A Mountain of Old Wax from the Bees

Suddenly I find that I am managing 22 hives - I'm not quite sure how that happened and I am sure that the numbers will decrease soon.  In the process, I am desperate for equipment.

To that end yesterday ahead of my inspections, I had to get seven boxes ready in case hives needed new supers.  I had the boxes, but not the frames.  So yesterday morning at 7:15 I was in my backyard, cutting old wax out of frames with my hive tool.

Below is the ensuing collection - there will be more.  I haven't finished.  And we have at least 100 unbuilt frames in my basement.  I took those to Jeff today.  He will build frames; I will build and paint boxes.  Of course this is what beekeepers are supposed to do in the winter, but the numbers crept up on me to my total surprise!

In the next couple of weeks (when I have some spare time - anyone laughing yet?) I'll melt this down a la Cindy Bee.

If you are wondering about the (SHOCK) 22 hives, here they all are:

At my house to stay:
2 package installations
1 nuc installation
2 splits from Colony Square
1 top bar hive

At my house temporarily:
Flower Pot Swarm (this will be moved soon as the queen is mated and laying)

Total at my house:   7

At Jeff and Valerie's house
Colony Square
Lenox Pointe
Lenox Pointe 2 (AKA Swarm hive)
Five Alive

Total at Jeff's house:  4


At Community Gardens:

Morningside Community Garden
2 package installations

Rabun County community Garden
2 hives - one survived the winter, second a moved-in swarm

Blue Heron Nature Preserve (and community garden)
Lisa's hive

Chastain Conservancy:
1 package installation

Total at community gardens:  6

Miscellaneous locations:


At Sebastian's and Christina's 
2 nuc installations


At the Stonehurst Place Inn
2 nuc installations (2012)
1 existing hive from last year


Total at miscellaneous locations:  5

Grand total:  22


I will get it down to 21 and perhaps 20, though.  Julia is going to take the really weak queen and bees from Lisa's hive and put them into her observation hive.  I will take the FlowerPot Swarm and install it into Lisa's Hive.  If the splits from Colony Square don't both make good queens, I'll combine them into one hive.  That would take my numbers down to 20.


I figure that I am likely to get honey from 7 - 10 of these this year.....but maybe that's counting my honey comb before it produces......


I didn't count the club Nuc/Observation hive which is also in my yard because it is going to Julia when I move the Flower Pot Swarm to Lisa's hive.

Morningside Garden Hives

And last, but not least, I opened up the Morningside Garden hives this afternoon - a little over a week since installation.  It's really hot up there and the sun beats down on the hives.  The former manager of the garden told me that this hillside was a civil war look out for Union soldiers because from the location of the beehives, you have a great view of downtown Atlanta from a distance.  Below the hill behind the apiary, the Union stored arms and supplies.



The bees had built wax but not as enthusiastically as the hive at Chastain or mine at home.  I do love how the bees get all possessive of their initial wax building as in this photo.



I can't seem to get through a year without making some major installation error.  This was mine so far this year - I put the queen cage between the frames and the bees made crazy comb as a result.  You can see the white tape from the queen cage extending out of the space between the frames.



I did take a rubber band and tried to coax the crooked comb back under the top bar.  Then I moved the errant comb frame next to the wall in hopes they would straighten it out.



They didn't do quite as badly in the yellow hive.  In that hive they made some comb around the queen cage but the frames remained OK.   I just cut the jutting comb off and took it home.

Julia suggested just laying the queen cage on the bottom bar of a frame - so I did that at Chastain and at all my home hives, but not at these two.

In the end I added a box of frames to each of these hives.  I left the food on the yellow hive and thought about coming back with more for the blue hive.  Not much water to be found up here and they may not be able to make wax easily.

Our New Chastain Park Apiary

Julia, Noah and I are so honored that we have been given permission to have a "small apiary" at the Chastain Park Conservancy.  I'll post some pictures of the conservancy office area later, but for now you can see the golf course in the background.

To get to the Conservancy, I have to drive across the golf cart path, so it's a careful, slow drive to get to the Conservancy….not much different than entering a bee hive.  Chastain Park is the largest in the city of Atlanta - 260 acres - so we are taking up a tiny bit of space.

