First Split of the Year Feb 15, 2022

 My bees at the biggest survivor hive have been flying like crazy and I knew I had to either make a split or checkerboard or both as soon as was reasonable. Yesterday it was 65 at 3 PM, so I opened the hive and made a split.

I recorded it with my iPhone and wanted to share it with you. I apologize in advance. I didn't have my microphone on properly. Oh, well! It's the first time this year. 

If we were watching this on a virtual hive inspection, I would pause a lot to let you see the frame not in motion. Please do this as you watch so that you can see the queen, etc. BTW, the queen is on the top center of the frame when I show it to the camera.

Here is the recorded inspection:

 

Now THIS is a Beard

This hive started from a package that I got from Jarrett Apiaries at the beginning of bee season.

I got home in the 90 degree June (??? - feels like August) Atlanta evening and found this hive looking like:

And when I went around to the back, there were even more bees consigned to the outside of the hive!

This is a HUGE hive and I have not opened up the screened bottom board.  I haven't done that for the last two summers.  But for this hive, I may have to.

I wanted to give them room to spread out inside the hive but it was 8 PM when I got home.  So I went out and put on two empty boxes - undrawn frames - just to give them some hangout room inside the hive.  (This hive has a slatted rack at the bottom.)

I carefully moved the top to avoid upsetting the bee beard at the back and gently put those girls on the inner cover.  Still it was hard to find a handhold.  I only got stung once in this whole maneuver, though, on the ball of my thumb.  I put the two empty boxes on and closed the hive up.

One bee seemed interested in the salty sweat on my hand:

However, as night fell, the beard was hardly disturbed and no bees appeared to go inside. I expect the space needs to be distributed throughout the hive for them to take advantage of the extra boxes I gave them. 

After a hot night, the beard was only slightly smaller this morning, but there were no bees bearding at the back of the hive.  I'll put some beer caps on the inner cover to lift it up a little and that might help as well.

The nectar flow is over and it's time to harvest and make splits. I'm not certain about this hive because at Jarrett Apiaries, they use oxalic acid, so this hive may not be able to deal with varroa mite on its own.  Still, it's such a strong hive that I will make some overwintering nucs from it for the winter.  

I'll have my work cut out for me for the next couple of weekends!

Swarm at Tom's - Two Cat Size

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keith Fletcher on Queen Castles for Making Nucs

This is the beginning of my ninth year keeping bees.  There's always something new to learn.  The highlight of the GBA conference this weekend was listening to Keith Fletcher, Master Beekeeper from Alabama, talk about his splits and queens.

Keith began in a lovely way, sharing with us his library of favorite bee books.  Many I did not know, but I will be looking for them:
R.O.B. Manley:  Honey Farming
Michael Palmer's book - I think Living with Bees (not available on Amazon)
Vince Cook: Queen Rearing
Vernon Vickery:  The Honey Bee  (also not available on Amazon)

He obviously loves the bees and a visit to his Facebook page told me that he is into chickens and other back to the farm approaches.

First he went over the basics:
Why make splits?

• To increase your hive numbers
• To have a "spare parts" hive (like we did at Chastain last summer and probably will this one as well)
• To discourage swarming
• To raise queens
• To build fresh comb

The easiest way to split is to take the queen and frames to go with her.  The original hive will not swarm and will go to work requeening.

He had an adorable set of frames he had made to demonstrate what he puts in the nuc box when he makes a split:

He discussed removing the original queen on a frame from a strong hive and putting her in a queen castle, as I mentioned above.  You could also take a frame of swarm cells and do the same thing.  This would not be as effective in swarm prevention as removing the frame with the queen on it since she would have left with a swarm. 

The queen castle is a box designed to hold several 2 frame nucs - with different entrances for each (one on each side of the box).  This way you can have several nucs developing in the box at the same time. He uses a "queen castle" from Brushy Mountain to make his nuc starts.  This reminded me of Billy Davis' "quiet box" and I was so excited about the idea.  So I came home and discovered to my great pleasure that Brushy Mountain makes a "queen castle" for medium frames - Whooo Hoooo! 

I ordered it this morning and will be so happy when it arrives.  I always have such great expectations of me as a beekeeper as spring approaches but maybe this will indeed be the year!  And thank you, Keith, for a new inspiration.

I have about five - six hives that will survive the winter.  One is in my backyard and was enthusiastically flying today.  There is one hive at Sebastian's that we have to move if it survives but I'm not betting on that.  There are two hives at Stonehurst Place and two at Tom's house.  

In addition to the hopeful/possible survivors, I have ordered four nucs from Buster's Bees (two medium and two in deeps).  I am buying a medium nuc from Mountain Sweet Honey, and Jarrett's Apiary is giving me a nuc so I can try out their bees.  These six hives will need homes.

