Hive Inspection from Week of St. Patrick's Day

 Tonight I held a virtual hive inspection for Metro Atlanta Beekeepers. We watched the video below to see three inspections: a Langstroth hive that overwintered from a split in 2021; my top bar hive into which I installed the March 2 swarm I caught in Decatur; the split I made in my own backyard which has finally made queen cells.

If you'd like to see what we watched, minus the ongoing discussion that we had on Zoom as we watched it, the video is below:

Rookie Mistakes in Beekeeping

It's the beginning of bee season in the south and many people are getting their packages and nucs. We are having a discussion at the Atlanta Beekeeping Meetup tomorrow night about rookie mistakes. That made me want to write about them here.

Some rookie mistakes that come to mind:

1. Not knowing what to do about the bees that stay in the nuc box you just installed or the package you just shook into a hive.

My first installation (and others after that) stopped the instructions with shaking the remaining bees into the hive. No matter how much you shake, bees remain in the nuc box or the package that still smells like home to them. So when you are finished with your work of installing, there will still be a large number of bees clinging to the old box or remaining on the package's screen wire. When I installed my first nucs, I called five beekeepers before I found someone who told me to stand the "empty" nuc box on end in front of the entrance and all of the bees would eventually find their way home to Mama.

2. Failing to light the smoker

I often only use the smoker once to puff at the front door to announce my presence to the bees. Then I set it in front of the hive and rarely use it. I get away with it because I use hive drapes. The very day that you, the beginner, go out to the hive without the smoker is the day that the hive is roaring mad and you really get stung. Never open the hive without having lit the smoker.

3. Not having enough equipment ready to use

Beekeeping is not a cheap hobby. But that being said, the worst thing that can happen is to run out of equipment. The bees don't understand that the equipment that they need to be happy (a new box, more frames) is on a UPS truck. They need you to have it when they run out of space. Always be several boxes ahead of your bees.

4. Feeding when the bees don't need it

You'll have to feed a package and you might want to feed a swarm. A nuc comes with its food already being stored in the hive. If a nectar flow is on, the bees don't want/need your sugar syrup. If you keep feed on the hive when there is a nectar flow, the bees may back fill all of the brood cells as well as their honey cells, leaving no room for the queen to lay. Also I am convinced that much of the honey in the US is partially sugar syrup because new beekeepers are so eager to feed their bees.

5. Leaving frames out of a box (not respecting bee space)

When you put a hive box together, you need to fill it with the requisite number of frames. If you don't the bees will make a mess. They only need bee space, and the area left open by the lack of a frame is an invitation for them to fill the space with unsupported comb. Once I fed new hives by putting baggie feeders on top of the hive bars instead of on top of the inner cover. I returned to find that the bees (all eight hives of them) had built beautiful comb from the bottom side of the inner cover. What a mess.

6. Cutting queen cells when you see them

Often nucs are so crowded in their nuc box before they are picked up, that they are eager to swarm and make more room. When they do, they leave queen cells behind. The rookie beekeeper may see these cells and cut them. But guess what? The hive swarmed when you weren't around and by cutting the queen cells, you render your new hive queenless. Besides as you work harder at bee-ing, you'll discover that the best way to deter a swarm is to use checkerboarding and that those queen cells can be used to make splits!

7. Opening hive too frequently

Great way to kill your hive. PN Williams in Atlanta always said to start with two hives: one to kill by over inspecting it and one to survive! Always have a reason for your hive inspection (just to look is not a reason - checking to see if the queen is laying is a reason). That might keep you from opening more than about once a week at most.

8. Going out to hive with no protection, wearing black, having drunk a coke, and at 4:30 in the afternoon.

Many beekeepers cut down on the amount of protective gear they wear as their beekeeping experience expands. However, at first, we are typically awkward and may drop frames, smash bees, or have a hard time handling the bees that fly into your face/veil. Wear your gear. Also bees don't like black (makes them think you are a bear), don't like caffeine (don't drink coffee right before an inspection) and are a little frantic at orientation time (around 3:30 - 4:30 in the afternoon. Avoid all of the above when you are inspecting.

Yes, there is a story here - I was singing in a choir in my early beekeeping years and was so enamored of my bees. We had an all day choir workshop and I had on black, had drunk a coke and we got a break at 4:00 before an evening get together at 6. So I went home and sat down between my hives at about 4:30. I was just peacefully sitting there, but the bees were orienting, I had on black and had drunk caffeine. So one of them zapped me on the side of my face. I was teaching at Emory at the time and had to go to work with one side of my face totally swollen and red. I don't get those large local reactions anymore, but at the time, I was a sight to behold!

