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!.

Inspection of the Community Garden Hives April 24, 2020

On April 24, I videoed an inspection of the three hives at the community garden. In this time of COVID-19, we can't do gathering around the hives to inspect and this is a way to share how an inspection might go with new and old beekeepers.

I have bad timing for these videos. Most of the time, it's windy on the hill, but this time we were plagued with yard guys - incredibly noisy yard guys! First Jeff and I went to the garden to put on the robber screens and the Georgia Power people were weed whacking the garden. They stood to get their photos with us doing our bee work in the background.

Then several days later, I went to the garden to video the actual inspection. This time the yard guys from the house next door began loud leaf blowers or weed whackers as soon as I opened the hive. ARGHHH.

When I show these videos to the Metro Atlanta Beekeepers, we do it in a Zoom meeting with lots of questions and interaction. So far I haven't recorded the meetings. Maybe I should but for now,
here's the video:

Winter Bee Deaths - and Still a Strong Hive

The bees that go into winter are not the same as the bees who live in the summer.  The summer bee has her work cut out for her.  She progresses through jobs in the hive, beginning with housecleaner and nursemaid and ending with forager.  Each job prepares her for her next assignment and each wears her out a little more.  Old summer bees have ragged wings and if you see one who looks like that, she is close to death.

Winter bees are different.  First there are no drones in the wintering hives (sometimes one or two) because they are a drain on the hive resources; contribute nothing during the winter; and  the queen can create them from unfertilized eggs as spring approaches.

Winter bees live longer.  Summer bees live about six extremely active weeks.  Winter bees in cold temperate climates may live for 150 days (Winston, p. 215).  In an area like Atlanta where we typically are not a cold temperate climate, the winter bees may live a slightly shorter amount of time.  In the hive during the winter, bees do die and their bodies are cleaned out when the temperatures are warm enough to fly.

Here's what it looks like around my surviving colony in my backyard:

 As you can see around the base of the hive, it looks like an enormous bee graveyard.  The ground has been littered with bodies like this every time we have a cold snap.  In the interim, the yard guys show up and blow them off so this pile is purely from the ice storm last week.

Yet there are still thousands of bees in this hive.  I have a "Billy Davis" robber screen on the hive and there are bees massed under the screened wire, just enjoying the sunshine.  

Here's a closer view or two of the dead, lying en masse outside the hive.

The bees who are flying into the hive have packed pollen baskets.  You might notice that some of the dead bees also have packed pollen baskets.  

I am amazed at the strength of this hive and the numbers of bees who have lived here through our extremely cold winter.  In Atlanta we often have a week of snow in March, so it's not over yet.

Billy Davis' Robber Screen

What a strange honey year!  After two years of drought, now we have so much rain in Atlanta that it has hurt the bees.  Many hives were unable to put up enough stores for winter and it's prime time for robbing.

Jeff and I keep saying we needed to put the robber screens that Billy Davis uses on our hives.  We put it off and put it off (I am deathly afraid of the staple gun).

While I was in Lithuania, my last hive from the Fatbeeman was robbed out and died.  I think his supplier in south Georgia didn't do well by him this year - one of my packages was the one that had a virgin queen at our Chastain site and the package I installed at home never did well.  They were just limping along, and were easy victims for robbers.  The ground under the hive was covered with wax shards and dead bees on the bottom board.  In a way, if robbers were going to pick one of my hives to destroy, that was the best one.

So Jeff and I put Billy Davis robber screens on almost all of our hives last weekend.  The hive below is the Northlake Mall Swarm.  Billy says for the screen to be effective the hive entrance must be about four inches from the edge of the screen.  This hive has an entrance reducer on it (as do all my hives this year) and the opening is under the bees clustered on the screen.

At first the bees are really confused.  How to get to Mama?  They aim for the entrance but that isn't working so they try the upper part of the hive to see if an entrance has materialized up there.

