Bee-Accountable

Yesterday after the Chastain inspection (I'll upload photos in another post), I came home to check on my own hives.

What a great year this is so far!  My first hive that I checked was from Sebastian's - a major hive, doing well.  In every hive at home my goals were to make sure there was evidence of a laying queen and to see if they needed new boxes for honey.

Sebastian's hive was putting up honey with great enthusiasm.  Most of it looked dark.  I'll be interested to see how their honey changes over time and with the new blooms.  Currently holly is coming to the end of its bloom and there are lots of flowering trees of all types blooming in Atlanta.

They were also doing a lot of wet capping (see photo above).  I don't know how bees decide:  "Wet?  Dry?"  What sort of reasoning (if any) is involved in whether the honey has wet (you can see the honey dampening the back of the wax cappings) or dry (bright white cappings not touching the honey).

This hive needed an extra box as they had completely filled the top box.  So I did the work of the extra box addition before I went on the the lower boxes to look for queen evidence.

I always turn the telescoping cover upside down, set the inner cover on top of it, and do the inspection, stacking each box on the inner cover.

To checkerboard the honey box and to help me with weight, I got the new 8 frame box full of empty frames and set it on the inner cover.  I took frame #2 from the box on the hive and hung it on the frame rack on the side of the hive.

Then I reached into the new box and got frame #2 (empty).  I put it in the old box on top of the hive in position #2.  Then I took original frame #2 on the rack filled with honey and bees and put it in the now empty #2 slot in the new box on the inner cover. 

I moved on to frame #4.  Removed full #4 from the original box and hung it on the frame rack.  Pulled #4 from the new box on the inner cover and put it in the original #4 slot in the box on the hive and put the frame rack #4 full of honey and bees into the empty slot in the new box on the inner cover.  And so on through frame #8.  So #2, #4, #6 and #8 were all moved into the new box.  

Then I lifted the original box off of the hive (now half as heavy) and set it on the new box on the inner cover and continued with my inspection.  I found eggs in the third box (the hive was stacked five high) so I ended my inspection.  Lifting now boxes four and five back onto the hive was much easier and the bees have lots of open storage available to them.

Moving on to the first swarm from Tom's (been here since March 30 - so about 11 days), I checked it for eggs and honey.  They were doing great, building out frames, etc. but didn't need a new box yet.  I saw eggs and not the queen.

The next box I checked was the Northlake swarm that overwintered so well.  Bees are really buzzing around this hive and I have wondered if it had swarmed.  It's top box (#5) was full with honey and busy bees.  I added a new box (the sixth) to this one the same way I did with the Sebastian hive.

My inspection of this hive was a little disturbing in that I found the third box down (first brood box) was full of drone brood, as was most of the next box.  I did find a little worker brood and when I saw eggs they were laid in worker cells, so I'm hopeful all is well.  They certainly are bringing in the honey, even if their queen is laying drones.  I didn't see any queen cells and only a couple of queen cups, but I didn't go all the way through the hive.

The last thing I did was to add a box to the nuc split that Jeff and I made at Tom's also on the 30th.  They are bringing in pollen like mad and I wonder if their new queen has already emerged.  It was a beautiful queen cell and perhaps was a week old, so conceivably, she could have.  Anyway, I didn't inspect since the rule of thumb is to leave a split like that for three weeks, but I did give them a new box in case they needed storage room.  I didn't do it the same way, since it's just a five frame nuc and because the last thing I'd want to do is destroy/injure the queen cell or the new queen.  Instead in the new box, I put a fully drawn frame of comb in the center of the box.

So the bee news here is good.  Next weekend, I go with Joe of "Growing a Greener World" to install his nucs at his house.

Ugli Honey

Jeff and I harvested three frames of honey from the original Lenox Pointe over the weekend.  I crushed and strained the total of 8 frames that we took on Sunday.  Some of the honey was very strange.

Here's what the cappings looked like.  Instead of individual cells being capped, the bees indulged in this stained glass approach.  The honey was a dark orange.