 BJ Sherriff's bee jackets

9. Dropping a frame.

My second to the worst sting occurred when I dropped a deep foundationless frame of brood in my second year. I forgot that I couldn't hold the frame at a slant to look at it (you can't with foundationless because they are often not attached at the bottom of the frame). The honeycomb and brood dropped off and all the angry nurse bees came after me, crawling up the legs of my pants and getting me everywhere they could find purchase for their stingers.

10. Harvesting too much honey in first year.

The idea is for your first year bees to survive the following winter and be alive for a second year. In Atlanta, I always leave at least a box and a half of honey on each of my hives. Find out what your bees need in your area and leave at least that amount for your bees. If you just really want to taste your honey (and of course, you do), then take one frame out of your heaviest box and crush and strain it so you can have something to show for your labors. Leave the rest for the bees and your reward will be great the next year.

Beekeeping is a constant learning activity. I learn new things with each talk I hear, each website I visit, and each book or article that I read. The more you learn, the less likely you are to make rookie mistakes.

What rookie mistakes can you add to this list?

Good luck with your bees!

Bee-Surprise at Home in the Process of Managing Swarms

The invited swarm at Tom's house that moved in in response to my swarm lure appeared to be queenless when I opened the hive a couple of weeks ago. As you'll remember from my last post, my plan was to take them a frame of brood and eggs every week for the next few weeks.

I decided to take the frame of brood and eggs from my survivor hive that overwintered as a nuc and has a queen from the Bill Owens' survivors that I own. At this time of year at the height of the nectar flow, I rarely take a hive down to the bottom box. Mostly I look at the top box to see if they need more space for nectar.

I opened the survivor hive and started lifting off the heavy eight frame boxes full of honey. When I got to the next to the bottom box, I thought there was a possibility of a brood frame there, so I started pulling frames. To my horror, the brood frames were back-filled with nectar - no eggs, no brood. On two frames I saw newly opened queen cells.

The top box on this hive contained four fully capped honey frames and four untouched frames to the right of them. This has been the case for two weeks of heavy nectar. So now I know they have been placing the nectar in empty brood frames.

Oh, no, these bees are without a current queen or at least have a brand new queen. Both queen cells had been ripped open from the side, so probably represented the new queen killing her potential rivals.

Finding all brood cells back-filled with nectar in that second box, I went into the bottom box of the hive. There I found more back-filled brood cells but on one frame, I found highly polished empty cells, waiting for the queen to return to fill them. I felt some relief, thinking that the queen was on her mating flights and that this hive was, indeed, OK.

This morning I saw bees flying in with pollen.

I am feeling reassured. But to make sure they didn't keep back-filling the brood chambers, I went ahead and put a new super on above the four filled frames.

The brood frame for the queenless hive at Tom's house would have to come from a different hive.

Swarm at Tom's - Two Cat Size

Yesterday it rained in Atlanta and Tom texted me at about 1:30 PM when the sun was just occasionally breaking through, that the bees at his house were "going crazy."  He sent me this photo that he took of the front hive:

Sure looks like a swarm to me, but it also looks like a swarm that couldn't get the queen to come along so they are out and ready but needing her to join them.

I told him they might not swarm until tomorrow but they would keep trying to get the queen.  Later he reported that he came home to find the bees gone - definitely they had swarmed and left.  He didn't see them anywhere.  Later that day he saw them up in a large pine tree on the edge of his property.

As I drove up to N Georgia, he said the hive was going crazy again.  Bees were everywhere and appeared to be gathering on a tree at about chest height.  I told him I would get Jeff and come to his house at 4:30 as I drove back into Atlanta.

Jeff was already there when I arrived and they were discussing that the bees were no longer in the pine tree and the group consensus was that the bees had moved from the pine tree to the shrub on which they now hung.  It was a HUGE swarm - about the size of two cats and gathered around a branch that hung down.

We spread a sheet under it and put a nuc box (looked really inadequate but that's what I had) on the sheet under the swarm.  We had brought the huge water cooler swarm catcher bottle.  Jeff climbed a ladder and although I was going to hold the bottle, it worked better for him to do it, so he was really the swarm catcher par excellence.  

Jeff shook the branch and the swarm dropped into the nuc box.  We then had to shake the tree a couple more times.  I set the box onto the sheet again (one shake was directly into the box), and the bees began doing the nasonov butts in the air to let the other bees know the queen was in the box.  We put the nuc top on catty-corner, leaving openings for the bees to join Her Majesty and worked the other hive.  There were layers and layers of bees in this box.

