The Beekeeper's Car and the Parking Attendant

A friend of mine and I eat lunch every other Wednesday. Today we met at a restaurant where you have to valet park. We had a delicious lunch and at the end of lunch, we walked down to the valet stand and each handed the attendant our claim tickets.

Moments later David's car arrived; he got in it and rode away. The people behind me got their car; the people standing in back of them got their car. Mine had yet to appear.

Finally my car arrived from the parking deck. The attendant jumped out out of the car, and two bees flew out with him.

"M'am," he said, "There are bees in your car!"

My guess is that he arrived to get my car and saw bees on the driver's side window. He waited, hoping they would move, but when they didn't, he screwed his courage to the sticking place and finally got in anyway. Of course, he arrived with my car and without any stings, but he probably felt insecure for the whole fifty feet of the drive!

I told him that I was a beekeeper and that there are almost always bees in my car at this time of year. He and the other attendants, listening in, looked shocked and then laughed.

I haven't mentioned yet that last night my friend Gina gave me a swarm that she collected. I drove over to her house to get it at 7:15 last night and took it straight to the Stonehurst Inn where the I-Beam swarm had absconded. I have been desperate to get bees for them and was delighted to get the swarm.

I installed the swarm in the hive at Stonehurst, but as usual when one installs a swarm, some of the bees remained in the original cardboard nuc box in which Gina had dumped them.

Hive box ready for the dumping of the cardboard nuc box.

The bees are in this cardboard nuc box.

I'm ready to put the cover over the hive when I realized two things: there were bees clustered on the outside of the top box just beneath the edge of the inner cover on both the front and back of the hive.

I had put the nuc from which they came in front of the hive, but nobody was using the front door. 

Often when you install a swarm, the rest of the bees will just file in the entrance to join the queen. Not these bees.

So I shook and brushed the excess bees onto the inner cover. I used my bee brush to gently roll the bees on the upper edges of the top box up and onto the inner cover.

I noticed bees with their bottoms in the air, signaling to their sisters that the queen was in the hive. That felt comforting but the lack of use of the front door was distressing to me, since the I-Beam swarm hadn't taken to these quarters. 

The bees began to treat the hole in the inner cover as their entry and started moving into it. I love to watch the process - it's like a slow moving river of bees.

To me this view from farther back gives you the feel of the move to the center hole. To get this moving flow of bees, I had shaken the cardboard box, shaken the empty box I had used as a pouring funnel, and brushed the bees off of the hive sides to the top. 

Although typically I would have left the cardboard nuc until the next day, I wanted to return it to Gina because the restaurant where I ate lunch was close to her house. Also it was supposed to pour rain today and I didn't want the box to get ruined. I took the cardboard box (with the few remaining fifteen or so bees) to my car. 

Thus the adventure was created for the parking attendant! 

I was so concerned after the I-Beam swarm absconded. I returned to Stonehurst tonight to check and indeed, the bees had found the front entrance and were using it well. Typically I put in an entrance reducer, but decided to leave this one wide open for now. I can reduce the entrance in the next week's visit.

I Think I have a Dead Hive Post the Freezing Weather

I have had three thriving hives in my bee yard at home and every time we go up to 50 degrees, I have looked out of my window with relief to see the bees flying.  We've just had a week of temperatures in the 20s or below and today it is raining and in the 50s.  Yesterday when it was up to 45, I saw bees flying from my overwintered nuc and one other hive but not the Northlake swarm hive.

Again today bees are flying (in the rain) from the nuc and the neighborhood swarm hive but no bees from Northlake.  There is such a large pile of dead bees in front of this hive that I think they must have had a disease filled winter and couldn't make it.  I feel sad about it, but that is the way it is when you are trying to raise bees that can beat the varroa mite.

Seems like I will be starting the spring in rather sparse bee condition.

Last time I was at Stonehurst, those bees were fine so I'll have to check by there tomorrow to see if the bees made it through the intense cold (and before any of you comment about how cold it is where you are and the bees survive, this was unusual for Atlanta in late February).  We have ordered bees from Mountain Sweet Honey for Stonehurst so they will have bees this year even if the hive does not survive.

I also haven't checked with Tom about his bees which were flying after the last hard freeze.  And I haven't been to Rabun County.

For sure in a couple of weeks, I'll move the nuc hive to a full sized hive situation.  And a week or two after that I'll split the neighborhood hive.

Robbing Peter to Pay Paul and the Taste of Honey

The front hive at Tom's house is desperately queenless, so on Thursday I went over to Stonehurst Place to steal a frame of brood and eggs from one of the deep boxes over there.  The new Ray Civitts hive was looking good and needed a new box.  I checkerboarded them top box into the new box and then went into the lower box.

I put the beautiful frame of mostly eggs and young brood into a pillow case and put it in the back of my warm car (it was 87 in Atlanta that day).  I drove to Jeff's office and picked him up to go to Tom's.  We opened the hive.  

Inside the hive, the frames had some brood but it was all drone.  I think after the swarm the queen must have either been short bred (a Keith Fielder term meaning that she only mated with a couple of drones - not enough to allow her to function as a good layer).  Anyway we pulled a frame from the bottom box that had a baseball sized circle of drone brood in the center.  The rest of the frame had all the worker cells back-filled with nectar and there was honey at the corners, as is typical in a brood frame.  