I will put one of Buster's hives at Morningside garden and possibly keep a nuc up there to be a source of "spare parts."  I'm going to put two of these hives in my backyard where right now I only have one live hive.  I'll put the other hive at Chastain and then I have one hive without a resting place, but surely I will find one!  My friend Tracy has mentioned he wants me to put a hive in his yard and he doesn't live too far from me, so maybe that will be its destination.

Bees are Now in Rabun County

Yesterday was a tough decision bee day.  I was going up to the mountains for the weekend so the queen I was supposed to get from the supplier couldn't be brought back to the Chastain hive.  I couldn't move the Chastain hive to Rabun county because it is a failing hive now with few bees since the drone layer queen is not replacing the bees.  I'm only up there about once every 3 - 4 weeks so I wouldn't be able to intervene if it didn't go well.

So what I decided was to take a split from my backyard to Rabun.  They haven't made their own queen yet, so I could put the replacement queen in it.  Then I could keep giving the Chastain package brood and eggs until they finally make a workable local queen.  Michael Bush says that when you have a drone layer, just give the hive a frame of brood and eggs every week until they successfully make a queen.

I went over to Chastain to retrieve the drone layer queen, but in the process and in talking to Julia, I changed my mind.  I've had two angry/mean phone calls from the supplier and two angry/mean emails from him and the idea of driving to Lula, an hour away, to allow him to say critical comments to my face just wasn't appealing just to get a queen.  And since he and I will no longer be doing any further business, what investment would he have in giving me a good queen?  For all I know, he would give me another unmated queen.

So Julia was very generous and gave me a frame of brood and eggs to put in the split I was taking to Rabun.  I had given it a frame of brood and eggs about five days ago, but didn't see a queen cell, so wasn't too hopeful about them.  I put the frame in the split hive and drove to N Georgia, feeling great relief as I passed the turn off to the supplier's house without even considering turning off.

Also the place where I collected the huge swarm on Tuesday was unhappy that there were still a baseball sized bunch of bees still clustered where the swarm had hung, so I stopped there and sprayed those bees with vanilla flavored sugar syrup, shook them into a Tupperware container and when I got to Rabun, added them to the hive split that I had brought.  The vanilla allows the bees to mask the pheromone and generally they will combine without killing each other.  Cindy Bee taught me that years ago.

So Rabun County now has bees at the community garden with plenty of bees, honey and the resources to make a queen.  I left the dead out hive in place there so that perhaps a swarm from the old school nearby where there are bees in the wall might move in as they did last year.

Weather with tornado watches was predicted for Rabun and as I drove into the county at 6:45 PM, the rain started.  I installed these bees in the rain, carrying the hive by myself about 50 yards to the bee site.  As soon as I had shaken in the bees from the swarm, then the rain started to pour down in full force.

What I have learned from this experience:
 
Always ask your supplier what their policy is should the queen fail in the establishment of the hive.  I did not do that and when I said the queen had failed, his response was that his queens were proven layers.  That was a terrible position for me to be in, since I had a failed queen purchased from him.  It set the situation up for his stance that the problem was with the purchaser rather than the seller.  And this queen was a drone layer from the beginning on March 18.  When selling bees, for good will and for continued support from the purchaser, the supplier should assume the customer is always right.

We will leave the drone layer hive at Chastain so that when we are doing teaching inspections, as we do there for new beekeepers frequently over the spring and summer, we can talk about drone layers, demonstrate how to handle a drone laying hive (hopefully), and talk a lot about how to choose a better bee supplier than we did.

Meanwhile so that we will have three good hives over there, I'll move a split I have made with a queen from Julia's yard to Chastain to be up and running since the queen is already "proven" and laying.

Spring Bee-ing

Atlanta has strange weather.  In December and January, it's not very cold - I rarely get out my winter coat, but March - it's cold.  It's a week before the first day of spring and the nights are in the 20s and 30s.  However, this weekend the temperature is supposed to reach 72.  But all over Atlanta last week the bees were swarming, so I got worried about my 3 year old hives at my old house.

I drove up there on Saturday to check for swarm cells and make at least one split.  We do have drones in the hives - not yet in large numbers, but I am seeing them, so I thought I could make a split and then plan to split and move these hives on the 16th.  I need to sell the house and can't put it on the market with bee hives in the backyard!

I went through every frame in Colony Square and didn't find a single swarm cell.  I made a nuc from frames in the hive.  I did find good brood patterns and that the queen was filling in holes where brood had emerged with new eggs.