But after a week, the bees have gotten it figured out.  They've been going in the side and bearding under the robber screen (and on top of it!)

Today at 4:30 - typical time for orientation - there was a frantic energy around this particular hive.  I'm not usually home at this time.  I do have breaks in my day, but my busiest time at the office is from about 2 - 7 at night, so I miss orientation.  Consequently I haven't really seen bees orient since we put the robber screens on the hives.

The other hives in my backyard were orienting at 4:30 and they didn't look as frantic as the Northlake hive.  The bees outside the hive were buzzing angrily.  Now, I've seen robbing and it's frantic, but you also see bees actively fighting with each other and falling to the ground; you see dead bees in front of the hive; and a growing pile of wax accumulates under the hive from wax cappings.  

But this hive has a closed screened bottom board, so I couldn't see wax cappings.  And although there were not dead bees, the buzz was angry and loud.  

The area under the screen is PACKED with bees and bees were actively guarding the available entry.  You can kind of see the bees under the screen in the photo above.

So just to be safe, I threw a wet sheet over the hive, covering the side entrances and waited it out.  I left the front open since there was no entry there and I could monitor the bee population and activity. 

Of course, if this were orientation and not robbing, now the hive bees also don't have access to the hive.

Around 6:30, the activity was back to normal.

In robbing the robber bees keep trying to access the entry of the hive because they smell the honey.  The hive bees go for the pheromone of the queen so they will search different ways to get to the queen.  But typically robber bees just focus on the entrance.

So was this robbing and Billy Davis' robbery screen as well as my wet sheet stopped the action?  Or was this robbing and the screen effectively kept the robbers out?  Or was this just orientation of a strong hive?

I don't know but I felt good about having the robber screen on the hive.   Thanks, Billy.

Maybe tomorrow I'll pull the block to the screened bottom board out and see if there are tons of wax shards there.

Beekeeper Error(s)

My commitment to this blog since the beginning has been to write about all of it - my successes, but also all of my failures....Today brought my failures front and center.  As always I have learned a lot, but I should have known better.  I know I should have.

When things go wrong in a beehive managed by a beekeeper, it is almost always due to beekeeper error.  I've made two major ones.

When I installed the Mississippi Queen in the hive at Ron's, I should have put her and the bees in a completely new and much smaller living situation.  I don't know why the bees were not thriving there, but they were originally the queenless half of Lenox Pointe, the thriving hive at my old house.

They never made a queen that was any good and the final queen they had before Mississippi arrived was weak and pitiful.  The comb was old and from last year and the bees were not doing well.  I should have put new frames or at least undrawn ones in a nuc hive, moved some of the honey and all of the bees and installed her there.

Instead I put her in the old hive and she and the bees decided to leave.  So today I found an empty hive.

I came home and was looking out my window and the Sister's Keeper nuc looked forlorn and empty - bees were madly flying out of all of my other hives, but this one had no action going on.  The last time I opened it, I took a frame of brood and eggs to give to the Unintentional Nuc to make sure they grew into a good hive.

Because we are at the end of the nectar flow, I decided to replace the frame I stole with a frame of drawn comb.  I have a few of pretty, unsoiled drawn comb mostly from hives that have died.  When I put that frame into the nuc, I broke some cappings on the adjacent frame of honey.  As I turned away from the hive to go back to my office, I noticed honey flowing out of the bottom of the nuc on the ground.

I had the conscious thought that the honey flow on the ground might draw robbers, but I didn't do anything about it...making the excuse that I needed to hurry back to the office.

Tonight when I opened the nuc and looked into it, there were about five bees.  I didn't explore it because it was getting dark and I didn't have veil or smoker, but the edges of the cells that I could see were ragged as cells look when robbing has occurred.

I was so upset with myself.

I don't know what I should have done - I know be more careful in putting in the new frame.  But should I have watered the ground under the hive to get rid of the honey?  Or scraped it up with a spatula and THEN watered the ground?  I know I should have done something.

