard earned product away.

While I inspected, I did a powdered sugar shake on all but the nuc of bees who found me. Then I read this article by Randy Oliver and felt somewhat purposeless in my powdered sugar efforts. He says that powdered sugar really doesn't do much in the fight against the varroa mite and that mite-resistant bee development is the answer. However, he does say that a powdered sugar shake at this time of year, when there is little brood raising going on, may move varroa out of the hive for the winter.

Randy is a scientist and I respect his careful examination of beekeeping tenets. Here's what he said might be effective:

"Sugar dusting can be quite effective for
reducing the mite population in broodless (or nearly
broodless) bees, such as during summer dearths or in
winter (if the bees are not tightly clustered). It also
works quite well to drop mites from package bees,
shook bees, or swarms. Another use is to “clean up”
new nucs (best applied at day 7 after the queen begins
laying--just before the first brood begins to be sealed)."
----Randy Oliver

This is what a bee looks like up close and personal when a powdered sugar shake has occurred.


The powdered sugar clings to the hairs on their bodies and they groom themselves and each other to get it off.

In the grooming process, varroa mites are groomed off as well and fall through the screened bottom board to the ground below, hopefully never to return to the hive.

Randy Oliver on Beekeeping in the 21st Century

Randy Oliver gave three talks at GBA. His energy and smile infuse all of his talks with enthusiasm and his obvious love of beekeeping. I read his articles in ABJ and he is someone who is referred to often on the bee forum discussions online, especially on BeeSource.

One of the talks I heard was on beekeeping in the 21st century. I'm going to try to share what I learned from this talk.

He said that management in the 21st century would include optimal nutrition, managing parasite loads, and using appropriate biotreatments at the right time.

Optimal nutrition means having a variety of pollen being brought into the hive. If you pull a frame with pollen on it, you should see lots of colors - this indicates a varied diet for the bees. He showed a slide comparing a "fat bee" with one that is not. House bees have lots of vitagellin and this keeps them alive and kicking. Foragers lose this fat and begin to age rapidly. Although he encouraged avoiding feeding bees as much as possible, if one feeds a pollen patty to the bees, they should be fed sugar syrup 1:1 at the same time.

For parasite management, he talked about the rapid increase of the varroa in the hive - at the rate of a 2.5% population increase per day. Sugar dusting with powdered sugar can help.

He had a wonderful picture of his methods, as he has described in ABJ.....a bee brush duct taped to a measuring cup in such a way that one can dump the cup and then with a flip of the wrist use the brush to brush the sugar off of the frame tops. The brush is taped one way for left handers and the other for right handers. I can't find a picture on his site, but you can imagine.

He also discussed working on retarding mite growth during spring build up and encouraged us to check for mite levels before supering up. Beginning August 15 all beekeepers should work like crazy to get the mite levels down in the hives so that the September bees who live through the winter will not be mite-infested.

When he is checking for mite levels with a sticky board, he sometimes does a check 10 minutes after sugar dusting. He uses his sticky boards over and over and cleans them with an ice scraper - really quick and effective.

If you can keep mite levels down under 1%, this will help not only with bees' health but also with honey production. Under 1% means that a 24 hour sticky board fall would be 10 mites or less, doing a sugar shake with a jar of bees - I believe he said 1 inch of bees in a mason jar = 100 bees - should only yield 3 mites, or a 10 minute sugar shake check of the sticky board should show a drop of only 5 - 10 mites.

He has invented a fabulous frame for drone management in the varroa fight. People use drone cell frames to grow drones and freeze the frame to kill the mites. These frames have to be on the hives for 28 days to assure readiness to freeze. To address the time issue and be more efficient (I experienced Randy Oliver as incredibly efficient about time usage), he invented a frame for drone management that does not involve freezing.

This frame has a bar in it about 1/4 the way down. He puts it in the hive with no foundation. The bees store honey in the upper fourth. In the lower fourth they will build drone comb. He pulls this frame, cuts out the capped drone comb and throws it away or melts the wax down. The process takes 15 seconds, can happen at the hive, and doesn't take up freezer space - see what I mean about his efficiency!

He also discussed, as many people are today, the idea of making late summer splits to interrupt the breeding cycle of the varroa mite.

When he talked about biotreatments, he discussed oxalic acid and formic acid. He treats his hives on the day after Christmas because the bees are not growing brood at that time.

This is purely an overview of what I understood. I encourage you to visit his site and read his many articles. I love reading his articles in ABJ because he writes in a very easy to grasp way. He ran a series on Nosema earlier this year and has written on Honey Super Cell, Powdered Sugar Treatments and many other topics.

