Hive Inspection FAQs: Common questions asked during my Coronavirus Inspections

Similar questions come up every time I do a virtual inspection. Since you all are not on my virtual inspections, I thought I'd address some of the FAQs that are asked every time:

1. What are those white cloths and why do you use them?
They are hive drapes. I learned about them from Billy Davis. He used oilcloth. I have used these for years. I use either pillow cases or flour sacking kitchen towels. You need something that the bees won't get tangled in (nothing with a nap) and both pillow cases and flour sacking cloth fits that bill.

When the hive is covered with a hive drape, it really cuts down the need for smoking the hive. I typically smoke the front door to knock on it (learned that from Michael Bush) and then set my smoker down and rarely pick it back up.

Like a surgeon, you can use two drapes to allow yourself only to expose the one frame you are about to remove from the hive. I keep one of them draped over the frame on my frame rack as well.

Here is an earlier post on hive drapes where you can see them in action.

2. Why don't you use a queen excluder? 
The queen excluder was developed for commercial beekeepers to use when they are harvesting honey. They can drive their trucks through the bee yards and take off the top boxes, blow the bees out of the boxes and load the box on the truck without worrying that they are taking the queen. All harvested honey in a commercial hive is above the queen excluder.

Bees don't want to be separated from their mother and the queen does better when she can lay wherever she wishes, so there is really no reason for a backyard beekeeper to use a queen excluder when there is no good reason to do so.

There are about four good uses for a queen excluder so it isn't really a useless piece of equipment for the backyard beekeeper. Here they are:

---As a drain rack for cut comb honey. The bars on the queen excluder are close enough together to distribute the weight of a square of cut comb honey without causing indentations in the cut comb.

---To prove your theory that there are two queens in a hive. Put the queen excluder between where you think the two queens are living in the hive. In seven days, look at the top box. If there are new eggs and brood, you have a queen in that box. Look below the queen excluder and if there are new eggs and brood, you also have a queen in that box.

---If you want to make a split and are scared you will take the queen. Take an empty box and put into it the frames of brood, eggs, honey and pollen that you want in the split. Shake every single bee off of these frames as you remove them from the hive. Put a queen excluder on the top of the top box and put your box of frames but no bees above the excluder. Put on the inner cover and top. In the morning, nurse bees will be in your new box to take care of the brood. Remove that new box and you have a split without a queen in it but resources to make one.

---As a queen includer when you catch a swarm. To make sure the swarm stays in the box where you hived them, put a queen excluder below the bottom box on top of the entrance. The only bees who can leave the hive are workers. The queen will stay put. After no more than two days, remove the "includer" and the hive will have established itself.

3. How do you make a robber screen?
Billy Davis also taught me this. With his robber screens on your hives all year long, robbery never happens. It's made of #8 hardware cloth and I have also used window screen. The secret is to keep an entrance reducer on your hives all year long. The entrance of the robber screen has to be four inches minimum away from the entrance of the hive.

See photos and more discussion here.

4. Should you start feeding your bees as soon as the nectar flow is over?
The nectar flow is over in Atlanta, but we are not in a dearth yet. Here the nectar flow is defined by the bloom of the tulip poplar. When it is over, the bees no longer stumble over each other in their rush to enter the hive and leave again to get more. But the end of the flow does not mean there is no nectar. Many nectar bearing plants bloom in early summer in Atlanta. As long as there is nectar, there is no reason to feed your bees. Since honey is the bees natural food, why not let them eat what they have brought in? If I see that my bees are eating all of their stores, then I should feed my bees and I will. But then if I have it, I will feed honey and if I don't, I will feed bee tea.

Now is a good time to check your hives for weight so you'll know how heavy your hive is at the height of the season. Then if it is really light in August, you should feed!.

SPARK bees Make it Through the Winter Despite a Major Beekeeper Error

So all of you know that I don't use queen excluders. I like to give the queen free rein and allow her to lay wherever she'd like. In my own hives, the bees thrive with what is called an unlimited broodnest. Winter preparation for my hives at home and in the community garden this year involved taking little or no honey in order to leave enough for the bees not to starve during the winter. Also, I eliminate empty boxes to help the bees have less room to deal with in the cold.