I've been telling Jeff for several weeks that we need to get robber screens on all the hives and then not pushing that we get it done.  He's busy, I'm busy.  Now I'm worried about all the hives and that we'll lose more hives because we are not doing what we should be doing - putting robber screens on all the hives ASAP as Billy Davis has suggested.

I have a little #8 hardware cloth here and I know what I'm going to be doing either early tomorrow or after work tomorrow night.

Creative Entrance Reducers

In Billy Davis' talk to our bee club, he emphasized the importance of entrance reducers.  He stated that the use of entrance reducers and keeping robber screens on the hives at all times stopped robbing in his apiaries.  So I am taking him seriously and trying it this year.

I've had two rather humorous experiences so far.  First at Morningside, the men who live in the house beside the community garden (where my hives are) are complaining that my bees are disturbing their use of their hot tub.  They are nice guys and supply water to the community garden, so we want them to stay happy.  I wrote them that there are five beekeepers within a mile of the community garden and that my bees are highly likely not to be the only ones visiting their hot tub.

However, to begin to address the problem and hopefully to prevent my needing to move my hives, I put a Boardman bottle of water on each hive.  I put a teaspoon of Chlorox in each bottle and a few drops of lemongrass oil to entice the bees to get their water at home.  However, I also wanted to reduce the entrance as per Billy Davis.  The Boardman bottles took up space and I don't have entrance reducers that short so I did something that I had read about on a beekeeping forum.  I used wine corks:

The bees fell all over themselves as they learned the new entrance but then calmed down.  I also put the same corks on the hive that I made from the Colony Square nuc the week before.   This photo was taken just before I left the Morningside hives.

I do wonder what the gardeners will think of all the wine corks - possibly that I really like wine!  But it is serving the purpose and looks like fun, doesn't it?








After the corks, I was really tired - not from putting in corks, but because we had done a lot of bee work already.  Jeff and I had already done our splits that morning; I went to the Morningside Garden berfore the splits to work on my plot there; and I was anticipating moving the hives in a few hours that night.  I knew the 3-box hive at Morningside needed a new box, but I just wanted to go home for a couple of hours and not do bees.

I sat on a stump by the hives and watched the bees for about 10 minutes.  Then I started for the car, telling myself that I'd get to it another day.  But I was already there and had already carried the box and all my bee stuff up to the hives.

I sat another second and then opened the hive and got to work.  I had brought a box of half empty frames and half drawn frames.  I checker-boarded these frames with the frames in the box below.  As I lifted out the seventh frame in the box on the hive, there was the queen!  What was she doing in the top box and on comb that looked like it was for honey storage - too large a cells for worker bees?

I got a little concerned that the reason she was there in that box was because the bees were running her around to get her ready to swarm.  She does look a little skinny!  However, skinny or not, she is certainly a pretty sight, I must say.  As is the beauty of the brand new wax and the festooning bees.















So I decided it was a good sign to reinforce my staying to add the box.

That was my funny entrance reducer story #1.  My second story happened on Sunday afternoon.  After the big split Saturday, on the next day (Sunday), I drove to Lula, Georgia to get a package of bees from Don Kuchenmeister for our teaching hive at Chastain Conservancy.

First I drove up to Rabun County to see if the bees there had lived through the winter.  Remember the one hive had been destroyed by what, I don't know.  The other was a hive that was populated on its own by a swarm last spring.  Those bees were alive in December, but Rabun county is 125 miles north of Atlanta and they have had a cold winter and some snow.

I found the hive dead, full of honey, with no bees at all in the hive except for about 20 on the bottom board.  I left the hive set up to possibly attract another swarm from the feral hive that lives in the wall of the nearby school building.

Then I picked up my package from Don - actually he had an extra one that I also bought to replace the Rabun hive, since I need a hive there and don't have confidence in my splits.  I couldn't drive another hour north to Rabun again, though, so I took both packages home.

I installed the first package in my backyard.