The Conservancy has its offices in a quonset hut - really!  It is spacious and amazing in its capacity to serve many purposes, but they do not allow a photo of it to grace the web page so until I take one, I can't share it with you.  I also need to take a photo of Chuck, the goat who lives on the Conservancy grounds!

The hives to the left belong to Noah and Julia.  We are all starting new packages and all in medium boxes.  This should be great if we ever need to transfer a frame of brood and eggs from one hive to another.  It is also a lovely space for people to observe an inspection.

We will still keep hives at the Blue Heron.  Over there we have 2Cat, a swarm hive that Noah will manage, and Lisa's hive, a donated hive that I will manage.  We may occasionally take inspection groups over there as well.



My job at this apiary today was to check to see if my hive had released the queen and if she were laying.
I also planned to remove the feeder if they had built out a full box of wax.



They had indeed built out beautiful wax.  You can see eggs in these cells.  I was so excited to see how well these bees were doing that I forgot to remove the empty queen cage - oh, well, I'll get it next time.



I also added a new box and moved two frames up to be a ladder to the new box.

Another Bee Day - at Jeff and Valerie's House

Today I went to Jeff and Valerie's house to check the hives there.  I started with Five Alive.  Look at the beautiful wax they are drawing.  This is the last frame in the box so it is drawn out the least.



The hive was full in every frame except the outside frame, so I decided it needed a new box.  I put the new box under the top box and took two frames of brood out of that box to make a ladder in the new box.  (A ladder allows the bees passage to start drawing wax from the top bar.) When I took out a full frame, I replaced it with a foundationless frame with a wax strip as in the photo below.



This is what Five Alive looked like when I closed it up - and it's only April 3!



I then went to what we've called the swarm hive but is now Lenox Pointe 2 because we moved the queen by accident into that hive.

They aren't going crazy and aren't building up as fast as other hives, but they are storing lovely honey.



And they are equipped with a laying queen.



If you enlarge the photo below you can also see eggs.






Then I went to the original Lenox Pointe - remember the queen was only laying drones.  Well, that was just how she started - now she is laying beautiful brood - you can also see larvae in the photo below.



Her frames are arranged just so - with honey in the corners, pollen next, and capped brood.



Last but not at all least, I opened Colony Square.  The top box is a full box of honey and I know they need a new box.  Instead of going into the hive (because I knew I couldn't lift the fifty pound full box to position six (over my head), I opened it and added a new box above the top box.  I didn't make a ladder with their own frames, but did have two fully drawn frames that I put in the center of the new box to provide ladder facility.

And this is what Colony Square looked like when I left.

And for the Remaining Hive Inspections

Luckily it is Spring Break in Atlanta and lots of people are out of town.  I didn't have to be at the office today until 4 PM.  So today was a major bee day - I picked up five nucs, installed them in three places and inspected seven hives on this side of town.  Tomorrow (also a slow day) I will inspect the hives at Jeff and Valerie's (four of them), the hive at Blue Heron, and the hive at Chastain.

Next up was the other package installation at my house.  Unlike its 10 frame neighbor, this hive had not drawn out the majority of its box, so I didn't add a box.  I did see eggs and the queen - she was lovely but I didn't take her photo - in this box, so I feel fine about it.  They just aren't as energetic as the 10 frame.  It's funny - the package for the 10 frame had a ton of dead bees on the bottom, but this package had the least dead bees of all the packages I installed.  You never can tell about bees……



The little nuc split from Colony Square had failed to develop a queen, so I gave them a frame of eggs from Lenox Point last week.  I did have to drive the frame 25 minutes from my old house, so the eggs might not have been great when installed here.



They had built a beautiful queen cell, however.  I very carefully returned this frame to the nuc and hope she'll do well once she emerges.



They had also made these odd attempts at a queen cell (see below in the upper center) but those are not queen cells.



I also installed the last nuc this afternoon and saw the queen. She has a yellow dot on her back and is at 9:00 on the frame below.


You can also see her on the end of the frame, pointing downward - isn't she lovely with her black abdomen?



There were pretty cells in yellow wax in this frame.  These bees came from south Georgia.  I remember that our bees on the farm last year drew yellow wax early in the season.



I also checked on the Decatur Swarm in the top bar hive.  They were doing OK - had begun drawing out about five top bars.  They had gone a little crooked at one end of all five bars, so I cut off the wax and took it inside.