We added the beautiful Stonehurst brood/egg frame to the hive.  I am crossing my fingers that they will now be able to make a successful queen.  

Jeff and I couldn't resist sticking our finger hive tool into the corner of the frame to taste the honey.  Yum - it had a sweetness followed by a spicy end note - delicious.  We didn't have anywhere else to put the frame, so I put it in the back of the car to take home.

I let Jeff out at his office and he went in to tell the staff that we had a taste of honey in the car.  At least six people came running out of the building brandishing spoons!  I didn't get the camera up and running fast enough.  

All six of them had a taste.  Jeff works at a casting agency and they know how to have fun!  All of them enjoyed the honey adventure, I think.  And I had a great time sharing our honey moment with them as well.

Where I Bee

I don't think I've posted this year about my hives and where they are.

I have one hive at Chastain Conservancy.  It's a teaching site for my bee club and Julia, Noah and I all have hives there.  I have one hive that was made from the swarm that a beekeeper donated to the teaching cause.  It came to us on April Fool's Day and has done well.

I checked on it today, planning to take a frame of brood and eggs from it to another hive.  BUT they had requeened themselves.  I found the opened queen cell and many others that had been opened.  The bees were quiet and contained.  They had many cells cleaned and polished waiting for the new queen to start laying.

This must have been a well-regulated plan in that they had two frames of capped brood, about ready to emerge (dark biscuit) and probably their new queen is in the process of her mating days right now.  This means that when the capped brood was laid, they made a queen cell from one of those eggs.  The queen emerges in 16, compared to 21 for the worker, so she has emerged (before the remaining brood laid on the same day) and should soon start laying.

So I didn't take a frame from them!                                  

I also have two hives at my friend, Tom's house.  These were the Bill Owens hives that I got at auction in September, 2013.  These two hives were doing great as spring began.  Since they are in deep boxes and don't have medium supers, I was unable to spread out the brood nest when we added the first new boxes to these hives.  Both hives swarmed.  

I captured both swarms which are now in my backyard.  The hives at Tom's are probably not going to produce much honey this year although both hives have two full boxes of honey on them.  They are struggling with post-swarm.  They swarmed on March 30 and April 9, respectively.  

The front hive (March 30) apparently failed to get a good queen and is now queenless.  We have put in one frame of brood and eggs but on inspection on Monday, did not see any evidence of a queen cell.  The hive was quiet and has not developed a laying worker.  I will take another frame of brood and eggs over there to it tomorrow.  I wanted to today from the Chastian hive but they were not in any kind of shape to do that.

The back hive (swarmed April 9) has a queen who is up and running and has been laying but they are slow to rebuild.  These hives have had the same number of boxes on them for the last three weeks when many other hives are adding a box a week.

I have two hives at the Stonehurst Place Inn.  One of them overwintered and is doing well, making honey, expanding, etc.  I will check on them tomorrow as well.  I last checked them a week ago.  The second hive at Stonehurst is a nuc that I got rather late (4/27) from Ray Civitts.  They have now been installed three and a half weeks.  I don't expect honey with this late a start.

(For anyone keeping tabs, we are up to five)

I have two hives in Rabun County at my friends' farm.  Those hives were installed on April 26 and May 3 - again unlikely to get much honey with this late start, but the flora in the mountains is about three weeks behind Atlanta, so if the bears leave us alone, maybe we'll get something from these hives.

I was in the area this past weekend and stopped to add needed boxes to each hive.  The moving straps are to make us think we are keeping the bears at bay!  I think a determined bear might argue with both us and the bees.

In his backyard, Jeff has two hives that we got from Buster's Bees when I ordered them in December, thinking my hives would not make it through the winter.  We installed them on April 11.  He is mostly managing those but he and I keep bees together.  They now have new boxes on them - maybe two - I'm not certain.

The other two hives from Buster are at the Morningside community garden and are rocking along.  I gave each of them a new box yesterday.  They were installed on April 26 and now each is composed of three boxes.

So I have 11 hives in other places.

In my own backyard, I have one hive that overwintered, the hive from Sebastian's yard that we moved at the end of March, the two swarm hives from Tom's house, a swarm I caught in my neighborhood just down the street from my house, a split in a three box nuc that I made from one of Tom's hives as a swarm prevention measure (didn't work, obviously), and a small hive of failure-to-thrive bees that I got from a beekeeper who thought they had swarmed.  

It was a tiny swarm and is not doing well.  I got them on April 1 and they are still on just three frames in a nuc.  I don't want to combine them with another hive because they are from a beekeeper who treats his bees and I don't know what their problem is but they don't seem to be doing anything.  I think they were actually absconding to get away from the treatment.  I'm just going to leave them alone and they may die, but I'm not going to take any action.

So not counting the two nucs (Failure to Thrive and the Tom Split), I have five decent hives in my backyard.  If I eventually move the Tom Split into a full box, I'll count it but not for now.  So sixteen altogether.  Some will have honey for me this year.  Others will just build up hopefully to go through the winter.