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!.

To Bee, Continued....

Sorry I left everyone hanging.  I'm in one of those periods of my life where I have volunteered for way too many things and all of them are growing in unexpected ways and all of their due dates seem to be coinciding.....in the last two weeks.

I watched the hive with the queen includer for several days after my last post.  Bees were going in and out as if normally they would.  Then over the weekend, about Sunday, I realized that the bees had absconded, despite my efforts to contain the queen.  Oh, well, I thought, they will die somewhere.  And what a shame since this was a powerful swarm hive at the beginning of the season.

Someone commented on my previous post that maybe it was a small hive beetle problem .  Mostly bees that are strong hives keep the small hive beetle contained in the top of the hive.  This hive had done that as well, and I had seen a normal (for Atlanta) amount of SHB in this hive, smashed them with my hive tool, etc.

However, if you have a small hive beetle problem of any level and open the hive unnecessarily, then every time you open it you break whatever propolis trapping the bees have devised to keep the SHB on the inner cover.  I opened this hive and allowed it to be filmed when the Weather Channel came two weeks before the crisis and then the following weekend, opened the same hive to be filmed for PBS for their show, Growing a Greener World with Joe Lamp'l.  So if the SHB were contained before, in the two previous weeks, they had the opportunity to run amuck.

Realizing that for whatever reason the hive had indeed absconded, and I assumed the queen had gotten thin enough to slip through the queen includer, I then noticed robbing beginning.  There was at least one super of honey on the hive and since it was five boxes tall, plenty of other storage places for honey that they might not have taken with them.

On Monday night I was meeting friends for dinner.  I stopped at home to let out the dogs and robbing was happening in a crazy way at the absconded hive.  I was so angry.  My hives haven't produced honey this year with all the rain and all I could think was YOU CAN'T HAVE MY HONEY.  I walked out to the backyard in my business clothes, threw a veil over my head, opened the hive and took off the third box down (the one heavy with honey).  I carried it into my house, bees and all.

It's still not dark until around 8 or so in Atlanta, so I put the box in my basement and at least 500 bees (looked like even more than that) began flying up to the ceiling lights.  I turned out all the lights in the basement, opened the back door, bolted the inside basement door leading into my house and left for dinner.  I crossed my fingers that the bees would indeed go outside toward the light.  (And that no human robber would find it appealing to cross the robbing bees to rob my house!)

When I returned from dinner, there were only 2 bees still in my basement and the honey super was apparently intact.

I left everything alone.  Like I said in the first paragraph, over the last month, everything I am doing has come to a pinnacle point all at once and I've felt rather overwhelmed.

Five days later, it's the weekend and I thought I should take the hive apart to save the wax from the wax moths.  I started casually throwing the boxes around.  I got to the bottom box and as I lifted it up to put it rather brusquely aside, there was the QUEEN.  She had been included and hadn't left with her children.  She had no attendants and had been alone for at least five days and probably more.

I caught her in a queen clip and took her inside and fed her honey from my fingertip.  What to do, what to do?

I went to another strong hive and made a four frame split - two frames of brood and eggs, one of honey and one of pollen.  I found some drawn comb that was white as snow and made a push-in cage of #8 hardware cloth, and pushed it into the comb, with her majesty in the push-in.  I realized later that I should have pushed her into the frame of honey or pollen, so she'd have some food at least, but I was thinking to give her an opportunity to lay.

I put these five frames into a nuc box.  I set it up with a Boardman feeder of honey and one of water, surrounded by an empty nuc box above the inner cover:

I then closed up the hive entrance with screened wire, stapled it firmly and left the nuc for three days.  This was an effort to get them used to the new queen and to let that loyalty keep them from returning to mama just in the hive next door.   Three days later I removed the screened wire.

I looked inside and she had been freed from the push-in cage.  The bees had eaten the comb beneath the push-in to release her and there were eggs everywhere.  They had taken none of the honey and only a little water, but I felt good about having supplied their need should it arise.

I put an entrance reducer in and crossed my fingers.

I'm going to give it my all to get her and her children through the winter.  Michael Bush overwinters two frame nucs.  Now they are in duplex nuc boxes.  But I am going to write him for helpful hints about how to get such a small force through the winter.

I'm so sad for the bees who left and who will inevitably die without a queen, but if this had to happen, I sure got the best of it with my queen "includer."  After all this was a swarm capture queen this year and should be strong enough in stock to make it through the winter if I'm lucky.