I thought this was a secondary swarm and the state of the hive bore that out.  The queen had just begun laying (as in yesterday).  I only saw eggs and some tiny c-shaped larvae, and there was no capped brood.  I think this means she spent the last 10 days getting ready to go on her mating flight, getting mated and getting ready to lay.  Now she is working hard at it and hopefully this hive will succeed.

Below is the comb I cut out - I took it inside and will melt it down or use it for bee talks.



So after a long bee day and many bee blog posts, I bee tired and am going to bed!

The Miracle of Growth (Bee Growth, that is)

A week ago, I installed a package into this hive.  I put a Rapid Feeder inside an empty hive box on this hive.  So the hive began in a 10 frame (my only 10 frame hive in Atlanta).



I love looking at gorgeous newly drawn wax.  This is what the bees had drawn in the last frame next to the wall of the hive box.  The rest of the frames in the box were fully drawn and filled with either brood, pollen or nectar.



 I pulled the queen cage and obviously (since I had already seen frames with tiny eggs and c-shaped larvae) the queen had been released.


Inside the queen cage were dead worker bees.  I wondered if they simply died, since sometimes the accompanying workers do, or if the bees in the package killed the accompanying workers.



Since they had used so many frames in the bottom box, they needed another box and have grown another level!  I left the Rapid Feeder on since about 1/3 of the syrup was still there, but I'll probably think better of that since the nectar flow is on, and remove it tomorrow.  Bees much prefer nectar to woman-made sugar syrup, so they often do use the sugar syrup when nectar is available.

And on to Stonehurst Place

Well, after a kind of rough start at Sebastian and Christina's house, I went on to the Stonehurst Place Inn where I installed two more nucs.  This went smoothly.

First I put the nucs on top of the hive bodies where they would live and opened the screened wire.

The bees seemed delighted to be freed from captivity.



These bees looked good although there weren't as many bees in the nucs as in the first two I installed.



I did not see either queen but the brood looked good and I saw new eggs in both installed hives.



Above and below you can see brood frames.



They are happily ensconced in their new homes.



I did see one bee in one of the hives that I installed here with definite deformed wing virus.  We'll keep watching for other varroa vectored problems.

While there I inspected the one hive that made it through the winter.  It was full of bees and full of drawn wax filled with honey.  I added a box recently to that hive on March 20, but it was full, so I added a new box.

A Big Bee Day: Nucs, Nucs, Nucs

First thing this morning I went to pick up nucs from my friend Jerry Wallace.  He had a yard full of nucs waiting for the purchasers.  I loved chatting bees with Jerry and his father-in-law (also a member of our bee club).  Jerry put the nuts on this trailer to close up the entrance.



He sprayed the bees with sugar syrup to encourage them to go inside the nuc.



Then he closed up the entrance with a stapled piece of screened wire.



I took the first two to Sebastian and Christina's house.  I didn't expect them to be at home and nobody answered the door, but we had prearranged the installation, so all was well.   They had cut the grass and settled the hives into place.

I set both nucs on top of the hive they would occupy.



As I was opening the first nuc, Christina appeared from a dog walk and wanted to watch.  I didn't have a lit smoker - it was in the car - and I had already started opening the nuc.  She was sleeveless, but wanted to see the installation.

I had left the boxes set up with room for the five nuc frames.



As Christina was taking the next two pictures, she got stung a couple of times on her face and bees were in her hair.  I hated that she got stung when her new bees had just arrived.  She had appointments all afternoon and now would be dealing with bee stings.

I had so hoped for a better introduction to bees for the two of them.





The bees in the first box were really feisty.  There were a lot of bees in the box, more than in the second nuc, and they had been cooped up for a while.  I didn't see the queen, but did see tiny eggs so we know she is there.

For the second box, I lit the smoker and had a smoother experience.  These bees were really nice and calm.



The brood patterns in this hive look great.



And I saw the queen.  She has a lovely yellow dot on her back - which made her easier to find.



As always when you install a nuc, many bees remain in the nuc rather than going into the new hive.  I left both nucs standing on end so that the bees would go into the hive to join the others.



Here's how they looked when I left.  I didn't get to see Christina again before I left - she had gone - and I hope she is OK.