Drone Layer Hive

Yesterday we had about a 2 hour break of sunshine and blue sky - followed, of course, by grey sky, clouds and, you guessed it, more rain.  It's raining now.

It was like the eye of the storm that I remember from hurricanes, growing up on the Mississippi river.  We would take a breath during the eye as it passed over, but the hurricane would start again.  I know it dates me, but the one I really remember was Hurricane Audrey in 1957.  I remember the eye because of the startling contrast to what was going on just minutes before - I was little and this fierce weather really scared me.  Hurricanes would devastate south Louisiana and then would come up the river to Natchez, MS where I lived.  By then they would be weakened and still wreaked havoc.

In our small calm of sunny weather, I opened the split to see if the new queen were laying and I opened the drone layer hive to see if their new queen had succeeded.  The split was doing great and had wall to wall cells of eggs and tiny c-shaped larvae.

The split was made on April 13, so the queen should have emerged around the 29th.  So checking on the 5th might have been pushing it.  We've had bad weather and I was concerned she might not have been able to go on a mating flight but she had and was working hard.

In the drone layer colony, I didn't find a laying queen.  I did find a queen cell on the frame I had given them that had been ripped open from the side, indicating that a queen had emerged, and I found a queen cell opened appropriately at the tip.  The last frame of brood and eggs I gave them was on April 15.  Doing the math, at the longest, the queen should have emerged on May 1 and this was just May 5.  We've had terrible weather for most of those days.  So either she hasn't mated; she was lost in a storm; she has mated but hadn't started laying.

So as a panacea, as per Michael Bush, I took a frame of brood and eggs out of the Patty swarm hive and gave it to the drone layers.

I'm leaving for Young Harris on Thursday and this way they'll have a chance if they need it.

I'm stopping by Chastain tomorrow and taking a frame of brood and eggs out of our nuc there to put in the Don Kuchenmeister drone laying hive tomorrow if I have enough time.

And for the Remaining Hive Inspections

Luckily it is Spring Break in Atlanta and lots of people are out of town.  I didn't have to be at the office today until 4 PM.  So today was a major bee day - I picked up five nucs, installed them in three places and inspected seven hives on this side of town.  Tomorrow (also a slow day) I will inspect the hives at Jeff and Valerie's (four of them), the hive at Blue Heron, and the hive at Chastain.

Next up was the other package installation at my house.  Unlike its 10 frame neighbor, this hive had not drawn out the majority of its box, so I didn't add a box.  I did see eggs and the queen - she was lovely but I didn't take her photo - in this box, so I feel fine about it.  They just aren't as energetic as the 10 frame.  It's funny - the package for the 10 frame had a ton of dead bees on the bottom, but this package had the least dead bees of all the packages I installed.  You never can tell about bees……



The little nuc split from Colony Square had failed to develop a queen, so I gave them a frame of eggs from Lenox Point last week.  I did have to drive the frame 25 minutes from my old house, so the eggs might not have been great when installed here.



They had built a beautiful queen cell, however.  I very carefully returned this frame to the nuc and hope she'll do well once she emerges.



They had also made these odd attempts at a queen cell (see below in the upper center) but those are not queen cells.



I also installed the last nuc this afternoon and saw the queen. She has a yellow dot on her back and is at 9:00 on the frame below.


You can also see her on the end of the frame, pointing downward - isn't she lovely with her black abdomen?



There were pretty cells in yellow wax in this frame.  These bees came from south Georgia.  I remember that our bees on the farm last year drew yellow wax early in the season.



I also checked on the Decatur Swarm in the top bar hive.  They were doing OK - had begun drawing out about five top bars.  They had gone a little crooked at one end of all five bars, so I cut off the wax and took it inside.

I thought this was a secondary swarm and the state of the hive bore that out.  The queen had just begun laying (as in yesterday).  I only saw eggs and some tiny c-shaped larvae, and there was no capped brood.  I think this means she spent the last 10 days getting ready to go on her mating flight, getting mated and getting ready to lay.  Now she is working hard at it and hopefully this hive will succeed.

Below is the comb I cut out - I took it inside and will melt it down or use it for bee talks.



So after a long bee day and many bee blog posts, I bee tired and am going to bed!

Mickey Anderson on Queen Grafting

Mickey Anderson has been keeping bees for years and years. He once worked as a queen grafter for Rossman Apiaries. He talked last week to the Metro Atlanta Beekeepers meeting about grafting queens and how to do it.

Here he is holding up the small copper wire instrument he actually uses to graft queens.  The instrument is long with a 90 degree bend at the very end.  That end is for scooping up the larva from the bottom of the cell.  The larva that is grafted needs to be less than 36 hours old for best results.

