Video of a Queen Moving Around the Hive

This talented photographer/beekeeper, Anand Varma, has made this video of the queen moving around the hive. He attached a fluorescent marker to the queen's back and shot this in black light in the hive. On my computer, at first it looked like the video wasn't actually posted, so be patient if it takes a moment or two to load. Since Mr. Varma is allowing people to embed his video in their websites, I wanted all of you to see it:

I wanted to show how a queen bee moves around her hive so I attached a fluorescent marker to her back and made a time lapse of her walking around under black lights.

Posted by Anand Varma - Photographer on Friday, May 15, 2015

The Impending Death of a Queen

This morning it's finally both warm and I'm in town AND I am off on Monday mornings, so Hive Inspection time.  I was very anxious to get into the drone layer hive and see what's going on.

I got out to the backyard to find that the bees in the Drone Layer hive were carrying out the bodies of drones, ripped out of their cells:

So now I'm thinking something is going on and the drones are either ill or perhaps they have a new hygienic queen.

I wanted to open the hive, but when I took the top off, I found a ton of hive beetles.  Those of you who have heard/seen my hive inspection talk/slideshow (on right sidebar under Pages), know that my cure for the small hive beetle is SMASH THEM WITH YOUR HIVE TOOL.  So that's what I did.  The first photo shows the shiny little !!#$!@#$ and the second shows the smashed dead bodies.

But then I opened the hive.  I started in the bottom box where there was pollen stored but no brood.  The last time I was in the hive, I saw (or thought I saw) eggs in the bottom box.  I worked my way up.

In the second box, I found the old queen.  She had a yellow dot on her thorax which means she is the original queen from the hive that was purchased as a nuc last year.  The yellow dot means she is a 2012 queen (yellow is the color for years ending in a "2") - the drone cells mean that she was indeed "short bred" and did not get mated well enough to justify selling her with the nuc that I bought.

The bees do not like her and are setting her up for her impending death.  I'm putting up several photos of her so you can see that they have chewed her wings.  I think they are about to push her out of the hive and with her wings destroyed, she will die.  I don't think they would do this or pull out the drone brood if they didn't have a new queen.

I know it's a lot of photos, but I thought this was fascinating....the impending murder of the queen....and it's by slow torture.  First they chew the wings, then they will cast her out to die in the elements - and she has been taken care of all her life.  What thanks does she get???

There was no brood in the hive.  But I found an opened queen cell, probably made from the frame that I put in the hive from Morningside.  So I think they have a new queen who is either out getting mated or is back from getting mated and isn't quite ready to start laying.

Since there was no worker brood, just for safety's sake, about 30 minutes after I closed up the hive the first time, I opened it up again and I added another frame of eggs into the hive from Morningside .

I think this hive feels hopeful as a group.  There hasn't been a good queen for quite a while but there were still a ton of workers in the hive as well as drones.

Sorry for the Radio Silence

In my real life, I have two jobs in the summer - my usual job and in addition I teach in the Emory Med School, teaching communication skills to the doctoral students in the Department of Rehabilitative Medicine.  I've been drowning in grading final exams and videos, and thus off the air for the last couple of weeks.

I'm going to post some activities from the last month to catch me (and you) up, and now that the semester is over, I'll get back to blogging about my bees.

A couple of weeks ago I went to check on the Morningside hives and found them hidden by tall grass.  The community garden is on land owned by Georgia Power and they usually do the maintenance, but someone apparently dropped the ball and the grass hadn't been cut in forever.

I had recently been up to Rabun County where I had to cut the kudzu off of the hive so I had in my car some hedge clippers.  So I grabbed them and instead of doing bees, I did landscaping.

Now I and the bees can see their front doors.  I have Boardman feeders filled with water on the hives to keep the bees from going to the neighbor's swimming pool.  Who knows?  They probably like the chlorine better, but at least I am demonstrating an effort to keep them away!  The hedge clippers are on top of the closest hive.

Then I went over to Sebastian and Christine's.  I didn't post about it, but one of their two hives was robbed out.  It was sad and I assumed the hive that was beside it, which was also the stronger of the two hives, had done the robbing.

I opened this hive to see the spoils.  Instead I found bees that were doing fine - lots of brood and bees, but very little honey.  I went all the way down to the bottom box to see what I could see and found little nectar.  

That was two weeks ago and the asters and goldenrod have begun to bloom so maybe they will bring in some nectar.  I also have some honey that I can feed them.

You can see in the photo above that there is lots of brood but no honey in the corners.