I inherited the hives at SPARK from another beekeeper whom I had never met before the day he handed them over. He had never treated these bees (Hooray!) and they were thriving and had been for several years. I definitely wanted them to live. Gosh, what if I took over and the first thing that happened was that they died?

So I felt really scared about interfering. You'll remember the hives both had queen excluders on them when I first visited and opened the hives:


This one had a comb of honey that the bees had placed where the previous beekeeper had taken a frame of honey and had not replaced it.

Well, winter began and the hives were already compact at SPARK and I didn't need to feed the bees because both boxes had at least one full super of honey on them. So I left them for the winter........and NEVER TOOK OFF THE QUEEN EXCLUDER. (please don't tell anyone - I'm a Master Beekeeper and really should know better)

For new beekeepers: During the winter, the bees cluster around the honey. This allows them to stay warm and to have a food source that doesn't require their moving to a different box. The bees have a hard time moving if the temperature is below 50. So a well-managed hive over the winter would include removing the queen excluder to allow the cluster to gather around the honey in the super.

Truthfully, bees move honey all the time. And bees are highly motivated to survive the winter. So smart bees, and these SPARK bees must be, move honey all the time. So to keep fed and warm and to keep the queen with the cluster, the bees would have brought the honey to her. On warmer days in the fall and winter, they moved the honey to be near the cluster.

Because, lo and behold, I arrived at the rooftop garden at SPARK on a warmish day on the last week of January to find bees flying in and out of both hives....despite my bad beekeeping.

Look at all the pollen coming in! Good sign that the queen is laying and building up for spring.

You can see the queen excluder on each hive between the second and third box. WHEW. I really dodged a bullet.

Three Good Uses for the Queen Excluder

In a tree there is no queen excluder.  Bees in the wild build where they want to and the queen is free to wander in the comb and lay where it suits her.  However, humans are always wanting to bend nature to meet their convenience.  The queen excluder is no exception.

It was developed for the convenience of the beekeeper.  In the time of honey harvest, the queen excluder insured the beekeeper that he/she could remove the top boxes of the hive (honey supers) and be almost guaranteed that the queen would not be removed with the boxes.  I can imagine that for the commercial beekeeper, this is essential for efficiency in the honey harvest.

However, those of us with less hives than a commercial outfit have the luxury of respecting our bees and their process in the hive.  We can employ an unlimited broodnest for the better functioning of our hives and deal with where the brood is come harvest time without needing to simply pull off the top boxes for harvest as the commercial beeks would do.

The beginner kits I bought when I started beekeeping ten years ago each came with a queen excluder so I have two queen excluders. Since I don't want to exclude the queen from the hive boxes, I have found three good uses for the queen excluder and want to share them with those of you who have never used yours.

1. The queen excluder is the perfect drain rack for draining cut comb honey.

The spaces between the wires are small to keep the queen from being able to push her enlarged abdomen through (excluding her).  As a result they are relatively close together compared to a cake cooling rack. On a cake cooling rack, the distance between the wires is much wider and if you put cut comb honey sections on that kind of rack, indentations are made in the honeycomb. If you want your cut comb honey to be show quality and pleasing to the recipient, it should not have wire indentation marks in it, and the queen excluder is your answer to this potential problem!

I can't find the name of the physical principle that defines the above distribution of weight - if anyone knows what it is, please put it in a comment or email me.  A kind anonymous soul has answered in the comments below:  Pressure = Force/Area!  Thanks so much for letting me know and say the appropriate thing here.

2. Once upon a time I thought I had two queens laying in my hive at the same time. There were eggs and brood in the bottom box of the hive and in the third box up, separated by a box of capped honey, there was another box full of eggs and brood. I went on Beemaster Forum and posed the question: Could I possibly have two queens laying in my hive?