The frame below is what a whole frame looked like - it's all disorganized and the cappings on all three frames had this modern art look.



Inside the cells some of the honey was crystallized!  The grains of the crystals were large and rough against the roof of my mouth.   The honey tasted a little like apricot with a sharp finish at the last minute.  I've never tasted anything like it.  The moisture level on the refractometer was right at 18.6.



Here's a view of the cut side of one of the combs.  See the thickened crystal?

These bees are all overwintered hives so we didn't feed them this year at all.  I wondered if this were honey that was the result of the bees visiting a hummingbird feeder, but with three full frames (and we left the other five in the super because they weren't capped yet), that would be a lot of sugar syrup.

What nectar could these bees have gathered that would crystallize in the comb?  And we've had very hot weather in Atlanta - about a week of days with temperatures over 100 in the last couple of weeks.

Any ideas?

Stonehurst Place Saga

Today I did a deep inspection of the hives at Stonehurst Place Inn.  I knew one hive was dead and wanted to find out why they had died.  I suspected they starved/froze in the cold few days we had when it was 19 degrees here after a warm spell.

I also wanted to check the first hive to see if they appeared to have swarm plans.  I had given them a new box when I was here a couple of weeks ago and discovered that the second hive was dead.

I always get stung a couple of times working these bees.  Today was no exception - three stings - left hand little finger, upper left arm, lower right leg.  These aren't really mean bees compared to Colony Square but aren't bees I want to work on gloveless.



The top box which I had given them at the end of February had three frames of drawn comb, two frames of barely drawn comb and one frame with comb being built from the bottom.  This is because I just threw this box on top of the hive and didn't give them a full frame from the box beneath to act as a ladder.  I moved this bottom drawn comb to the edge of the box.  If they don't fill it out, I'll take it out on my next visit.

The second box was heavy with capped honey and uncapped nectar.



When I lifted off the box to look at the one underneath, I broke open honeycomb they had built between the boxes - they were distressed and immediately began re-gathering the honey because the bees will store this again.  They do not waste something they worked so hard to create.



The capped honey was what is called "wet cappings" because the bees lay the wax cap right on the honey creating a wet look.  I wonder what influences their choice to make wet or dry cappings?  Anyway, this hive is on track to make a lot of honey.  We'll probably need to harvest early and maybe more than once.



So the top box was empty but newly drawn comb.  The second box was all honey and nectar.  The third box was full of brood - and it was pretty as well.  Here you see what brood looks like on newly drawn comb.


There are both drone cells (the highly rounded tops) and worker cells on this frame.  Some of the drone cells are not fully capped and you can still see the larva through the opening in the top of the cell.



I thought it was interesting that they put drone cells occupying one whole side of this frame.



In this comb you can see worker brood capped to the left, and uncapped larvae just to the right of that.  Then in the open cells there are eggs.  You may have a hard time seeing the eggs in the cells with the light behind them, but in the cells with the darker background, you should be able to see a lot of eggs (at about 1:00 in the photo).



I was planning to remove the bottom deep but the bees had drone brood between box 1 and box 2 as well as between box 2 and box 3.  When I pulled up frames from the bottom, it's true that they weren't fully using the frames, but there was brood as well as nectar stored there.  The good news is that I didn't see a single queen cell or even an opened one, so these bees must not be planning to swarm - at least not right now.



When I opened hive #2 it was clear that they had starved.  The bees were flying around in January when I did the powdered sugar shake and the hive looked healthy.  Right after that, though, we had a string of four or five days with weather too cold for the bees to move or fly.  These bees died then.  There was a baseball sized cluster of bees - you can see the top of the cluster in this picture.



The frames were sickening.  They were clustered through three frames.  A sure sign of starvation is to see their little rear ends up in the air, heads down in the cell, getting the final sip of honey before all dying together.



We've ordered two nucs for Stonehurst - a nuc to replace this one and a new nuc to make a third hive.  It's going to be really crowded back there, working the bees, but the Inn will be glad for the opportunity to make more honey this year.