The hive was full of bees and seemed to be doing well.  I looked at every frame but the two under the board in the lower box.  This is an eight frame box hive sitting on a 10 frame deep.  I blocked the two outside frames with a board that is so well-propolized that I didn't even try to get it off.  Since there were no swarm cells (and I looked at every frame except those two), I'm thinking it will be fine until Saturday the 16th for Jeff and me to do splits.

Next I went through Lenox Pointe.  Again, no swarm cells

In Lenox Pointe I saw signs of a good queen at work.  Empty cells, each with a single egg or c-shaped larvae.  And then I saw the queen in the second box.

  

I realize it's a blurry photo, but at least she is distinctive and you can see she is there...right in the center.

In the bottom box, nothing much was happening.  When we split the hives on the 16th, I will leave this box off altogether, if I can, because I prefer to use all medium boxes.  If not, I'll make a nuc of deep frames from Colony Square and Lenox Pointe and see how they do.

I had made a nuc from frames out of Colony Square so I closed it up rather clumsily with hardware cloth.  Note to self:  Next time staple the hardware cloth to the entry before putting it into the car to go visit the bees!  Because I hadn't closed the entry well, there were bees all over my back window, much to the consternation of the car behind me at a red light.  

I took the nuc to install it at the Morningside Community Garden to replace the hive that had died over the winter.  The bees seemed happy there, but I am worried that I didn't shake enough bees into the nuc, as I always worry when I make a split.

I then went into the survivor hive at Morningside that made it through the winter.  It had obviously emerged brood with the cells filled in with new eggs and larvae - great, hard working queen.  

Although the camera doesn't let you see it, the space inside the curve where brood has obviously already emerged was filled with eggs.  I took a frame of brood and mostly eggs from this hive and put it into a pillow case to take it home to the drone laying hive.

At home the drone layer hive looked the same.....still three frames of drone brood.  I went all the way down to the bottom of this hive and found eggs in two of the bottom deep frames.  I have not yet seen the queen in this hive, but every cell I see with eggs has only one egg and it is standing upright, as it is supposed to.  I don't think I have a laying worker, but rather a poorly mated queen.

I added the frame of eggs from Morningside to this hive to give them the resources to replace their queen.  There are a lot of bees still in this hive, despite the queen not making replacement workers.

In this hive on the bottom I found in the deep a frame close to the side of the box that had fairly new wax in it.  In the cells were dead small hive beetles - not bees.  The SHB were crowded and face down in the honey cells just as a starving hive of bees might be.  I don't know how to explain it since the hive is alive and doing well.

I made all of these photos last weekend and tomorrow is my move and split day.  Jeff and I are meeting to split the hives at my old house in the morning and we are moving the newly split hives at dark later in the day.  I will take one of the nucs to Rabun County to replace one of the hives there and will cross my fingers that the other hive is also there and alive.

Carl Chesick and Sustainable Bees

Last weekend was the fall meeting of the Georgia Beekeepers Association.  I went because the speakers look better than in any previous year I remember and because I am on the board.  The most interesting speaker was Carl Chesick, Director of the WNC Center for Honey Bee Research.

Carl was focused on sustaining bees that can outlast the varroa vectored diseases.  He said that in Asheville and the Asheville area, his center was encouraging everyone who has an untreated hive that lives through the winter to split it in early spring.  This is a fabulous plan and one that is in some ways obvious.

I, however, keep hearing that we should be supporting survival stock, and hadn't exactly understood how little ole me would be instrumental in that since I am not a queen breeder. But Carl pointed out that a split and a new queen that results is in fact breeding (a) queen on a very small scale.  Duh! But I hadn't registered this thought.

It's basic math, though.  If I have a hive that lives through the winter, untreated and only fed honey, then in the spring, I split it.  I have doubled the number of hives in my yard that are survivor bees.  The bees in that hive are strong enough to live WITH the varroa and not be defeated by the varroa.  If everyone did that, imagine how quickly treatment for varroa would go away.

Basic split involved in this:

• 2 frames uncapped brood with attendant nurse bees
• 1 frame of capped brood (to replace aging nurse bees)
• 1 frame of honey and pollen
• 1 frame of drawn empty comb

I rarely succeed with a split because I am always scared to bring enough nurse bees.  But in this split, if I were to take the queen by accident along with enough nurse bees, then the hive that is left becomes the queen breeder!  

In three weeks, the new queen should be emerged and laying.

Carl's talk followed a talk in the morning by Kefyn Carley from WNC University.  Kefyn's main interest is in spiders and mites, but after his talk I wanted to scratch my eyelashes.  He said mites are necessary and EVERYWHERE (even - read that often - in your eyelashes)...