The forum members suggested that I put a queen excluder between the two boxes and leave them for a week.  At the end of that time, if there were new eggs in both the top box and the lower box, then I would have a queen laying in both boxes.

I did it and in fact there were two laying queens in the hive.  So the second use of the queen excluder is to prove that there are two queens in a hive.

3.  The third use of the queen excluder is to let the queen excluder make sure you don't take the queen by accident when making a split. 

While there are several ways to do this, I'm going to share the easiest one. The simplest way is to take the frames you want for the split out of the hive and shake or brush every single bee off of them.  You will be taking a couple of frames of brood and eggs so that the new hive can make a queen. Then put the queen excluder on top of the top box in the hive.

On top of the queen excluder, put an empty hive box and fill it with the five frames you have pulled and shaken free of bees. Don't put any other frames in that box. On top of that box put the inner cover and the top cover and leave the hive for the night.

The next day, the brood frames should be covered with nurse bees who have come up to make sure the brood and eggs stay warm enough, and you can move the five frames into their own box with no fear that you have accidentally taken the queen. Simple nuc, simply made.

I'm sure there are other good uses for the queen excluder beside the traditional one of separating the queen from the honey supers. I'd love to hear how you repurpose this device!

There's no Such Thing as a Free Lunch!

All beekeepers get excited when they are called for a swarm!  I'm in that boat - I get so excited that I keep all my gear in my car during swarm season so I'm ready to go if called.

Last night as my work day was ending, my friend, Curt, called me and said his hive had swarmed for the third time!  He now has three hives in his yard and he has reached his limit, so he offered the swarm to me.  It was about to rain, but I drove by his house where I saw the swarm about 16 feet up in a cedar tree.  I thought I could get it with the swarm catcher, but it was about to pour and I was exhausted.

So I decided to wait until this morning and if the bees were still there, I'd get them then.  I drove to Curt's house this morning around 8:45.  The bees were still there, up high in the tree and were very active.

Here's the swarm as up close as I could get it with the zoom on my camera.

 Here's its location in the tree - up toward the top on the left - see the house roof in the background? I had to put the swarm catcher on I think the fourth or fifth notch to get it long enough.

I had set up the box to receive the swarm on top of cardboard.  I also put a white sheet under the swarm's tree location.  I remembered Bee-wo Jima and put the box a little ways away, but after the first bee dump, I realized it could be closer so I set it on the white sheet.

What I am using is a plastic file box. I have a ventilated hive cover to close it and a white hive drape to cover that. A bungee cord is set to go around the collection box.

I tapped the swarm branch at least five times and bees still remained encircling the high branch.  I looked at the frantic bees flying near my head and realized there was another swarm about five feet over my head!  I went after that one several times as well, and got most of the bees.

When you collect a swarm, you know you have the queen when you see the bees raising their rear ends into the air and emitting nasonov to announce, "The Queen is here! The Queen is here!"  This was not happening and I felt discouraged. There were still hundreds of bees in the two tree locations and I was getting tired, getting close to two hours into this.

I looked around and my eye fell on about six bees on the edge of my plastic bucket I had brought with smoker fuel in it for later in the day. I had emptied it to try to use it to collect the small swarm on the lower branch. It was an unsuccessful attempt, so I had set it on the edge of the sheet.

As I looked closer, I realized that on the edge of the bucket was the QUEEN with about five bees in her retinue!  I didn't pause to take a photo; I just dumped her and her five companions into the plastic box. In ten years of beekeeping, I have never seen the queen in a swarm.  I was so excited!

As if by magic, suddenly everything changed.  The bees began making their way into the box. Bees started flying down from the high perch in the tree to join their sisters in the box. Hooray. By now I had been here two hours.

At this point almost all the bees had left the tree, so I brushed most of these bees into the box, attached the ends of the bungee cord and folded the sheet up around the whole thing so I wouldn't leave bees behind.

My plan was to install them at the nearby community garden where I have two hives, one still empty of bees from last year.