In the bottom box which is a deep (this hive started from a nuc this year), I found Her Majesty, walking regally over the frame:

I don't usually wear gloves but a bee stung me on my right hand and I threw on a glove so I could finish up.  The queen is marked with a yellow dot and is in the upper left corner of the frame.  So this hive MAY make it through the winter if they can gather some supplies in the fall flow (which in Atlanta is generally minimal).

Bee House Calls

My father was a doctor in Natchez, a small town in Mississippi.  When I was a little girl, he often went on house calls to take care of patients in their homes.  This generally happened at the end of the work day, and he often took us with him.  "Us" at that time consisted of my mother, my brother and me.

While Randy and I mostly bickered in the back seat, I actually remember it as fun.  Often to break up the evening in the car, Daddy would stop at the Dairy Queen, one of two "fast food" establishments in Natchez, the other being the Monmouth, an old-fashioned drive-in with trays that hooked to your car window.  We only went to the Dairy Queen (now the Malt Shop) for dipped cones - Yummmm - nothing better on a hot Natchez night.

Today I made house calls on my bees at other houses.  First I went to the Stonehurst Place Inn where I manage three hives.  In the first hive, there was plenty of honey and on the frame closest to the side of the box, I saw Her Majesty.  You can see her as well - isn't she gorgeous with such a long golden body!



I was both thrilled to see her and to see that the hive was not eating up all of their honey and seemed fine.



The second small (only two medium boxes) hive also had recently drawn comb in the top box.  They were happily storing nectar.  I didn't see the queen, but felt good about this colony.






The third hive was difficult.  It's a mean hive and I put on my gloves before opening it and smoked them both at the entry and at the hole in the inner cover.  I did not get stung today, but that's a first for me when visiting the Stonehurst Place hives.  I didn't go down far enough to see if the queen were laying.  The hive was calm and I wasn't worried about that.

They had plenty of honey - probably we can take another box off of this hive.  However, under the cover I saw plenty of hive beetles.

Between the Stonehurst Place and Sebastian's house (my second house call) in childhood style, I stopped by the King of Pops' stand on the corner of North and Boulevard and bought a blueberry lemongrass popsicle - nothing better (except all the other popsicles he makes which are equally scrumptious).  You should try the chocolate sea salt - WOW.... but I couldn't afford those calories today and blueberry lemongrass was so good that I'll get it again.

Sebastian and Christina have a lovely garden plot just to one side of the hives.  Their cucumbers are healthy and I'm sure the bees are enjoying the blooms!

These bees were in a different state than my bees in Va Highlands.  The hives both had stored honey and brood and eggs, but the yellow hive had no honey in the corners of the brood frames.  I only saw three full frames of honey in that hive.

The blue hive had a ten frame inner cover and hive top, so I replaced those with the appropriate 8 frame sized inner cover and telescoping top.

I told Sebastian we would harvest a frame of honey from one of these hives (probably the blue one since it is hived in a ten frame box and probably has more stores).  But we won't get a box of honey from either of these hives since they aren't gathering nectar like my Va High hives that are only a few miles away.



I left the blue hive with the appropriate top wear!

Atlanta Temperature Today Will be 106!

We have a dearth of nectar, supposedly, in Atlanta and it's hot as H____.  The high today is supposed to be 106 and I think it must be close right now.  My dog Hannah, whose preference on summer days is to be outside in pursuit of squirrels, is camped out by the air conditioner duct.  (I know it's the return duct but for some reason, it's a very cool spot on the floor)

I did worry about the bees, though, and checked my hives at home on Thursday.  After all, if the Top Bar absconded, could the others be far behind?  My goal was to see if they were eating up all their stored honey and if I might need to consider feeding them.

In every hive I found stored honey and uncapped nectar.  The bees have been working the porcelain berry really hard lately and maybe it is a nectar source.  I don't see them with pollen on those vines, but they are all over the flowers.  The bloom is almost over, though.



I found frames like the one above in every hive.  I also found boxes full of capped honey like the one below.



I even found some newly drawn wax....



By way of management, I removed one box from the hive below because it is a small hive and they were not using the space.  I am most worried about this hive.  They do have a queen who is laying, and they have some stored honey, but this is the weakest hive in my apiary.  This was a split off of Colony Square and has not done well - they've had two queens since the split that they made from frames of brood and eggs.  I should move some frames of brood and eggs into this hive to bring up the numbers, if nothing else.  This hive will never make it through the winter at this rate.



Other management tasks:  I put bottle caps under most of the top covers to help with ventilation in this heat.  Also if the bees were not using their newest box addition, I moved it to the top of the hive so its empty space could also help with ventilation.