As I am getting ready to install the bees, I am thinking of Billy Davis.  So before I put in the package, I equipped the front of the hive with a robber screen as close to the one Billy had as I could do with my landing being slightly different from his.

Then I installed the package and stepped back to view my "great job."

And then there was my moment of realization, my Ah-Ha of the day.  A package consists of several pounds of bees (three in this case) and an unknown queen in a queen cage.  These bees aren't attached yet to the queen - they were only dumped in the package yesterday.  So the bees are no different than robber bees.  Without the pull of the queen pheromone, they have a hard time finding a way into the hive.  Attached to the queen, resident bees can negotiate the robber screen and undaunted, enter the hive from the side opening of the robber screen.

DUH.  My bees were flying at the hive in every direction and not finding the hive entry.

So I removed the robber screen and allowed the wayward bees to find their to-bee-queen and will wait to install the robber screen!

But I do plan to put them on every hive this year.  I lost my two biggest hives last summer to robbing and I am not having that happen again, if I have any possible way to influence that occurrence.

Billy Davis' Quiet Box

Billy Davis respects his bees, his "critters," as he calls them.  I learn so much from him every time I hear him speak.  The first time I heard him was at EAS in Boone, NC.  From him I learned about the reason to use hive drapes and have used them ever since.  We employ hive drapes in our inspections at Chastain Conservancy and the bees are so much calmer.  We light the smoker and rarely use it.

 Billy Davis spoke to the Metro Atlanta Beekeepers last night about his nuc sustainability program in Round Hill, Virginia. Billy said that a beginner can learn more from raising bees in a nuc than any other way.  He said something like, "Anyone can find a queen in a five frame nuc!"  He also emphasized the importance of taking notes and said people in his apiary have to prove they can take notes before they can manipulate any hives.

Billy has been keeping bees since he was a kid - over 50 years.  He stressed the importance of having a mentor as well as the importance of using nucs.  He does not like the idea of buying a commercial nuc but rather creating a nuc from your own splits.  A nuc is

• a great learning tool, 
• a generator of drawn comb, 
• a generator of honey, 
• a source of brood queens.  
• Splitting colonies into nucs is a way to increase your apiary.  
• Nucs are also a way to practice swarm control.  If you take the queen and enough bees to support her, the colony thinks they have swarmed and you have stopped the swarm.

Billy's approach is that we need to help the bees survive by promoting hygienic queens and raising local queens.  He has an extensive program in Virginia in which he runs nucs and raises queens.  He went through his methods for the nuc program in explicit detail, more complicated than I can repeat here, but essentially he is making nucs over and over; overwintering the nucs; culling out queens who are not certifiable breeder queens.  And then he does it all over again.

He railed against artificial insemination and said that it had ruined many aspects of farming - breeding cattle, breeding hogs, breeding all kinds of animals.  He thinks the bees should raise their own queens.  He selects for hygienic queens by systematically killing capped larvae and seeing if the bees remove it within 24 hours.  If so, he uses that queen as a breeder.  As a result he does no varroa treatment and said the most number of mites he has seen this year is THREE.

He is a wood-working guy (in his non-bee life, he works at Home Depot) and makes his own equipment so that he can keep these nucs on a common base.  He has entrances on opposite sides and faces his nucs so that the prevailing winds are not blowing toward the entrance.  You might notice that he uses all medium equipment - no deeps or shallows for him.

He keeps a robber screen and an entrance reducer on every hive.  I was interested in his robber screen - not complicated like mine, but rather a simple screened wire, looks like #8 hardware cloth or maybe a little smaller.  He says it needs to extend 4 inches on either side of the entry to be effective.  He simply staple-guns it to the hive body and the landing.  It's folded into a squared edged to create a tunnel to the entry hole.  Boy, I plan to do this on every hive after my terrible robbery at two different great hives last year.

We have used hive drapes at Chastain Conservancy since I heard him speak about them at EAS.  Now I'd like to try the other item he uses during an inspection: his "Quiet Box."  The Quiet Box is the green box in the photo below.