The hive was ready and waiting, so I dumped the bees in and replaced the missing frames.  I left and went to work.  The photo below is what it looked like when I left:

I had a break a couple of hours later, so I went by the garden to see how things were going, fully expecting to see bees orienting to the hive and happy as bees can bee.

Instead, this is what I found.  Not a bee in the hive and all of them in a swarm cluster, waiting for the scouts to find them a better home.

In desperation, I called Julia to find out what she would do in this situation.  She suggested that I spray them again with sugar syrup and then do three things: 

• That I add another box to the hive and spread out the drawn and empty frames - maybe the hive  in two medium boxes wasn't big enough for this group;
• That I put some lemon grass oil on the frames and inside the hive;
• That I use a queen excluder as a queen includer and put it between the hive and the entry so that the queen couldn't leave again - picky woman that she apparently is.

Then I had to collect the swarm all over again.  So this time I spread out the sheet, propped the collection box below the hive entry, and readied the ventilated hive cover (seen to the left on the sheet).

Once the bees were in the collection box, I took the hive down to the screened bottom board and added the queen "includer." Then I checkerboarded the two filled boxes, adding a third box full of empty frames. In the end, each of the three boxex had about four drawn frames and four empty frames interspersed.

When I left (to go yet again back to work) the hive looked like this with more bees going in than coming out.

I stopped on my way home around 7:30 tonight and this is how it looked. There were a few stubborn swarm enthusiasts hanging out under the top cover, but the rest of the girls were flying in and out and orienting to the hive.

Beekeepers joke that swarm bees are "free bees. These were hardly free. I collected the swarm with great effort over and over, first from the tree and then later in the afternoon, had to collect it again. I spent at least four hours on this project during a work day (not at the office, not getting paid!) 

Because I had to interfere with them so much, I got stung in the hands at least eight times. On the positive side, though, I only wore a veil - not my jacket - and only put on gloves after I had been stung a lot because I wanted to mask the pheromone so they would quit.

It was a great challenge and I had a direct experience to teach me that there is no such thing as a free lunch!

PS - since this is the third swarm the hive has sent out into the world, the queen is likely a virgin and I can't leave the queen "includer" on for a week.  Guess I'll take it off this afternoon after work or tomorrow morning.  Will call my friend Julia for more advice and consult Honey Bee Democracy and Mark Winston's book for help.

Note:  I stopped by the next day when the hive had been in the hive for 24 hours and removed the queen excluder.  I do hope the queen makes her way out to be mated.  Meanwhile in the next few days I'll probably put in a frame of brood and eggs from one of my survivor hives to be sure.

Soap-making, John Campbell Folk School Style

After a weekend at the Folk School taking a soap making class, I came home with all of this soap.  It has to cure for a month.

You remember how I like to find uses for the queen excluders I bought when I first started beekeeping?  On two occasions in ten years, I have put them on a hive for overnight to solve a problem.  Other than that I use them for cut comb honey draining!  Now I have found a new use: curing soap!

Soap has to sit for four to six weeks to cure before it is in its best shape for use and lather.  You are supposed to turn the bars over occasionally.  My basement smells lovely.

At the school, we learned how to protect ourselves against the danger of being burned by lye.  We wore goggles, rubber gloves, long sleeves.  We were very, very careful.  Everything in making soap has to be measured in a precise way.  Saponification (turning lye and fat into soap) is a chemical reaction and the ingredients have to be controlled exactly. 

We carefully stirred the lye into cold water and then began to melt our precisely measured fats.  By the time the fats had melted the lye would have cooled down.  The teacher had fancy laser thermometers - I ordered one from Amazon the minute I got home.  The lye and the melted fats plus olive oil had to end up with an average temperature of somewhere between 80 and 120 degrees before you could mix them together.

When the magic temperature was reached, the lye solution is gently poured into the fat/oil mix and you begin the thickening process.  We used stick blenders and "trace" occurred rather quickly.  "Trace" is the point in the process when you can see a line on the surface of the soap solution when you pull out the stick blender or make a circular drip with a rubber spatula on the surface of the soap solution.  At that point, you can add fragrance or color.