Because this hive had swarmed, we wanted to make a split from the back hive.  The second hive was full of queen cells.  We took a couple of frames with good queen cells on them to make the nuc.  The hive was left with at least seven other queen cells that we saw.  It too was preparing to swarm.  

We have not been able to do good swarm control (ie, checkerboarding) because this hive was in a deep and a medium.  As a result you can't move frames in the checkerboard pattern because a deep frame can't move into a medium box.  We had given these bees all kinds of room but you can't argue with the Darwinian imperative to split and survive!  So we did our own split on the second hive.  They may still swarm.  I don't think they have already because we found a frame of eggs, indicating that the queen was probably laying today.  

We made our nuc (in a deep box) up of both deep and medium frames.  At worse they will make drone comb off of the bottom of the medium frames.  But one of the queen cells we took was on a deep.  

I'll cover installation in the next post.  You can see the capped queen cell near the rubber band and another queen cup with larva in it to the upper right.

Dave Tarpy on Good Queens

At Young Harris this morning I heard a talk by Dave Tarpy on how good queens = good colonies.  A study by Dennis vonEngelsdorp found that of hive deaths over the winter, 31% of the deaths were attributed to poor queens.

 Dave Tarpy is on the left, Tom Seeley on the right (weren't we lucky to hear both of them!)

Tarpy pointed out that the queen serves many more functions in the hive than simply being a good egg laying machine.  When the queen is a virgin, her QMP (queen mandibular pheromone) is low but after mating her QMP is high and stays high during her lifetime.  Her emission of this pheromone does many things for the hive.

1. The presence of QMP in the hive suppresses laying worker tendencies
2. Workers are instantly attracted to QMP and want to touch the queen and disperse the QMP throughout the hive
3. QMP is a great attractor for drones - drones even have a special segment on their antennae just for smelling QMP
4. QMP includes 9-ODA as well as 9-HDA.  The 9-HDA is needed to encourage the clustering of a swarm when the hive swarms
5. The queen also has a footprint pheromone which is emitted with each footfall.  This pheromone inhibits queen cell production.  The queen spreads this herself as she walks throughout the hive
6. If laying worker eggs are present, QMP influences the workers to cannibalize those worker-laid eggs.

It's crucial in the life of a hive that the hive have a really good queen.  In the hives we run where we let the hives requeen themselves, there is a possibility that the bees will not make a good queen.  I've always heard this but never understood why until today.

If the hive is queenless and desperate for a queen, then the beekeeper gives them a frame of brood and eggs to help them make a queen.  The pheromone emitted by the eggs and young larvae is helpful in making the bees react as if they have a queen.  But they are still desperate for a new queen as quickly as possible.  

In the general development of a queen, the bees feed the egg and larvae only royal jelly until the cell is capped.  If the egg is to be a worker, then after the third day, the bees feed the larvae bee bread and other things - not just royal jelly.  With their goal being to replace the queen as quickly as possible, they may very well pick an egg or larvae that is older than 3 days and start feeding it royal jelly.  In the interim, it may have had a couple of days of being fed like a worker, meaning that it has a lesser quality developmental start and will be less of a great queen.

Not only that, but a queen cell made from a four or five day larvae is going to emerge in 11 or 12 days rather than 16 (as in a one day egg).  The bees may pick for speed of emergence rather than quality so that they get the new queen sooner than later. The newly emerged less-than queen will then kill the other queens in their cells and you the beekeeper are stuck with a less than wonderful queen.

To prevent this Dave says to check the hive five days after installing the brood and egg frame.  If you find any capped queen cell at that time, remove that cell, leaving any still uncapped queen cells which were of course started with younger larvae and thus more likely to be successful queens.

That last paragraph was worth going to the conference to learn - thanks, Dave Tarpy.

News from Drone Layer Queen

The bees are rid of the queen.  I've added weekly a frame of brood and eggs for the past three weeks.

Today I saw queen cells - at least FOUR of them - on a frame of brood and eggs I left them last week.  The best looking one is below.  The second photo is blurry but there is another queen cell.  I saw two others - all on this same frame from the nuc Julia gave me the queen cell to use to start it.

Michael Bush says that with a drone layer, you need to give them brood and eggs three times and then they will probably make a successful queen.  I hope this time, they get a good one.

I'm so glad I got to see this process so close up - watched them remove the drone brood in a good housecleaning; saw the old queen with her wings chewed almost off; now see they are making a queen cell.  From just watching the front of the hive, you'd have no idea this was going on!

The brood you see is capped brood from the frame of eggs I gave them last week.  It was a good testament to why a beekeeper should have a nuc or two going all the time.  I took a frame out of a nuc.  It was two large tear drops of newly drawn wax, covering about 2/3 of the frame.  Almost every cell had an egg in it.  There was no honey or capped brood.

