Ground Control to Major Tom......

I went over to Tom's on Monday morning to see how the hive was doing. I knew it had made it through the winter because Tom and his family reported seeing flying bees (and I had stopped by earlier), but I had not yet been inside the hive.

Monday was the day.  As I popped the top, an angry queenless roar began and I felt worried.  I took the hive down to the bottom box.  Some honey in the second box and in the bottom box. In the bottom box, I found tons of dark brown capped brood (dark biscuit), meaning the bees were about to emerge.

I searched on both sides of every frame and could find no uncapped brood and no eggs, despite there being plenty of room.

It's early in Atlanta for a swarm, but there have been some. All I could determine was that Tom's hive had looked out and said, "Take your protein pills and put your helmet on....The stars look very different today," and swarmed last week while he and his family were on vacation.

The only explanation for this hive bursting at the seam with bees and only capped brood is that they had swarmed; the queen had emerged and had gotten rid of any other competing queens; and she was off on her mating flight. Perhaps she was unsuccessful - got eaten by a bird or didn't find any available drones aloft.

Thus the queenless roar.

I put the hive (which I had intended to split) back together and left to think. As I drove home I decided to get a frame of eggs and brood from the daughter hive that is in my backyard and bring it over to Tom's on Thursday (my next free day). On Thursday I made a split from the daughter hive to put in Tom's second hive (a 2014 Buster's Bees hive that did not make it through the winter).

My office got busy on Thursday, so Jeff decided to help me do this on Friday. Atlanta was cold and windy on Friday morning, so instead we put the nuc box with the split and an extra frame of brood for the queenless hive on top of its new quarters.  I planned to return when the temperatures rose in the afternoon.

Around 3:30 I arrived at Tom's and opened the "queenless" hive. Now they were calm. No roar; no angry bees head bumping me. I looked through the bottom box and there they were, right in my face: eggs, newly laid, and young, young brood. In the five days since I had been there, the queen must have successfully returned and began her new job.

HOORAY!

And I installed the nuc in the other hive. So we have had two very cold nights, last night and tonight, so the new nuc may not make it. I'll give it more bees next week.

Sorry about the lack of photos - left my camera at my house......

Queenless Hive - How to Move a Frame of Brood and Eggs Without Accidentally Including the Queen

Julia and I inspected our hives at Chastain a week ago.  We discovered to our dismay that my hive was queenless.  There was no sign of queen cells and the bees, while there was no queenless roar, were diminshing in population.  We added a frame of brood and eggs from Julia's hive at Chastain and crossed our fingers.

For best results in adding a frame of brood and eggs, the beekeeper should add a frame weekly until the hive has established a new queen.  Michael Bush talks about this in the queenless hive that has resulted in laying workers, but it holds for any queenless hive:  adding a frame of brood and eggs weekly allows the best possibility of the hive being able to become queenright.

So this weekend I need to move a frame of brood and eggs from one of my hives at home to my Chastain hive about 25 minutes away from here.

As you know, I edit the Georgia Beekeepers Association newsletter with my friend, Gina.  We asked Noah to suggest a question for Aunt Bee, our Dear Abby of the Georgia bee world.  Noah suggested a question about how to transport a frame of brood and eggs to a queenless hive.

I also asked him to answer the question.   He said he had always heard to wrap the frame in a towel soaked in warm water and put it in a cooler to maintain its warmth.  I thought that sounded good.  What I typically do is drop the open brood frame into a pillow case and drive like mad to the far away location.

That is, of course, not the safest plan!

So to confirm Noah's suggestion, I went online "googling."

I found the suggestion on Beemaster forum to wrap the frame in a warm damp towel for transport.  As I explored I found a post from one of my favorite posters on all the bee forum places.  This was from Indypartridge who posts on Beemaster but I found his advice on Homesteader.

Generally the best way to move brood is with the nurse bees to keep them warm.  Most people removing an open brood frame are afraid that they might accidentally take the queen.

This is what Indypartridge said:

"I can understand being nervous about accidentally transferring the queen along with a frame of brood from the strong hive to the weak. ........you can simply shake off the bees and give the weak hive a frame of eggs & open brood. If you want to give the weak hive an even better boost, you should transfer nurse bees along with the frame of brood. Do it this way so you don't transfer the queen:
1) Take a frame of eggs/larva from the strong hive. Shake off all the bees.
2) Put a queen excluder on top of the strong colony.
3) Add an empty box on top of the excluder. Put the single frame in the box.
4) Cover up the hive, leave for an hour or two.
5) Come back, the frame will be covered with nurse bees (and no queen).
6) Put the frame of eggs/larva & nurse bees in the weak hive.

