Nuc Hive without a Queen

Yesterday I went into my hives with the video camera, planning to make a video on how to do a hive inspection. The reason there's no video with this post is that I didn't get a good film. I opened four hives and in each instance, there was an auditory issue - in three of the four hives, an airplane flew overhead as I began the inspection! In the fourth hive, my dogs started barking loudly, making it difficult to hear.

The next problem is that I did the inspection at noon while the sun was overhead and thus the lighting was terrible. As a result you can't see anything on the frames that I pulled out. I also positioned the camera so that it focused on the hive. So when I pulled a frame and held it up to look at it, the frame was out of sight of the camera.

I may post one of these films to keep my promise to make one this weekend, but I definitely will be doing it again and differently.

The most upsetting thing I found in inspecting these hives was that one of my nuc hives appears to have no queen. These three nucs were installed last Friday, one week ago. Two of the hives have very active queens - I've seen Her Majesty in each of those hives and can see eggs and new brood in those hives.

In the nuc hive on my deck, there is absolutely no new brood after a week. I searched through the hive again today and still didn't see the queen on any frame and there were no eggs, brood or young larvae.I called the man from whom I purchased the nuc and he said he would get a queen for me and call me when she arrived so I could come and pick her up.

Meanwhile I have a queenless hive full of bees and eager to draw out comb, etc. They have polished the cells where new workers are hatching and are waiting, but there's no queen to lay eggs in them.While I am waiting for the new queen to arrive, I borrowed a frame of eggs, brood, etc. from Mellona to add to this hive.



If you double click on the frame above, you can see eggs in the 12:00 position in each cell. These are newly laid and will give the hive a chance to make its own queen. There is some capped worker brood in this frame on the side you can see as well as lots of pollen both in picture one (side A) and in the picture below (side B)



You can see how many bees are in Mellona in the picture below. You can see where I took the frame of brood and eggs. In its place I put a starter strip frame on the side of the box and pushed the frames closer together to make up for the space from my removal of the frame.

When I took the frame out, I shook it hard to send any bees remaining on it back into their home hive, Mellona. The remaining bees clinging to the frame I was moving were nurse bees. I checked each bee carefully to make sure I wasn't moving the queen out of her hive and then placed the frame into the nuc hive.

How to build a Frame

At the end of January I posted some questions that most new beekeepers wish to have answered (or at least I did). Here are the questions:

1. How hard is it to put together a hive box?
2. What do you use to light a smoker?
3. How do you put the bees in the hive and what are the scary parts?
4. How do you deal with your neighbors?
5. What is it like to be stung the first time?
6. How much is the initial investment and do you have to have an extractor?
7. Will you have enough wax the first year to make candles?
8. What's the purpose of a hive inspection and how hard is it to do one?
9. What are the most confusing parts of the first year of beekeeping?

I answered the first one: "How hard is it to put together a hive box?" here.
A missing question from the above list is how to build frames for your hives. The easiest way to build frames is to use a "jig" to build a lot of frames at once, but in order to use the jig, you have to understand how just one frame is built - so here goes:


Basically you glue the frames together and then nail them together.


If you are using foundation, on some frames you nail in the foundation with the wedge. On others you wax in the foundation into the groove of the frame using the wax tube fastener. I don't usually use foundation, but rather give the bees starter strips which are waxed into the frames just like full sheets of foundation. I wax the starter strips into both groove and wedge frames.


I find building frames to be a bit boring so instead of working on my downstairs workbench, I usually build my frames in front of the TV while I watch a movie.

The frames I built in this post came from Walter T. Kelley Company. His frames have two notches on the bottom of the end bar, but the principle of frame building is the same whether there are two notches on the bottom of the end bar or just one.

I made one of my own movies about building frames posted below:

Video on How to Use a Simple Solar Wax Melter

Here's a video on how to use a very simple solar wax melter for beautiful results.

The plans for the solar wax melter can be found here. I built the solar wax melter last year and have been using it on every sunny day this June to melt the wax I've collected over these two seasons.

Pictures of how I put it together can be found here.

Using the solar wax melter is simple, fun, painless (it happens while I am at work during the day without any energy or supervision from me), and the results are gorgeous filtered wax. Try it, you'll love it. This is the most popular video on my site (#2 is the Crush and Strain video) and for some reason both are blacked out by Google today - so if you would like to watch a video about the solar wax melter, you can click here.

Harvesting Chunk Honey

I love honey comb. I love to melt it in my tea and drink it that way. I love spreading it on a biscuit and having the melted wax be part of the feast. I've done a video on how to harvest honey as chunk honey.

I previously did a post and video on how to do crush and strain to harvest liquid honey. You can see it here.

Please leave any comments or questions you have in the comment section. Here it is:

Honey Harvest - Crush and Strain

Today I harvested the six frames I took out of Proteus to make room for brood (if there's a queen in the bottom box). When I did the crush and strain, I made one of
my videos.



Please let me know if you have any questions or comments about this way of harvesting honey.

By the way, after the honey had completely filtered, I got about 5 pounds more in bottles. This means that the six frames of honey from a shallow super harvested in this video yielded approximately 17 pounds of absolutely delicious honey, uncontaminated by heat or being slung around in the air...or about 2.8 pounds per frame.

Small Hive Beetle Trap Saga

Yesterday I did all the construction for the Sonny-Mel Small Hive Beetle trap and put it on my three hives. I posted pictures of the process of making the lure for the trap in an earlier post.

I made a video of the whole construction process.

[Note: I worried about the hole size (that perhaps they were too small) in the sandwich boxes so I went back and made the holes on 2 sides of the boxes larger before I put the boxes in the hives. I didn't want my now somewhat smaller bees (as I regress) getting into the boxes instead of the beetle.]

Most of the members of my bee club aren't trying the things I am trying. I wish I could watch someone do the things I am doing for myself for the first time. So I am made this video in case one of you would like to see someone else making this trap before making it yourself.

I hope the trap works and will report to you the results.

How to use the Wax Tube Fastener

After all my difficulties with the wax tube fastener, I figure I am not the only person to be challenged by its lack of directions.....although if I am, the rest of you can enjoy a good laugh at my expense.

Meanwhile to address the problem, I made a video of how to use the wax tube fastener. I forgot to say in the video that to release the wax from the tube, you slightly lift your thumb from the hole in the handle.

Here it is:

Video of my beeyard

This is a video of my beeyard on the deck behind my house. I set up a tripod with my digital camera on it to film the activity at Proteus. I love how golden the bees look in the sun.

Since I took this in the middle of the afternoon and wasn't fully suited, I didn't take the camera closer to the other two hives because I didn't want to walk, carrying the tripod, through the buzzing busy flight paths. (I usually go behind a tree on the deck to go to the other hives when Proteus is this active.)

It's fun to hear and see the bees buzzing!


Hope you enjoyed it!

A Bee Grade Movie

My son-in-law has put a great movie on his blog for my new grandson. He has a real movie camera. I decided to make a movie of my bees with my digital camera and put it up on this blog, just for fun!



Click on the play arrow to start the very short video.