His main point was that we would lose if we try to defeat (read that kill off) the varroa mite.  That approach only breeds a stronger varroa mite.  Instead, we need to accept the varroa mite and try to work with natural selection.

To do that, we have to recognize that if the parasite (the varroa) kills off its host, it will die as well, so it behooves biology for a mite to develop that can co-exist with its host.

It will take from 6 to 12 years to get mites and bees that can co-exist together and neither kill the other off.

So after hearing him talk and then hearing Carl, I am determined to get my bees to live through the winter and then split them!

Cross Your Fingers, I'm Making a Split!

Today, suited to the max, Jeff and I returned to Colony Square. The temperature was in the high 60s and tomorrow is going to be another summer day in February, so it's time to make a split from this colony. I brought a nuc (actually I brought two but we decide only to make one today), and all the extra gear I needed: screened wire to block the entrance, bungee cords to hold the nuc to its bottom board in the car, wire cutters to cut the wire to fit, lots of smoker fuel (read: a full bucket of pine straw), an extra bee suit and veil for Jeff, lots of stuff.

I stopped at Blue Heron on the way and it's pretty good bet that the nuc there has died. I took off the top and found no bees in the top nuc box. There were some bees in the bottom box, but it's a pretty good assumption that they are marauders from another hive.

At Jeff and Valerie's, it was a different story. The bees were flying actively in and out of all the hives when I arrived. Colony Square being the largest was the most active.

However, even the swarm hive had a bee flying in with pollen on her legs (in photo below). This isn't a guarantee of brood, but we put a frame of brood and eggs in there last week, so maybe, maybe, maybe they are working on a queen. We left this hive alone. Five Alive sported a crowded entry with bees landing laden with pollen. And Lenox Pointe was chugging along as well.

I didn't take photos while we worked, but we agreed on several things before we started.

1. I've not done well with splits - mostly because I'm always so worried about accidentally taking the queen that I don't take enough bees with the split. To do this split, we decided that it didn't matter if we took the queen. Should that happen, we would interrupt the brood cycle at Colony Square. With the extremely warm winter we have had, this year should be an overwhelming varroa mite year, so interrupting the brood cycle at CS couldn't be all bad. And if we didn't take the queen, the colony will keep growing as it has.

2. We would only take the eggs and brood from the first box on the top of the hive. Well, the first (top) box on the hive was solid honey and very heavy, but the box under that would be our source of eggs and brood. We didn't want to disrupt this hive any more than we had to, given our last week's experience.

3. We thought through all our steps ahead of time.

We set up both nucs;

We removed the replacement frames I had in the nucs;

We set the tops on the ground;

We put the bungee cords under the hives, ready to fasten;

We measured and inserted the screened wire in the entry openings.

Then we opened the hive and removed the top honey medium. We used lots of smoke and hive drapes.

We draped the first brood box without removing it from the hive. We pulled frames and found brood and eggs in frames 2 and 3. Frame 4 was one of the empties we had checkerboarded and it was not yet being used. All told we removed three frames of brood and eggs, one frame of solid honey and one frame of honey, pollen and a little brood.

The replacement frames that we put back in the hive were all drawn comb from my hives at home.

By now the bees were not happy. Jeff got many stingers in his glove as you can see and got stung once through the glove.

At that point we decided that we would only take one nuc's worth of split today and consider doing it again in the next couple of weeks. We loaded the nuc into my car.

Meanwhile I had set up a bottom board and a slatted rack at my house, waiting for the arrival of this nuc. It was late in the day and I had a meeting of people coming to my house at 5:00 so I will wait until tomorrow to move them into a hive box of their very own. For now they will spend the night in the nuc.

The hive box beside them is all set up with frames and ready for the bees tomorrow. Meanwhile it was reassuring to see the bees at the entry of the hive. I'll also remove all the bungees from under the hive tomorrow. I hope they make a good queen! And that they succeed at making a queen!

Tomorrow I'll move them into the hive box and probably feed them to help them draw comb.

The Many Lives of Topsy

Like a cat, I think Topsy must have at least nine lives. Started out as a top bar, but the bees absconded. I fooled around with the top bar box and situation (removed the legs and set it on cinder blocks; blocked the screened bottom board, gave them some old comb) and the bees were reinstalled. This time they stayed.

We've had numerous problems with the hive building comb attached to the side of the top bar. Jeff and I practically destroyed the hive one day as we tried to unhook the comb from the box sides. We killed lots of bees and made a complete mess of the whole thing.

This year I decided to leave it entirely alone because every time I addressed the problems in Topsy, I made it worse and often killed bees and destroyed comb.