I use this method for making nucs and splits when I don't want to spend time looking for a queen."

You could then put the brood frame with the nurse bees into a nuc box for transport.  Typically a hive will pretty readily accept nurse bees from another hive.

Gosh, I'm Feeling Like a Bad Beekeeper

I went up to the mountains for the Fourth of July to see the fireworks and to check on the bees.  I love the Rabun County fireworks - we go and sit on a blanket in a field near the Rabun Gap Nacoochee School.  We wait eagerly for dark (which doesn't come until 9:30) and by then the grandkids are sleepy.  But the fireworks are grand and glorious - (and don't include Atlanta traffic jams) - so we have a great time and are back at the house by 10:05.

Since the Fourth was on a Wednesday, all of us needed to go back to Atlanta the next day.  Before I left I went to check on the bees.  Sad news:  The over-wintered hive was almost completely dead - all of the honey was covered in small hive beetles and the whole hive smelled of orange crush (a sure sign of being slimed by the small hive beetle).

I was so upset that I didn't want to look at the evidence and determine the reason the hive failed, allowing the rise of the SHB.

When I was last up there about three weeks ago, there was no nectar and although I saw brood and eggs, the hive had no evident stores (although the slime would indicate otherwise).  I imagine that I may have killed the queen in that inspection.  When I put on one of the boxes, a roar went up from the hive, but I discounted the possibility.  If the queen died in that inspection and stores were so low, the hive may have not been able to make a new queen.

The frame of bees below is all that were left.  Since I didn't know what caused the end of the hive, I didn't shake them into the other hive for fear of contaminating them, if the hive were diseased.

I regreted not having enough supplies - I couldn't move the bees into a nuc because I didn't have one.  I had brought boxes to add but not solutions to problems.



On the good side of things, the other hive, which was a swarm that took up residence there this year, was busting out all over with bees.  In spite of encroaching kudzu, hundreds of bees were coming and going.  Afraid and feeling like a bad beekeeper, I didn't inspect this hive - didn't want to kill another queen.

I looked in the top box which was completely empty on my last visit.  They had filled five frames, drawn new wax and were filling it.  Sourwood is blooming up there now and this looks like nectar that ends up as sourwood honey.  We'll see.

I won't go back until the 22nd and by then the surviving hive may be covered up with kudzu.

Aristaeus2 is a Queenless Hive

On March 10 I took this picture of the apparently lovely queen in Aristaeus2. I was so pleased to see her and to see that she was starting to build up the hive.



I've noticed very little activity in this hive over the past week. I'm not seeing pollen flying in with the bees and it's a quiet hive. This morning I decided to open it up. It's generally a quiet hive, so I didn't light my smoker and didn't wear gloves.

I was inspired to open it because this little clump of bees was on the landing, looking as if they were having a rather serious conference.

I opened the hive and a "queenless roar" went up. I was stung three times on my bare hands. I went indoors, got gloves, came out and lit the smoker. When I returned and opened the hive, there was not any capped brood - all empty cells. There was one frame with a saucer sized group of drone brood.

In despair (this was the hive I planned to take to the mountains), I opened Mellona and found a frame of brood and eggs. I shook all the bees off into the Mellona hive and brushed any clinging bees. Then I put this frame into Aristaeus2. This gives the queenless hive the resources to make a new queen, if they can. We'll see. I marked the frame so I could check and see if they have created a queen cell.

Meanwhile I think I'll try to find a queen to buy.

Inspection at Blue Heron: The Good and The Bad

We had our second inspection of the hives at Blue Heron yesterday. Noah, Julia's son, led the inspection and did a fabulous job. He was well-informed, could answer questions, and gave the participants lots of helpful information.

One of the nice things about having two of us at the inspection is the proof of the old adage: Ask 10 beekeepers a question and you'll get 10 different answers. In fact, Julia and I do things a little differently so when questions were asked, there was a demonstration of the fact that beekeeping is a matter of choice. We all make decisions and not always the same decision!

In the bad news column, Julia's hive was filled with swarm cells and apparently no longer had the original queen. We counted 12 queen cells on the bottom of one frame. The hive was calm and didn't have a queenless roar when it was opened, however.