I tried to get a close up of the instrument, but my camera chose to focus on the people on the other side of the room.

Because this was too tiny to use for demonstration, all of us died laughing when Mickey pulled out a hoe and a c-shaped piece of drain piping to show us in large how the larva is grafted!

Here he is, hoe and piping in hand, to show us the way you lift the larva from the bottom of the cell.

In the picture below he is showing how the tip of the hoe has to go under the larva to lift it.  It can't be flipped over because it will smother since the spiracles will then be down in royal jelly.  

Here he slides the "instrument" under the "c-shaped larva."  to lift it up.


I thought this was one of the most entertaining demonstrations I have ever witnessed!



He went on to describe a method so complicated of moving hive boxes and putting the queen cells into frames and moving brood.  He called it the Doolittle method, but said, tongue in cheek, that it was really the Do-A-Lot Method of queen grafting.  Michael Bush talks about the Doolittle method which was invented really by Schirach.  It involves a bunch of moving frames from one hive box to another, restacking, turning - like the hive boxes are dancing in the process of raising queens.


I hope some others of you have a chance to hear Mickey give this talk.  What an enjoyable bee meeting!

A Little of This, A Little of That, Not good focus at all!

So I'm a little out of focus and these pictures are a lot out of focus - I had the camera on the wrong setting and no tripod.....

First both of my hour interviews are playable online at Radio Sandy Springs - these were hour long talks about beekeeping in general for the Master Gardener Radio Hour. Here's the first one and here's the second one.

Today I was through early at work and came home to check on the bees. The first hive I opened was the Don nuc hive. I last looked in on June 15. At that time the queen was laying well and I was happy. I only lifted up one frame to see if there were eggs and since there were, I stopped the inspection then and there.

Maybe in lifting that one frame, I either killed or injured the queen who is now no longer there. There were no hive beetles in the hive and no eggs - just a little capped brood and two queen cells. Here's one and the one on the other side of the frame looked fabulous and ready to emerge. It was about 1/4 inch longer than this one.

I imagine emergence should happen in the next day or so, since this is July 7. It's actually too late for the queen to have been killed during my inspection. But how else could she have died?

To help this hive, I moved two frames of brood and eggs and all the bees that were on the frames from Mellona into this hive. That will increase the nurse bees available and up the numbers. The hive has one completely capped frame of honey and the dripping frames from the three frames I harvested for the bee movie.



This was also the first time I opened Mellona and the Easter hive since trading spaces. Mellona looked good and I saw the queen (below, out of focus). She was a lovely majestic bee, moving gracefully around the frame. I put her frame very, very gently back into the hive and took a couple of other frames to the Don nuc hive. It was important that I find her and not move her by accident.

See her at about 7:00 on the frame?

The Easter hive (the one from which the too-moisturized honey came) has found some nectar source.  They had built out comb in four or five of the frames in their top box and were storing something.  I usually have some honey stored in July - maybe from catalpa or sumac, but something is blooming.



This has been the oddest year.  I usually am madly taking pictures of bees on cucumber, echinacea, butterfly weed, butterfly bush, abelia, anise hyssop, etc.  I have not seen a honeybee on any of those plants.  The only nectar gathering bees I've seen are on the clover at the nearby school and that clover is burning dry now that we haven't had rain for a couple of weeks.

A Visit with Don (Fatbeeman) in Lula, GA

This afternoon I drove to Lula, Georgia with Julia and Noah to get the two queens I had ordered for my queenless hives. Don K is a character and fun to spend time with - I learned so much in the 45 minutes we spent at his beeyard. He was constantly sharing what he knows and challenging us to think about the whys and wherefores.

He had the queen cages ready. He said he knew I'd post pictures so he had new queen cages for me! We got to go with him into the yard to get the queens out of his hives. Note he has on NO protective gear - neither did any of the three of us. I did have veils in the car, but we didn't stop to put them on.

Don has his own system of hive marking. The brick you see in the picture with the stick on it means that the hive we are opening has a laying queen in it, ready to be sold and go to a new home.


His beeyards (his land is covered with bee hives - all systematically organized in his own special way) sport multiple colors and many types of tops and bottoms. Many of his boxes are really boxes - solid on the bottom and four sides - with a drilled entrance hole.

Here he explains his brick marking system to us.

He shows us the brood and eggs this queen is laying.  He makes sure each queen that he sells is proven as a layer.

He had Noah, who is trying to be more comfortable with the bees, lay his hand right on top of them to feel how they are under his hand!  He was totally surprised but did well.