A few weeks ago we tried to split Topsy and the very next day, they had absconded once again, leaving the two boxes practically devoid of bees. I had gone to the beach with family. Jeff found the swarm behind his fence. The problem was that the long handle of my fancy swarm catcher was available to him but the water jug was not.

Enterprising, Jeff bought another water cooler bottle and cut off the bottom. His cat helped!

Since he didn't have the epoxy, he duct taped the water cooler jug to the long handle.  Then by himself with no help and nobody to record it, he captured the swarm.  The night before he had delivered the hive into which we split Topsy to my back yard.

He dumped the bees into a banker's box that he outfitted with screen wire over the handle holes to create ventilation and drove the bees to my house.  He put them in their split hive box but in a new location: my backyard.  He then added the second box of the split, setting it right beside the first box.

My mentor from Virginia, Penny, wrote me that it was possible that the queen was not with them since they didn't really have enough time to get her skinny enough.  I had hope though since we brought both of the split hive boxes that if the queen did not go, perhaps she was in the box waiting for her bees.

I left them alone for a week.  I put their own honey in a hive top feeder and crossed my fingers.  Then  on Saturday, I opened both boxes to combine them.


From the largest hive I had ever seen, the bees had dwindled - partly because we killed a number in splitting the hive and partly because of age and disturbance.  I was discouraged and put both boxes together noting that there was empty comb where we had rubberbanded in brood and that the hive looked forlorn.





I did notice a couple of frames with new wax on them, but at that moment my dog Hannah ran away from home.  She is quite smart and has discovered how to climb over the rock wall fence around my backyard.  I dropped everything and went to find her.

I couldn't get that new comb out of my mind so after retrieving Hannah from a neighbor's yard, I went back to the Topsy bees and pulled those two frames.  To my amazement, there were eggs, tiny c-shaped larvae and hope for the future.

I immediately gave them some more honey and put on an entrance reducer.




So Topsy is still surviving - in new form and very small and weak.  I harvested honey this week and put the dripping frames from Colony Square onto Topsy to give her more resources.  We'll see........

Splitting Topsy

Lots of moving is going on in my life. I've moved out of my house that I lived in for 13 years; moved to a smaller intown house in Atlanta; my daughter and Jeff, my son-in-law, are moving into my old house and they are renting out their house which is where Topsy has been located.

So among the many changes, Topsy can't stay in the backyard of a house that will be rented.

On Sunday, Jeff and I split Topsy into two hives with the plan of moving the split to my new house. It was hard and made difficult by the fact that the honey comb has been cross-combed for the summer and we haven't been able to get the bees to draw straight comb in there.

Here's the pre-split hive.



It's hot in Atlanta so they are bearding both down here at the entry to the hive and under the top board. This is a huge hive with lots of bees.


We took out the brood frames first. We propped up the top bar and examined each comb to determine how to divide it up because we were rubber-banding the comb into Langstroth frames.



We were as careful as we could be and rubber banded the comb into frames, fitting it as best we could.


Here's a look down into the hive before I quit taking pictures. When we got to the honey-filled combs, everything got sticky and taking photos wasn't happening after that.


The brood comb was straight and beautiful and we carefully cut each comb to fit the frame, trying to save the most brood and eggs possible.



The honeycomb part was a complete mess, but we managed to get them some saved comb and I put some of the comb into a filter bucket to drip through to feed it back to them.


There were so many bees that we ended up putting on three boxes for them and putting a hive top feeder of their own honey above the inner cover.



There were so many bees on the outside of the hive that we propped the top despite the notched inner cover to allow them a top entry. Both Jeff and I felt a little defeated by the daunting task of trying to split this hive and weren't sure how it would turn out. We decided to leave them for this week in the new hive and move them on Saturday night when I get home from vacation.



So I'm at the beach with my family and Jeff, who stayed in Atlanta, called to tell me the split hive had absconded and are hanging in a tree behind his fence.

My super swarm catcher tool is locked in my new house and these bees are about 20 feet up a tree.  Jeff is going to try to get them tomorrow, but it's not going to be easy.  I'll let you know how it all comes out.

I'm very sad about all of this.  I put a lot of energy into this top bar hive and haven't done well with it.  Also this is the third split I've made this year that has not succeeded.  So I'm not too optimistic that he will capture the swarm and that we will keep these bees.

Tonight Jeff is moving the hive boxes to my new house and if he can capture the absconded hive tomorrow, he'll install them at my house where there are three other bee hives.  He's picking up the pole for my swarm catcher which is still at my old house and is going to get a large water cooler bottle from Home Depot to try to use on the end of it, since the water cooler bottle is locked in the basement of my new house.