This may mean that there is a virgin queen in the hive who may or may not have successfully mated but at least is not yet laying. We decided to add a frame from one of my hives to her hive.

This is like an insurance policy. If the virgin queen is in the hive and just hasn't started up yet, the frame we added would provide a jump in numbers as the eggs and larvae mature. If there is no queen or an ineffective one, we gave the bees the resources to make a new queen.

Another choice that could be made is to order a new queen. Julia will have to decide if she wants to wait for the maturation of this queen or to do that.

Either way, the hive is now behind in the middle of the nectar flow. It will take about a month for the hive to be up and running well if they have to make their own queen - which will be half way through the nectar flow. And if they have a queen, they still will be behind since she isn't laying yet, but not as far behind.

On the good news side, my hive in which the bees made their own queen was thriving. We took a frame from that hive to add to Julia's. We didn't see the queen so we were very careful to make sure the queen didn't leave with the frame we gave to Julia's hive. There were good brood patterns and lots of eggs and larvae in that hive.

On the second hive of mine we saw the queen with remnants of her red dot - the bees frequently eat the paint off in the process of grooming the queen. She had been laying well also.

On all three hives the box we added about 2 1/2 weeks ago remained untouched, so we didn't add any further boxes although we had brought them along. Since we'd like to get honey from these hives, the slow progress in the middle of the nectar flow is a little discouraging, but my hives at home are doing exactly the same thing.

Below is a slide show of photographs from the inspection. Click on the slideshow to be able to view it larger and with captions for the pictures:

Ministering to Blue Heron

Yesterday when we inspected my hive at Blue Heron, we found absolutely no brood, no eggs, no capped brood, no queen cells, nothing. I've been wondering what happened. The hive was boiling over with bees when we installed the nuc and there are still lots of bees but no brood or any evidence of a queen.

It's possible that the queen wasn't in the nuc or that she had died in transit. It's possible that the queen who was probably raised in the fall didn't mate properly.

A gardener at Blue Heron reported that she saw a huge swarm on Friday, hanging on a tree near the hive area at Blue Heron. Possibly the nuc hive swarmed. Sometimes a hive swarms to deal with overcrowding when they don't have enough stores and can't find another solution. However these bees were being fed and had lots of room in the hive.

The swarm being from my Blue Heron hive is less likely because there were no queen cells left in the hive - usually a hive that swarms is reproducing itself and would leave behind resources for the hive to survive. But a virgin queen in the hive would need to make her mating flight and wouldn't begin laying for a while after the hive had swarmed.

The only things to do at this point are:

• To call the supplier who hasn't yet called me back to see if he can supply a queen, since the nuc was supposed to have one or
• To set the hive up to make its own queen by giving it frames of brood and eggs from another hive.
  

The latter is a good thing to do in any event. If there is a queen in the hive, the bees will simply raise the brood I provided them and add to the numbers in the hive. If there is no queen, then the eggs in the cells with allow the bees in the hive to make a queen.

So today I brought a nuc filled with three frames of brood and eggs as well as two frames of honey to Blue Heron.

Important note: When we opened the hive, the bees did not make the characteristic "queenless roar" of a hive without a queen and we didn't use smoke and the bees were not angry and attacking as they were on Day one at Blue Heron.

Sam, Julia's son, helped by spraying the foreign bees and frames with sugar syrup to ease their introduction into the hive.

First I hung a frame rack on the side of the hive to hold the frames I planned to remove. Sam is holding the spray bottle and I have a bee brush to help with clearing the frames of bees when I swap them out.


We pulled the frames from the hive to make space for the nuc frames of brood, eggs and honey.

The frame in the picture below came from my hives at home. It had tons of eggs and some capped brood as well as nurse bees. Sam is poised to spray sugar syrup on the nurse bees as we put the frame into Blue Heron.

We successfully moved all five frames to the hive and took out five frames. Yesterday I had put a new box on the Blue Heron hive so these frames were not used yet. It was easy to remove the bees from them and make room for the frames from home.



When we finished the transfer, we shook the bees off of the original Blue Heron frames back into the hive and closed up the transfer nuc.

Yesterday I noticed the box that I brought over for the second box on the hive had one side broken. In addition to the frame transfer, I also moved all of the frames in the second box into a box that didn't have any damage. I left an empty box on the Blue Heron hive because we have been feeding sugar syrup in baggies, but I should have removed that box. We will feed with a Boardman to avoid disturbing them while they make a queen.