I made six different quarts of soap.  I think these were the types I made:

1.  Tuscan wine soap with calendula - turned out red and smells divine - shea butter was in that

2.  Apple jack and orange peel with cornmeal was next and I didn't use shea butter for it

3.  Then I think I made a soap with dirt/smoke as the fragrance and I added both activated charcoal and cornmeal for texture.  It turned out black and very masculine in smell

4.  Cucumber with parsley flakes and ground up oatmeal

5.  Vanilla soap with chamomile.  This one was made with shea butter.  The dark places are chamomile flower bits

6.  Lavender swirl soap with only lavender flavoring and no texture, I don't think.  I did almost everything in a quart milk carton and the lavender I made in a half gallon carton.  I tried the swirl technique and although it isn't the way it is supposed to look, I wasn't unhappy with how it turned out.

There's a slide show below (click on it to visit the Picasa web album page) where you can see the process and the teacher at work:

When the Train Has Left the Station.....

You know all those movies where the one person drives speedily to the airport only to see the plane lift off as they reach the runway?

When I went to Lithuania, I committed to the trip months ahead of time.  I also evaluated what I needed to take, what should go with me, what could I leave at home.  Something major, major would have to happen for me to change my plans.

The bees are still there this morning, but they are ready to go.  I should have seen it.  I should never have put the robber screen on - I think they started planning then.



While I can't find anything about absconding in Seeley's books, Malcolm Sanford (Keeping Honey Bees) says, "Absconding rarely occurs in colonies in temperate regions where European bees are usually kept, but it may occur if colonies are under threat from disease, pests, or depletion of forage (pollen, nectar, or water)."

The Complete Idiot's Guide to Beekeeping   doesn't discuss absconding but defines it as "Absconding resembles swarming except that  no bees are left behind in the parent colony.  The entire colony leaves its hive."

I can't find any description of preparation to abscond.  Usually in my experience the bees take all the honey.  There is one honey super still on this hive unless they emptied it this morning - which is not typical of absconding unless their tummies are full with the other honey supers.  Just like in robbing, there are shards of wax below the hive.  These are shards from brood frames and are brown rather than white:

You can see them under the hive below the screened bottom board.  

And why are the shards brown?  Because before a hive absconds, they empty the hive.  This means that they leave no or very little brood behind.  I've seen them carrying out larvae over the past few days and congratulated myself on having such a hygienic hive.....but that's not what they were apparently doing....

So now I know that before absconding you'll see young larvae being carried out, typically they empty the honey cells, and no pollen bearing bees are coming into the hive.  As a matter of fact, I think the bees out flying are scouts and are dancing to advertise new space.  I saw several rather frantic dances like Seeley describes taking place on the front of the hive. 

The bees flying in this morning were light, carrying nothing, and only doing a scout job.  The working bees this morning were the ones in the hive, still removing larvae.

One theory would be that these bees are sick and that's why they are absconding, but it looks more like they were clearing out the young to leave.  

Last night before I went to sleep, I read on Beemaster that one way to stop absconding would be to do what one might also do when hiving a swarm: put a queen excluder between the hive and the bottom board so that the queen probably can't leave.

So that's what I did a few minutes ago.  I took the hive down to the bottom board where there were tons of removed larvae.  BTW, I looked very closely at the larvae both in person and with the zoom on my Picasa viewer at the computer.  I do not see any Varroa mites.  I think these are healthy bees, sacrificed to the hive's wish to abscond.  

I put on a queen excluder (I do actually own several even though I never use them in the hive.  I use them to drain cut comb honey!).

This should hopefully stop them.  I checked the bottom board carefully and did not see the queen.  Unless she's really skinny, she should not be able to go through the excluder and the hive will stay.  Beemaster says I should leave the excluder on for at least three days.

If this hive survives, then the disruption should help with a varroa problem in that the bees have interrupted the brood cycle and thus the Varroa cycle as well.

I totally tore off the robber screen in case that was what was bothering them.