Billy said that anyone in his apiary who took out a frame and leaned it against the hive would be in big trouble with him.   In our inspections, we typically use a frame rack that may or may not be under the hive drape.  It is his contention (and he's obviously right) that being out in the sun like that is very disturbing to the bees.  

I often find a clump of bees on the outside wall of the hive box when I remove the frame from the rack to return it to the hive.  They left the frame and crowd together on the hive box, probably trying to get into protected space where it isn't very light.

Instead of this disruption, Billy uses a quiet box - the green box in the photo.  It is equipped with a built-in hive drape.  He puts the first frame removed from the hive into this box where there are a couple of other frames.  If the frame is alone in the box, he might also put in the frame on which he finds the queen.  These frames remain in the "Quiet Box" until he is finished with his inspection and then he returns them.

If he chooses not to return them to the hive, with those two frames, he has the beginning of a nuc.  He just needs to add frames of honey and pollen, capped brood and bees.

We could easily take an empty nuc box to our inspections at Chastain (and at my private hives) and use that as the "Quiet Box."  I am anxious to try this and see how we do with it.  Our first inspection there is on the 23rd, so I'll let you know how it works for us.

Billy feeds all of his bees sugar syrup all the time.  He says that they will quit taking the syrup when there is nectar available.  He uses the rapid feeder from Bee Works in Canada that I also use.

He likes this feeder because it is inside the hive and because the bees are protected from drowning when using it.

Billy employes nematodes to control the SHB.  He says the first year you need to do three applications (Julia and I only did one the year we did the nematodes) and thereafter you need to do two applications.  I need to get back in touch with SE Insectaries and order some more to do that again.

At the end of this wonderful talk, Billy was surrounded by members of the Metro Atlanta Club who wanted to ask him questions and thank him for all the information.  I went up afterward to thank him personally and had such a lovely surprise.  He looked at me and said, "I'm so glad you came.  I was hoping you would be here.  I do go to visit your web site sometime, you know!"  I was bowled over and honored - who knew that he even knew who I was?  

Mayhem and Robbery in the Bee Hive

Robbery in the bee hive is disconcerting, to say the least.  It is violent and upsetting to watch.  I am a grandmother on Fridays and after a morning with my grandchildren today at the Atlanta Botanical Garden, came home to find one of my biggest hives being robbed.

Below is a video of the hive.  I usually use a tripod and at the end of the filming with bees head bumping me on all sides, I was not a steady camera holder, so it's jiggly, but I put it up so you can see what robbing actually looks like.

Both Orientation in the afternoons and swarming behavior when the hive is gathering for the swarm are  often confused with robbing.  Both lack the violence.



In the end I soaked a sheet in water and threw it over the hive for a couple of hours.  The robbers desisted and left.

Later in the evening, I removed the sheet and set the robber screen up so that the entry was open for a bit.  The sad bees were carrying out opened larvae.

Under the hive you can see lots of wax shards from the robbers tearing open cells.

I had just inspected this hive yesterday and was pleased to find that they along with the rest of my hives were putting up some nectar and that they had some larvae in the cells.

I don't know what the state of this hive is and if it can recover.  I may open it on Sunday and see what I may need to do to support them, such as add some frames of honey from another hive.

Beeyard Mayhem

At 8 PM on Saturday night I was moving a wheelbarrow through my backyard to the shed when I realized there were bees buzzing and swirling all around my yard and rising from my deck. I put on my bee jacket and veil and went out to see. Bees were everywhere. It was organized like a swarm and it wasn't apparent that any particular hive was being robbed.

The bees were all over the deck - they head-butted me no matter where I walked. Hundreds were flying in circles near my sun porch door. It was almost dark - what was this about? I assume because of the nectar dearth and the relatively low supplies for this time of year, that probably robbing was going on. I approached the two weakest hives and both, while not looking like robbing I've seen in other years, did appear to have some attacking happening on the front landings.