I am in a dilemma about the empty top box. If I leave it they will probably make a mess of comb in it since there are no frames in it (set up to shelter a baggie feeder that is no longer there). If I remove it I'll disturb them in the queen making process.....hmmmm.

Probably the best solution will be to leave the empty box on until a queen cell is probably capped - that would be in about 9 days - so I'll leave the empty for 10 days for good measure - until March 18 - and then remove it.

In the picture below I am moving the frames to the box that is not in disrepair. You can also see the transfer nuc sitting atop Julia's hive.

The End of the Newspaper Combine Story

A cou;le of weeks ago when I discovered that I had three queenless hives, I made several decisions. I decided to requeen the only strong-looking hive of the three. The second hive, Melissa, which had wax moths already laying and wax moth worms already eating, I combined with Persephone on my deck.

All of the beekeepers online say that with a newspaper combine, you cut slits in the newspaper between the two hive boxes and after a while the bees chew through the paper, leaving scraps of paper around the hive. Although my first attempt at combining Hyron and Hyron2 did not make a successful hive, this one appears to have worked.

There are newspaper scraps all over the ground near the front door.



When I took the top off of the top hive box there were tons of happy bees.



When I separated the two boxes, lo and behold, all of the newspaper had been chewed away and all that was left were the scraps between the wood edges of the hive boxes.

Hooray - success at the combine at last. I didn't go deep into the hive to see about eggs, etc, because the day was cloudy and threatening. My main goal was to remove any remaining newspaper and bid the bees well.

Bee Business for Today

I inspected the hives today with several items on the agenda. First I wanted to see if I should add sugar syrup to the hives. This would be determined by the presence and strength of the numbers of the small hive beetles in my hives.

Second I wanted to see if the queen were alive and laying in Mellona. The numbers of bees have diminished greatly and I've been worried that the queen may have died while I was out of town on vacation earlier in September.

First when I opened the hive, I saw SHBs but in much smaller numbers. I had added the vinegar frame trap to the hive last Saturday and there wasn't a single beetle in the trap. I took out the feeding bottle from Mellona and you can see the SHBs in the edge of the screw top. I think this indicates that they do thrive with the sugar syrup, just as they do with grease patties.

However, Mellona isn't very prepared for winter. There are empty frames, as a result of the dearth at the end of the summer, with comb but no stores in the upper box where the honey should be, so I want to feed these bees.

Bob Binnie, a Georgia beekeeper who I really respect, says to feed your bees 2 gallons of sugar syrup per hive as winter approaches. So, SHB or no SHB, I am going to put food on this hive today.

When I began looking for the queen, I found capped brood and frames with nothing in the frame - no brood, no honey, no pollen, just empty cells. I even found the comb in the second picture which looks like queen cells on the edge - kind of bizarre - each of which has a hole in the bottom.

I went down into the bottom brood box, looking for evidence of the queen. I found several frames that were empty of brood and anything else. I found a beautiful frame filled with pollen (I've been watching them bring it in). I found lots of capped brood, but no evidence of new or young brood.

I left the hive opened and went to Bermuda while I thought about what steps to take. I could call the Purvis Brothers and see if they had a queen available and drive up to get her. I could put a frame of brood and eggs from Bermuda into Mellona, but that would do no good because in neither hive did I see drones, meaning that making a queen on their own would not work since the drones aren't around for mating.

Well, I thought, I need to make completely sure so I looked at every single frame in the lower brood box of Mellona. On the last frame I looked at, I finally saw evidence of the queen. Babies and very small brood. I didn't see any eggs, but I never do when out at the hives and the brood I saw was very young. I also didn't hear the queenless roar which I now know to recognize, so I felt reassured that Her Majesty is functioning.

Checking up on the Small Hive Beetle

When I left for vacation a couple of weeks ago, the hives were full of small hive beetles. I think this was in part because I had been feeding my bees in the face of the dearth for the week before. I left a quart of sugar syrup on each hive on Sept 6, but haven't added to it since.

As a result there are less SHBs in my hive - that and the time of the year when they are diminishing anyway. Here are the opened Sonny-Mel traps from my two hives - I added new lure to each one today. They are working.

Inside Bermuda, the hive was boiling with very calm bees. They usually rush to attack and hate my intrusion with or without smoke. Today they went about business as usual and ignored me. I didn't add any syrup but will feed both hives beginning in the middle of October to keep them alive over the winter.