Don found the queen and put her in his closed hand; he held his hand over the open hole in the queen cage; she moved right in.  Then quick as a wink, he picked up about five workers from the frame and put them in with her.  He marked the hive as now queenless and we moved on.

 

To rectify the queenless situation, he immediately moves to a hive that has queen cells (he can read the bricks on top of the hives to know which ones fit the bill).  He finds a viable queen cell.

    

Using a knife, he cuts a circle of comb containing the queen cell.  The cut cell lies next to the smoker in the next picture  He then wedges the ripe queen cell between the frames of one of the queenless hives and that hive is in business again!

There's no way to cover everything we learned in such a short time in this post.  One of my favorite moments was when he pointed to this stack of nuc boxes.  "Now this is natural beekeeping," he said.  As he pointed out the nucs are about the size of a tree trunk and he can stack them and the bees will make honey forever.  "After all, it's just like a tree...." he said.

Since this visit, I have had two very negative interactions with Don - one in 2011 and one in 2013.  

Don is a good beekeeper and a good teacher but does not appear to take a positive approach to his customers.

I have bought bees from him every year since I found out about him, so in 2011 I just let what he did go and chalked it up to his being basically a rather angry man.  In the most recent incident, he directly blamed me for the failure of a queen and hive after three weeks when the queen was obviously not mated well - the bees wouldn't release her and when we directly released her, she only laid drones.  He was very difficult to deal with, criticized me personally and my beekeeping,  and did not say, "no problem; I'll be glad to replace the queen"  Rather he said I would have to bring him the failed queen in order to get another and was quite angry and critical.    

I will not ever buy bees from him again and, since I am in charge of the list we give out to new beekeepers, I am planning to remove his name from the list of suppliers that Metro Atlanta Beekeepers recommends to our members and participants in our short course.

Distressing First Inspection at Blue Heron

Today Julia ran the first inspection of the year at Blue Heron.  She made a new sign for the apiary from the side of one of the hive boxes that washed down the creek in the flood last year.  It is at once both a sign about the apiary's location and a memorial to the seven hives that died last year.

We installed the nuc we got from Jennifer yesterday into a hive at Blue Heron.  We also looked at the other two hives which were installed on March 30.  I don't really know what to think about the first installed hives.  We saw no eggs or new brood in either hive.  Both were filled with bees.  There were no queen cells in my hive.  There were five queen cups, open, in Julia's hive and one closed one that didn't look like a queen cell....it seemed too small to me.

Jennifer told us that the intense early bloom was making the hives swarm.  She warned us to watch for signs.  We have seen no queen cells in either hive and we have looked.  Usually a hive doesn't swarm until after there are drones in the hives.  Julia's hive had drone brood and we saw a couple of drones.  Mine also had drone brood that looked old.

Also we know not to cut queen cells when there are no eggs in the hive.  Why?  Well, if you cut the queen cell and the hive has already swarmed AND there are no eggs in the brood box, then you have killed the future queen and there are no resources in the hive to make another one.  It's a moot point, really, since there weren't any closed queen cells.

So this is a very odd problem.  Have both hives swarmed without leaving a queen behind?  Did we totally miss queen cells that emerged in both hives and they both have virgin unmated, as yet, queens? 

Interestingly, without discussing it,  each of us went home feeling awful and opened our hives at home.  We each have at least one hive with brood and eggs to spare so we are going to add a frame of brood and eggs to each of the first installation hives at Blue Heron.  If they have a queen who isn't laying for whatever reason, the brood and eggs will boost the numbers, but if they need a queen, the brood and eggs will give them the resources to make one.

Oh, and while this is good news, it also felt like a let down.  I had put a sticky board on my Blue Heron hive. We pulled it and after three days, only saw one mite, and it was questionably identified.  I've seen mites on boards easily before, but I think Jennifer's bees came with very few mites so our mite drop was beyond insignificant.  We thought we'd show the participants what a mite looked like and weren't able to do even that!.

So here's the slideshow of the nuc installation. When we realized we had a problem, I got so worried that I forgot to take many pictures after the installation. 

Swarming - the Reproduction of the Hive

Swarm season is about to be upon us here in Atlanta.  I've been reading about swarms and swarm action in the hive in the Winston book.  Here are some interesting facts about swarming:

Environmental cues that contribute to swarm preparation in the hive:

•  Time of year (spring build-up, usually)
•   Length of days (longer)
•   Availability of nectar (the new hive formed by the swarm has to be able to provision itself)
•   Warm weather (what cluster of bees wants to hang from a branch in the snow?)