So maybe the train has left the station, but maybe I put a big enough boulder on the track to keep the departure at bay.  We'll see.

P.S.  I was at home on a phone appointment at 11:30 AM when the bees started the swirl of a hive that is leaving.  They swirled and swirled, but didn't leave since the queen couldn't come through the queen excluder.  They are still anxiously flying around the hive but haven't left.  I hope I did the right thing.  

There is no nectar flowing in Atlanta and even though the statistics say it has rained on 38% of the past 224 days this year - greater than 1/3 of the days, it seems to me as if it rains almost every day.  If they leave, there are no better areas for nectar collection around, so best if they don't.  If they are leaving because of disease, then who knows if it would be better for them not to be here.  

Will Proteus become Proteus A and Proteus Bee?

I posted on Beemaster because Proteus is a hive that is arranged in an unusual way. I also wrote about it earlier on this blog. Today I went into the hive to see if I could be a good beekeeper to these bees.

It's possible, as mentioned earlier, that Proteus is a two-queen hive. Sometimes, as Michael Bush writes about it, it is efficacious to have a two-queen hive. But the way I see it, my bottom box is honey-bound and the queen has no room to grow, so it's up to me to find her some space.

As I see it, with Hive Box 2 being filled with capped honey, it is highly likely that there is a queen, laying and growing brood in the bottom box (Box 1). I saw the queen in Box 3 above the honey, laying eggs. She is a young queen, unmarked - not the original queen in this hive as the season began. I had added Box 4 about 3 weeks ago when Box 3 was fully drawn comb.

At the advice of people on Beemaster, this is what I did today. I prepared a new super to put on Proteus (see first picture). BTW, I bought the medium frames for this box from Walter T. Kelley. This is the first time I have ordered frames from Kelley. They are built differently from other frames that I have. I found them easier to put together than my other frames from Dadant, but rougher in their construction.

I used no smoke today to keep the queen from moving somewhere strange. As a result I got stung on my left thumb - this after being stung on my right thumb on Monday!

I went to Proteus and removed Box 4 (four frames of comb/honey and six frames partially drawn or unaddressed). I also removed Box 3 (where I saw the young queen laying). I then took Box 2 (full of capped honey) and removed the center six frames. I replaced those frames with five of SC starter strips and one full frame of SC foundation. You can see its picture in the middle.

To complete this part of the operation, I had to get the bees off of the six honey filled frames. I shook the frames hard above Box 2 and most of the bees went back into the box. Then I used my bee brush to removed the remaining bees and put the honey frame into the new super and covered it with a top.

Here's the theory: Proteus may have a queen in both Box 1 and Box 3. To determine this, I put a queen excluder (I've never ever used one!) between Box 2 and Box 3.

This now means that Box 1 which was full of brood and possibly houses a Queen A has Box 1 as well as the empty frames in Box 2 to build up the bee numbers. I kept two frames of honey on either side of the center and put the empty frames in the center, with the full frame of foundation at position #5.

The queen excluder will keep Queen A (if she exists) from moving above Box 2. See the bees below the excluder, clustering on the four frames of honey.

Box 3 which may contain Queen Bee, I simply put back on the hive above the queen excluder. Then I put back on the hive Box 4 which contains four frames of capped honey and six frames that are relatively untouched. This means that Queen Bee has room to continue her laying on the right four frames of Box 3 and that she can move up to room to grow in Box 4.

One thing I didn't think about until I read a post about something else on Beemaster: The drones in the upper hive group (boxes 3 and 4) will not be able to go through the queen excluder because they are too large. In order for this to work, the hive has to have an upper entrance. Thankfully, since I prop the top of all of my hives with a fat stick, this hive does have an upper entrance through which the drones can come and go (as well as the other bees if they choose).

At the end of a week or so, I'll check to see if there is new brood in both Box 1 and Box 3. If so, I have a two queen hive and will split the hive into Proteus A and Proteus Bee. If not, I'll simply remove the queen excluder and let Proteus continue in its unique approach to life as a hive.