The last picture is what Mellona looked like inside. There are tons of bees in between the frames but not many on top of the frames. I have seen many bees going in and out of both hives over the last week with their pollen baskets full, so I think there are baby bees in Mellona. Also they were very quiet today - no queenless roar - so I think although they aren't as robust as Bermuda, they are doing fine.

I'll do a deeper check on them next weekend if their numbers continue to look low. I have to remember that this is a first year hive while Bermuda is a second year Varroa survivor strong hive.

I saw no evidence on the backs of bees of Varroa mites and I saw no deformed wing, but I'll also do a sugar shake and count next week. Notice that I added the vinegar frame trap (on the far right next to the wall) that I used last year to Mellona. I can't find the other one - when I do, I'll put it in Bermuda. It's on a frame somewhere!

Small Swarm Appears to be Doing Well

I didn't inspect the hives today, but wanted to glance in the small swarm nuc to see how things look. You'll see very few bees on the landing, but I don't think they have much need for foraging right now. I supplied them with a full frame of honey from Mellona as well as the honey around the edges of the brood frames I gave them.

Currently they have three frames of brood cells with honey on the edges and one completely filled frame of honey (in the #5 posiition, the one marked 2007). And they have a frame from the old hive left from the swarm's arrival in the #1 position which has some pollen on it but nothing else (the one with the staple at the end).

I opened the nuc and didn't hear the "we-are-queenless" roar. Instead they are quietly working and there are many bees - you can see them between each frame.

If the new queen (assuming she is there) has started laying, as she should have in the last day or so, then we can assume there will be a need for foraging for pollen. I may look for signs of laying tomorrow, but feel pretty assured that there is a queen alive and well in the hive since they didn't use the last egg/brood frame I gave them for making queen cells.

BTW, we had a tiny bit of rain during the night last night but it is still so dry here that when I checked my garden this morning, the soil is bone dry less than an inch from the surface, damp from the rain last night.

Inspecting Mellona Today

In Mellona today, the combs in the medium were being drawn well and straight. You can see the bees festooning in the picture below. I didn't disturb the hive much because I only had a short time before I had to go to work. Also it was cold and I didn't want to freeze the bees - just wanted to make sure they were building straight comb.

This hive is in an old repainted deep box and the medium box where this picture was taken is also an old box. The frames they are using are old frames - you can see the comb remnants from last year in the bottom of the frame. I wonder if the smell of the old comb, etc is helping these bees draw straight comb.....

















Here is an example of an almost-filled comb from that hive:

















I took off the honey super shallow box that I added last week and looked in it to see if the bees were building comb yet. They had barely started. In addition, I had put a full sheet of SC foundation in a frame in the center of this shallow.

The bees had completely chewed out the foundation. I actually heard them doing it. While it was really cold I went out and listened to the sides of the hive - it's something that I like to do because the smells and sounds of the hive at work are just wonderful. I heard the sound of them crunching and wondered what it was. Now I know.

I didn't run that foundation top to bottom (cutting error), but it extended to about 1/8 inch from the bottom. For some reason they didn't want it there and chewed it off......SC foundation is really expensive and the cheap part of me felt resentful that they wasted it like that!

On Beemaster I asked about the chewed foundation and the reply was that they probably needed the wax in the box below and chewed it off to use it there. If I had waited a little longer before putting that box on, then they might have left it alone. I usually add a super or box when the box below has 7 - 8 frames drawn with only a couple to go. This time I added the super when they had only drawn 6 frames. I did this since the tulip poplar flow is on and it was going to be too cold to go into the hives over the past week. Of course if it's too cold to go in the hives, it's also too cold for the bees to fly so having the extra super was too early and not necessary.

I think the old saying is "Hoist by my own petard." No, I just looked it up on Wikipedia and actually that's not the correct expression because it means to be harmed by something you intended to harm someone else (as in being blown up by your own bomb).

Since I only LOVE the bees, no harm was intended. In my family when you push to get something done in a more than timely way, we say that we are "pushing the train out of the station," a phrase used in my grandmother's house when my mother was growing up. So I guess in putting the super on too early, I was pushing the train out of the station.

I took a brief look into Bermuda - boy, those are angry bees in that hive. They growled discontentedly when I opened the inner cover, and buzzed at my veil. They have not begun work in the medium that I added last week. It's possible that the hive is queenless (by virtue of the anger and the buzz when I opened the box) so I'll give it a proper inspection later in the week. Although it is also possible that the hive is still gathering strength since it was so weak a month ago.