Inside the hive the cues that contribute to swarm preparation are:

• Congestion in the brood nest
• Good buildup of population in the hive
• Lots of young bees (70% of worker bees in the swarm are under 10 days old)
• Reduced distribution of queen pheromone (which influences the workers to build queen cells)

 Queen cups are built as a sort of insurance policy so that they could be quickly filled with an egg and royal jelly should the factors for swarming begin to increase.  Previous to swarming the queen lays 20 or more eggs in queen cups - this ensures that the hive will have a queen when the old queen leaves with the swarm.  Colonies seal 15 - 25 queen cells before swarming!

Usually the swarm takes place on the day of or the day after sealing the first queen cell.

Note:  in traditional beekeeping practices, the beekeeper "cuts" queen cells.  The teaching is that cutting the queen cells keeps the hive from swarming.  Let's think about this.

The hive is going to swarm when the first queen cell is capped.  The bees themselves sometimes destroy queen cells to delay swarming.  They do this during bad weather or when the nectar flow has stopped so that the swarm won't leave in less than optimal conditions.

Since it works for the bees, beekeepers often try to prevent swarming in the same way, but we are not privy to hive decision making.  The beekeeper opens the hive and says, "Oh, dear, I must cut out those queen cells."  And with one decision, the hive may be rendered queenless because the old queen has left/is leaving with the swarm.

Hmmmmm.  I don't think I will be cutting queen cells. 

Another possibility upon finding swarm cells in the hive is to take a frame with queen cells on it and use it to make a split a la Michael Bush.  Maybe this is the way I'll choose to go when I find swarm queen cells in my hives this year.

Blue Heron - the Queenless Saga

As you'll remember from earlier posts, my hive at Blue Heron was started with a nuc that had no queen. There was little or no brood in the box and we saw no queen and no evidence of a queen - no new eggs or larvae, very little capped brood, all in all a sad state of affairs.

To cope with this I gave the hive brood and eggs on two frames, hoping that they would make a queen. They made at least one perfectly lovely queen cell and the hive is calm, quiet and seems to be chugging along.

Meanwhile the nuc supplier calls and wants to "make us whole" by giving me another nuc, this time with a queen. I called several beekeepers whom I respect: Cindy Bee, Jim Ovbey, and I posted on Beemaster. Everyone agreed that the hive that made its own queen needed to have a chance.

So we got permission from Blue Heron to install the nuc in a second hive. I will keep an eye on the first hive to see if the queen they made successfully mates and begins to lay eggs. If she succeeds, then we have two good hives and I'll move the newest one somewhere else. If she fails, I will combine the hive I installed today with the first hive since we know there's a good queen in the new hive.

Here's what our process today looked like:



Now the supplier feels good about coming through with a queenright nuc, I feel good about Blue Heron allowing us to temporarily have two hives there, the whole process provides a great teaching/learning opportunity, and the new queen in the first hive has a chance to prove herself.

Everybody wins!

Hives at Blue Heron Nature Preserve

My new beekeeping buddy, Wade, has a new hive at the Blue Heron Nature Preserve. This is a community garden. People rent plots and grow organically at Blue Heron. There are three beehives located at the preserve. Several beekeeping friends have asked or emailed me to find out if I know who they belong to. It's such a great idea to put hives at the site of an organic community garden - so we are all curious.

Lucky me, one of the beekeepers there emailed me to comment on my blog. Mystery solved!

He was concerned about his hive and the performance (or lack thereof) of his queen. I offered to come for an inspection with him and he took me up on it. Wade (who has an injured foot and is clomping around the trail in spite of it) is one of the best smoker lighters I have ever met. He alluded to Boy Scouts, and I imagine this experience serves him better as a smoker-lighter than it did me to be a Girl Scout!



Wade had seen the queen in his nuc when he installed it, but when we opened the hive, there was no sign of a laying queen - no young brood, no eggs, lots of empty cells. The only brood in the hive was old, emerging now from being laid about three weeks ago. We did find opened queen cells. One of the queen cells was appropriately opened (see yellow circle in the picture below - you may have to click on the picture to enlarge it for better viewing). Wade is pretty sure this cell was not open the last time he inspected.

In addition to that opened cell, we also found two other intact, closed queen cells.

We decided that probably his hive had requeened itself and the virgin queen had not started laying yet. If this is the case and there is, in fact a queen, she may not lay for three weeks. If Wade had had another hive, we might have taken a frame of brood and eggs from it, but the other two hives belong to other people and were started at the same time as his.




We closed the hive up. You'll notice the hive box sitting on top of the inner cover. Wade is doing this as a way of storing the hive box until the bees need it.