These bees managed to make four queen cells from the eggs.  So by the middle of May the hive should be queenright again.

They are not missing the nectar flow which is currently going.  They have really been storing up honey.

Note:  Each time I have opened this hive, I've had to squash at least 30 small hive beetles.  Today I only saw five small hive beetles the whole time I was fooling around with the hive.  I need to order nematodes which I have not done yet.

The Rest of the Splitting Story

After we did our lovely split of Lenox Pointe, it was time to open Colony Square.  The week before on Saturday, I had opened the hive to find eggs - enough that I made a nuc and took it to Morningside Community Garden.  However on this day when we opened the hive, we couldn't find a single egg.  It was mid morning and sunny, so we should have been able to see eggs if they were present.  We also never saw the queen.

I'm embarrassed to say that I didn't take any pictures of this phase of things - we were making decisions and struggling with this.  Of course we couldn't split a hive with no eggs - there would not be resources for the queenless hive to make a queen.  And indeed was there a queen in this hive?  We didn't know.

We finally found a frame with about three queen cells on it.  All of them were still open and had the workers upside down in the cell taking care of the larvae.  Would a hive swarm without leaving capped queen cells behind?  Maybe the queen cell that counted and was finished was hiding somewhere???

I think either the hive had swarmed without leaving queen cells finished (unlikely, right?) or they were planning to swarm and were stopping the queen from laying while they made queen cells.  In any event since we only saw the one frame of queen cells, we decided that we would have to move this hive as a whole.  We were taking it to a man who lives behind a community garden in a neighborhood that abuts the Emory campus.  The bees will have not only the community garden, but the floral abundance in lovely Lullwater park on the Emory campus as their foraging ground.

What we decided to do was to put the two boxes of brood together and to put the two boxes of honey together with a bottom board and top as if two separate hives so that we could carry it together.  We left for the day and planned to come back in the evening to move the hives.  We strapped them up before we left and planned to close the entrance with #8 hardware cloth when we returned.

In the dark of night, we carried the queenless half of the Lenox split and the two halves of the Colony Square hive over to Ron's house in the Emory area.

A close up:

By the time we drove 30 minutes to the Emory area (Atlanta is really big, you know), it was dark.
We set the hives up in Ron's backyard - you can see the moving screen we used on one of the hives and the screened wire we used on the other:

Our last move of the night was to take off the screens and leave the bees to settle into their new environs.

So optimistically I was hoping for at least four hives out of these two three year old hives.  Instead I got one even split and moved the other as a whole.  We even brought the deep box on Colony Square because it was full of brood.

I did see one tiny c-shaped larva in that deep, meaning the queen was laying about three days before.  That reassured me a little because one of my worries was that I had inadvertently put the queen in the nuc I had made the week before....not the case, as per the egg age in the old hive.

Stonehurst Hives are All over the Place

In preparation for visiting the Stonehurst Place hives today I waxed foundation into sixteen frames.  I assumed I would need to add a box to at least two of the hives over there.  The last time I was there on April 11, I didn't check the largest hive because a UGS doctoral student was collecting samples of the bees in that hive for his research.

In the service of his research, he probably killed about 300 - 400 of my bees.  But it's for a good cause.  I also had to spend about 40 minutes filling out a survey about how I manage my bees.

So I spent the first part of today waxing frames.  My wax tube fastener kind of bit the dust in the middle - I think it need a long bath fully submerged in boiling water - it seems clogged.



I tried a paintbrush which my friend Jerry says he uses, but just look at the picture.  It did not fare well.


I placed the frames according to Housel positioning in empty boxes to transport them to the inn.



At the inn, I found that Hive One was bursting at the seams, storing honey in comb between the boxes.  I moved the top box off, transferred two honey-filled frames to the new box and inserted the new empty box with the filled frames as ladders between the now sixth and fourth boxes.




I left Hive One with six boxes on it - the top four solid with honey.



Hive Two had a laying queen but the hive was slow to grow.  They had not really used the second box at all.  I didn't do much at all to that box.



Here's their second box - almost unused.



When I was last there about two weeks ago, Hive Three was queenless with about three almost ripe queen cells.  I was sad about this, but this week, I saw eggs - and ripped up queen cells.  The queen has obviously both emerged and started laying.

In contrast to Hive Two, Hive Three had completely filled their second box with nectar.  In the bottom box, they had lots of center-of-the-frame space available for laying and the queen had begun to do so.
I moved two frames of brood, eggs, and honey into what would become the new second box and sandwiched it between the bottom deep and the second box, full of honey.