I immediately dropped the propped tops on all three hives and planned to get out robber screens for the two front entries of the hives that looked violated. By the way, opportunists were just waiting. I saw two bald-faced hornets get into the act of violating the hives as well as a couple of yellow jackets.

I went into the house to get the robber screens and angry bees went in with me. Usually they abandon the cause at the door, but not this time. I got the screens and put them on Mellona and Aristaeus2 since both seemed somewhat in distress. I posted on Beemaster to see if someone had an idea about what might be going on, but most of the wise people I depend on were at the Northeast Treatment Free Beekeeping Conference in the northeast and nobody answered for more than 24 hours.


On Sunday the center hive, Mellona, looks OK, but I was worried about the robber screen on Aristaeus 2. When I took it off, there were lots of dead bees behind the screen. By this afternoon (Monday), they had removed the dead and everything appeared to be back to normal. I will open the hive tomorrow and know more about what happened - if they were robbed and what is the state of the hive.

Meanwhile I had a wedding shower at my house on Sunday morning and didn't have the time to rescue with the glass and postcard all the bees that were on my porch. I carried about 20 of them outside that way. But then I am ashamed to say that I vacuumed up the 102 others that were still on the sunporch. I was afraid of having them there with all the people coming to the shower and I didn't have enough time to remove them one by one. So I was part of the hive devastation that happened on Saturday night.




If you click on the picture below to enlarge it, you'll notice in the lower part of the picture a bald-faced hornet attacking a bee.

The Small Absconded Hive is Still OK

I've left the robber screen on the small nuc to help this tiny cluster of bees and the queen. It isn't completely closed up - on the right side you can see the opening. However, a robber aims for the front door and the bees who live in the nuc are drawn to the queen, so they will go to the side opening without any problem.



It's extra cold in Atlanta for this time of year. Tonight the lows will be in the 30s for the fourth night in a row. I didn't want to disturb the colony but wanted to look for signs of life so I lifted up the inner cover and found these happy girls looking up at me.



There are two Boardman feeders inside the empty second box of this nuc with pint jars on them to accommodate the shorter size of the medium nuc. The bees do not seem to be taking the syrup, however. This weekend I may pour the syrup into two sandwich bags instead. I didn't want to put a gallon Ziploc in the nuc because bees tend to drown if baggie feeders fold over on themselves. There isn't enough room in the 5 frame to allow the Ziploc to lie flat, but two sandwich bags would.

A poster on Beemaster says that he pokes holes in the Ziploc with a pin and bees can then get the syrup without drowning, but I tried that and the bees completely ignored the baggie. Slits seem to work better for me.

If it warms up this weekend, I'll open this box up again and see if the larvae are developing in the two frames of brood that I found the last time I looked.

"Damn, it feels Bad to Bee a Beekeepa'"

With apologies to the Geto Boys, while they thought that "damn, it feels good to be a gangsta," I've been thinking, "Damn, it feels bad to be a beekeepa'." Especially when tragedy strikes.

Today I inspected the hive that looked as if it were being robbed the other day. There are bees buzzing all around the hive and the other night they slept in a clump on the corner of the roof of the hive. Bill Owens wrote me that those bees were probably residents of the hive and couldn't get in because I had mostly blocked the entry, so they spent the night on the corner.

And that's probably true, but when I opened the hive, it had been completely robbed out although there were bees everywhere.

Dead bees on the inner cover (along with hive beetles and a roach)


Typically robbed comb, with ragged edges and absolutely no honey at all.


Dead bees on top of the brood frames.


And a heartbreaking load of dead bees on the bottom board.



I felt sad and sick. I guess the absconded swarm that ended up finding me actually was the core of the old hive and a queen who made it out after the robbers ruined their home. I was proud of those four frames in a medium nuc brave bees. But very sad to lose this hive and the new queen I purchased from Rossman.