I saw Eggs with my own eyes today!

Hive inspection today. Purpose: Powdered sugar shake and determination if new frames or boxes are needed on either hive and to see how the feeding is going.

I opened Bermuda and there were scads of bees. They have brood in both boxes and I SAW EGGS! I saw them with my own eyes - not inside with the camera transferred to the computer. Isn't that the best? But I don't have pictures of the eggs I saw, however, I did see them in both hives. Maybe getting the sun behind me happened at just the right angle, maybe I was lucky, but I saw EGGS.

It's nice to know that there is a functioning queen in both hives.

Of course the price for this was that an angry bee from Bermuda stung me on the right side of my neck, right through my veil. It hurt worse than past stings. I immediately came inside, leaving the hive open, scraped out the stinger and put toothpaste on it. Plantain is supposed to be the best, but I don't have any in my yard, and I had read on the Internet that toothpaste helps. I also put one of the melt-in-your-mouth Benadryl strips in my mouth. I then quickly returned to the beehive to put the hive back together.

I did a powdered sugar shake on both hives. Here is a picture of the bees at the front of the hive after the shake. You can see the ones who had been powdered! There is also abee with big pollen baskets all full at the bee-end of the entrance reducer.

Miracle of miracles, I only saw a total of ONE hive beetle. The last few times I've seen lots of them. Now the hives are both much stronger and have probably invited the SHB to find another home. I certainly hope so!

The Lure of Lemongrass Oil

Today I got home from the mountains to find it sunny and warm in Atlanta - perfect weather to open the hives. I opened Bermuda to find it bubbling over with bees. The brood has been mostly in the bottom box, but today they are also raising brood in the second box. They had eaten all the sugar syrup I left them last weekend. I wanted to check on the brood situation and to open up the brood space while in Bermuda. I removed several frames from the brood box and spread out the brood with an empty frame between frames 2 and 3 and another between frames 7 and 9.

I then did a powdered sugar shake - the bees grumbled in a bee-way by buzzing and flying around. You can see how much they have to clean off by looking at the bees in the above picture.
In Mellona there wasn't quite as much activity and there are fewer bees. They too had eaten all of the sugar syrup I had provided. I made some at 3 PM before going out to the hives at 4 PM. It was still warm but I put some in a Ziploc bag, laid it on the top box and slit the bag. I don't think the fact that it is still warm will be an issue. After all the bees like to be in the 90s themselves.

I noticed some drone cells being made in each of the two hives. With spring coming soon, the girls are ready for some males in the picture to mate with queens, should a hive need to make their own queen.
While working on the bee hives, I thought I might try to lure a swarm. I have an empty deep on the deck. Today I lifted out each frame and shook off a few dead roaches who had wintered there. The hive has a few frames with starter strips and mostly drawn out brood comb. There are a few plastic based foundations and some with none. I used lemongrass oil (this is an effective lure for swarms, according to Michael Bush and others on Beesource and Beemaster) and dropped about 10 drops on the center 5 frames. For good measure I put a few drops at the entrance as well.

Swarm season will be on us in March so I want my bee hive to be an appealing place, should a swarm come along. I love it that on the bottle of lemongrass oil, there is the word: INSPIRING. Let's hope the oil draws a swarm and INSPIRES it to live on my deck!

Hive Inspection - First Real One of the Year

I did my first real hive inspection of 2008 on Sunday afternoon. Both hives looked healthy and had lots of bees. The bees in Mellona in the first picture were all through two boxes. The brood was all in the bottom box and had not moved up, to my surprise. The second box was still heavy with honey.
Last year at this inspection, Bermuda was a small handful of bees, with Varroa everywhere. But the queen was alive and with many powdered sugar shakes, the hive rebuilt itself. This is the hive where the original queen was cast out on January 6 this year. They obviously have a queen and are really building up. I scraped off the burr comb that you can see on top of a couple of frames.
I did a powdered sugar shake on both hives today and with the DWV (Deformed Wing Virus) that I saw earlier in the month on the dead bees on the deck, I will be shaking sugar every inspection this spring. Look out, Costco, here I come!
The sad news was that I had left a Ziploc bag feeder inside the Bermuda hive. There were so many bees in that hive a few weeks ago that I was afraid they would go through their stores. I knew when I put it in the hive that it had sort of folded over on itself, but I didn't do anything about it. The many dead bees I found inside it today let me (and preventively all of you) know that a ziploc feeder must be sitting flat on the frames in order to keep bees from drowning as they get the sugar syrup.