The little kitten swarm is living still in nuc boxes (three of them).  I wondered how they were doing.  I looked and easily found the queen - she's in both photos below.  I was so relieved and she looks like the queen who ate the honey off of my fingertip, so I am going to believe that she is the actual queen of the hive.



If you don't see her right away, she's near the bottom of the frame just to the right of center.



So for now, I'm not worrying about the strength of my hives' stores - they all seem OK for the moment.
Although if the nectar is done for the year,  I'll probably feed going into September....it's funny because my general stance is that I want survivor bees and don't want to feed them if they can't manage on their own, but with this many hives, I feel a lot of responsibility not to lose my investment in addition to not wanting to lose the bees.

Temperature record set in Atlanta today at 106.8!

The Queen, the Queen, Where is the Queen?

Today Jeff and I inspected the hives at his house.  We started with the small swarm hive.  On February 19, a month ago, I inspected this hive and found about a baseball sized clump of bees there with plenty of honey but no sign of a queen.

On that February day, we took a frame of brood and eggs from Lenox Pointe and gave it to this hive.  I had intended to move another frame of brood and eggs from Colony Square but they were so angry when I opened them that day that I forgot.

Today this hive was doing well.  We saw brood and eggs, honey both capped and uncapped and generally it looked great.  I didn't get it, because if they had made a queen from the frame of brood and eggs we gave them, she should barely be laying at this point.



The cells below contain eggs - bad pictures - sorry.



And here is a frame of capped and uncapped honey.



The hive was doing so well that we gave it a third box and moved on to Five Alive.



Five Alive had several frames of brood that looked just like this - solid worker cells capped and almost ready to emerge.  They had two full boxes so we gave them a third box and put a ladder of filled comb from the box below to help them get started.



Then we went to Lenox Pointe.  On February 19, there was lots of brood in the bottom box as well as in the second box.  Since the bottom is a deep, we took a brood and egg frame from the second (medium) box to give to the swarm hive.

Today there was no brood in the bottom box and there was some honey and lots of empty cells.  In the second box there were seven frames of honey and the eighth frame was a new foundationless frame that I had inserted to replace the egg frame for the Swarm hive.  That frame was filled with honey comb now that was all drone sized comb.  There were eggs in most of the cells on this frame, but it will be all drone brood.

The third box was solid honey.  There was no space to build.

As I thought about it, here's what I think happened.  When we moved the frame from Lenox Pointe, we actually took the LP queen with that frame and she simply set up shop in the small swarm hive.  She is doing well and the hive is thriving.

Meanwhile LP made a queen with their eggs but because it was so early, the queen was poorly mated and is not doing a good job at the moment.  Since the queen seems inadequate to us (who knows what the bees think), Jeff and I decided to put a new frame of brood and eggs from Five Alive into this hive and see if they can make a queen.  This will effectively interrupt the varroa mite's brood cycle while the new queen is being made.

Meanwhile the frame of brood will provide enough pheromone to keep the bees happy and purposeful in that hive and we gave them another box so there would be somewhere for the current queen to lay or for a  new one.

We only opened Colony Square for a moment.  They too need a new box since their top box was filled with drawn comb and nectar.  I didn't bring enough equipment with me, so I will put a new box on CS tomorrow.  Here's what one of their beautiful wax frames looked like as it was getting started.

Rabun Hives are Thriving!

This morning I stopped by the Rabun County hives on my way to a professional meeting in Young Harris.  They have been established for two weeks now and are doing really well.

In the first hive (in the old hive box), the bees were concentrated on one side of the box.  They peeked up between the frames as I opened the hive:

I checked the hive and they were mostly using the old comb frames and had not begun to draw out the new foundationless frames.  I moved the concentration to the center of the box and put a couple of undrawn frames on either side.

When I slid the frames apart to remove them, the bees were festooning, linked together making wax.  I hated messing up the good work they were doing!

I never saw the queen but I did see brood and eggs so I was relieved.  Because the nectar flow has started, and I won't be back for a couple of weeks, I added a box of empty frames for them to move into when they are done with this box.

I moved on to the new box.  I was so pleasantly surprised.  The bees had drawn comb on every single frame in this box.  Each frame looked about the same like the photo below:

I thought you'd like to see a close up of these beautiful productive bees.  Here they are:

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Toward the right side of the photo above, you can see some really fat larvae waiting to be capped.

And then on the next frame, the same one on which she was installed, I spotted Her Majesty.  She is a gorgeous queen, moving regally along the honey comb.

Isn't she beautiful?

I gave this hive another box as well and expect they will use it as well as they have the first one.  Good I visited this morning - the rain has been terrible all afternoon and late into the night.

I left the hives closed up for another day and hope they keep going as well as they have so far.