We opened his friend Kent's hive and found beautiful brood patterns throughout the hive. Perhaps when he and Kent are back at the preserve at the same time, they can move a frame of Kent's into Wade's hive. A frame of brood and eggs would allow Wade to give his bees the opportunity to make a new queen in the event that they are queenless.

Dilemma of the Possibly Queenless Swarm

When you get a small swarm, it sometimes is an after swarm. When a hive swarms, about half the hive leaves and the queen goes with the swarm. They leave behind enough bees to keep the hive going and either a virgin queen or a queen about to emerge. Sometimes in a large hive, there are several after swarms, each containing a virgin queen.

When I got the small swarm on Tuesday the 8th, the bees in the box put their rear ends up in the air to signal the rest of the bees that the queen momma was in the box. However, she may not have made the box journey well or she may have been injured in the transfer from cardboard box to hive body.

I opened the small swarm on Friday and there was no sign of laying. The workers were drawing out comb, but syrup was being stored and no eggs were anywhere. This could mean the queen is a virgin queen and won't be laying for a while since she will have to make her mating flight and return safely to the hive.

One way to deal with this is to put a frame of brood and eggs from another hive into this hive. If they need a queen, they can then make one from the eggs. If there is a queen, they won't need to use the eggs to make a queen and the brood that emerges from the borrowed frame will simply enhance the hive.

I wanted to do this and took a frame from Bermuda to add to the small hive. The frame from Bermuda had eggs, young brood, capped brood and three queen cells on it. Two of the queen cells were opened at the bottom, indicating that the queen had emerged. The third cell in the center of the picture was whole.

I chose this frame because of the queen cell, but I don't know if it were a good idea or not. My thought was that if the hive were queenless, they would gain time on getting a new queen because this one would emerge soon. However if there is a queen in the hive, I guess I wasted a perfectly good queen cell. Anyway, I don't know what the answer was to this problem. If I had it to do again, I'd probably only add a frame with brood and eggs.

Report on the Small Swarm Nuc

Here sits the small swarm nuc with a pot of mint on top for beauty and inspiration. Mint represents hospitality and wisdom.... so maybe this will influence the bees to be happy and welcomed in my little deck beeyard.

Two pieces of good news (potentially) anyway:

1. The queen cells were all opened (see second picture). I didn't search for the queen because I wanted to disturb the hive as little as possible. I did not see any new brood or eggs, but if she has returned from her mating flight, she would have just barely started laying.

2. The last picture represented the second piece of good news. I had added a third frame of brood and eggs to the nuc before I left to go out of town on Thursday. Today the frame shows that the capped brood had hatched (you can tell by seeing the empty cells which had caps on them last week) and they did NOT use the eggs to make a queen cell so they must at least feel as if they are queenright for the moment.

The Swarm is Making Queen Cells!

I inspected all the hives this morning - just a perfunctory check to determine which hives (if any) needed new supers. I started with Mellona. The first picture is the beautiful honey being stored on 7/11 foundation and being capped in this picture. This hive is such a workhorse. They had filled every frame in this super and I added another with 7/11 foundation for more chunk honey or crush and strain if I wish.

I then checked Bermuda who is beginning to move into the third box. They have a way to go yet, though. I removed two frames of 7/11 that I had put into that box last week. The frames hadn't been touched by the bees and I needed it in the box I added to Mellona. I pushed the 8 frames together and will add two more with starter strips of SC before I go to work in the morning.

Proteus continues to make creative comb, although now the bees are staying inside the boundaries of the frame. The second picture is one of the combs created by Proteus from a crush and strain comb from last year. You can see the remnants of last year's comb on the bottom bar of the frame.

A friend of mine who is deeply into mythology and ritual suggested that I have a name-changing ritual to take Proteus and change its name to something that doesn't include shape-changing (as done by the god for whom Proteus is named!) Then perhaps the hive would improve its comb-building ability!

Finally I checked on my tiny swarm hive. On Saturday, the 12th, I gave them two frames from Bermuda with eggs and very young brood. If they were able to start queen cells from the eggs, that should be evident by now, nine days later. I was thrilled to find open queen cups on one frame and one prominent and very big queen cell along with a couple of others that were smaller. You can see it in the lower left of the third picture. Also you can see the opened queen cups to the right.

I'm so excited that these girls are on the right track. I moved the five frames to a nuc box where they will stay until they get bigger. I've been feeding them 1:1 sugar syrup and will continue that in the nuc box. I also plan to add another frame of capped/emerging brood to increase their numbers.

In the last picture you can see the tiny nuc hive, rather dwarfed by the towering Mellona that now has four (4) honey supers on it!