The Small Swarm Nuc Has a QUEEN!

Today I opened the small swarm nuc and was greeted by many happy bees. I crossed my fingers that there was a queen. I checked the first frame from the old nuc - darkest one in the picture - no activity. I checked the second where I found capped honey around empty cells where the borrowed brood from Bermuda had long since emerged, but no eggs or larvae.

Then I took out the third frame and there it was - many, many cells of very, very young larvae, larvae in every stage - in the upper center you can see a larvae being capped. I saw eggs - she is there this very minute doing her queenly duties.

How exciting is that! Between my efforts to give them brood and eggs and their incredible ingenuity that allows them to create a queen - not to mention that the queen survived her mating flight and returned to the hive to start her job, I now have a new hive started!

WOW!

I really feel like a beekeeper now - one year and two months into this endeavor.

Other items from this morning's inspection:

I also returned honey dripping frames to Proteus for clean-up but didn't disturb the hive since it hasn't been a week yet since I put the queen excluder in place. The harvested honey frames I had were from removing 6 frames in the full honey super above Box 1. This meant that I had 6 dripping frames and 4 SC starter strip frames to put on the box.

Since Queen Bee in Box 3 is working on the right side of the hive and mostly laying in the right side frames, I put the 6 dripping frames on the left of the box and the 4 SC frames on the right of the box so it would be over the brood area. We'll see what happens.

I peeked into Bermuda and they were working away.

When I got to Mellona, I took the box of beautifully capped honey that I am going to make cut comb or chunk honey with off of the hive. I did this in a back-friendly way using two empty supers. I took one frame at a time off of the hive, shook the bees off, and put it in an empty super covered by a sheet. When I had five full frames in that super, I carried it inside to my kitchen. I then took an empty 8 frame medium box and put the other five frames into it.

When I do this usually I shake the bees on the individual frames back into the hive, holding the frame over the open hive. I had closed the hive up by the time I got to these last five frames so I shook the frames in front of the door. Bees fell on the deck in front of the hive in the cluster you can see in the picture.

I left the open box on the ground beside the hive so the remaining bees can make their way back to the hive on their own timetable. Within 10 minutes there were no bees on the ground or in the empty super.

It dawned on me as I got ready for work this morning that I need to put a super on Mellona - they now have no space and I won't harvest this cut comb honey until Tuesday night, so I'll hurry and get a box ready for Mellona to keep them having enough room to be happy.

Note: I came home at lunch time and took the now bee-free box sitting beside Mellona and filled it with frames from last year out of my freezer that had comb remnants on them for starters for the bees. I threw a helmet on over my work suit, went out in my sandals to the hives, opened Mellona, and added this super now filled with frames for the bees to use for themselves.

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 Swarm Appears to be Doing Well

I didn't inspect the hives today, but wanted to glance in the small swarm nuc to see how things look. You'll see very few bees on the landing, but I don't think they have much need for foraging right now. I supplied them with a full frame of honey from Mellona as well as the honey around the edges of the brood frames I gave them.

Currently they have three frames of brood cells with honey on the edges and one completely filled frame of honey (in the #5 posiition, the one marked 2007). And they have a frame from the old hive left from the swarm's arrival in the #1 position which has some pollen on it but nothing else (the one with the staple at the end).

I opened the nuc and didn't hear the "we-are-queenless" roar. Instead they are quietly working and there are many bees - you can see them between each frame.

If the new queen (assuming she is there) has started laying, as she should have in the last day or so, then we can assume there will be a need for foraging for pollen. I may look for signs of laying tomorrow, but feel pretty assured that there is a queen alive and well in the hive since they didn't use the last egg/brood frame I gave them for making queen cells.

BTW, we had a tiny bit of rain during the night last night but it is still so dry here that when I checked my garden this morning, the soil is bone dry less than an inch from the surface, damp from the rain last night.

Thoughts about Bees in the House

One of the costs of having my beehives on my deck is that bees inevitably end up in my house. Even when I haven't opened the door to the deck where the bees are, bees ride into my house on the backs of my dogs.

I keep the outside lights off at night to lower the rate of attraction. They come in anyway. If they don't come in with the dogs (which is how the majority of the bees enter the house), they come in on my hair or my back after I've visited the hives.

Yesterday I was cleaning up because my one year old grandson spends Fridays with me. I began counting the numbers of dead bees I was vacuuming up. I stopped when I got to 30 because it was depressing to think of all those bees, slamming their bodies against the ceiling lights (which is how most of them die). Granted, I had been out of town so it had been about a week since I had vacuumed, but there were a lot.

The bees mostly experience death by light bulb. In addition, I also find dead bees on the floor by the glass walls between my den and the sun porch. These bees die by desperately trying to get to the light bulb on the other side of the glass and I suppose kill themselves by repeatedly throwing themselves against the glass.

I keep a drinking glass and a postcard by the door to the deck and rescue 3 -5 bees a night in the house. Even after being rescued, these bees may go back outside and simply die there. By the time I capture them, they have already gotten my attention by throwing themselves against a light bulb.

If I keep things relative in my mind, I realize that each hive has 20 - 30,000 bees or more at this point and 30 - 40 dead bees in the house over a week or so is not so big in relationship to the colony as a whole.

But I do continually feel bad about it.

Will Proteus become Proteus A and Proteus Bee?

I posted on Beemaster because Proteus is a hive that is arranged in an unusual way. I also wrote about it earlier on this blog. Today I went into the hive to see if I could be a good beekeeper to these bees.

It's possible, as mentioned earlier, that Proteus is a two-queen hive. Sometimes, as Michael Bush writes about it, it is efficacious to have a two-queen hive. But the way I see it, my bottom box is honey-bound and the queen has no room to grow, so it's up to me to find her some space.

As I see it, with Hive Box 2 being filled with capped honey, it is highly likely that there is a queen, laying and growing brood in the bottom box (Box 1). I saw the queen in Box 3 above the honey, laying eggs. She is a young queen, unmarked - not the original queen in this hive as the season began. I had added Box 4 about 3 weeks ago when Box 3 was fully drawn comb.

At the advice of people on Beemaster, this is what I did today. I prepared a new super to put on Proteus (see first picture). BTW, I bought the medium frames for this box from Walter T. Kelley. This is the first time I have ordered frames from Kelley. They are built differently from other frames that I have. I found them easier to put together than my other frames from Dadant, but rougher in their construction.

I used no smoke today to keep the queen from moving somewhere strange. As a result I got stung on my left thumb - this after being stung on my right thumb on Monday!

I went to Proteus and removed Box 4 (four frames of comb/honey and six frames partially drawn or unaddressed). I also removed Box 3 (where I saw the young queen laying). I then took Box 2 (full of capped honey) and removed the center six frames. I replaced those frames with five of SC starter strips and one full frame of SC foundation. You can see its picture in the middle.

To complete this part of the operation, I had to get the bees off of the six honey filled frames. I shook the frames hard above Box 2 and most of the bees went back into the box. Then I used my bee brush to removed the remaining bees and put the honey frame into the new super and covered it with a top.

Here's the theory: Proteus may have a queen in both Box 1 and Box 3. To determine this, I put a queen excluder (I've never ever used one!) between Box 2 and Box 3.

This now means that Box 1 which was full of brood and possibly houses a Queen A has Box 1 as well as the empty frames in Box 2 to build up the bee numbers. I kept two frames of honey on either side of the center and put the empty frames in the center, with the full frame of foundation at position #5.

The queen excluder will keep Queen A (if she exists) from moving above Box 2. See the bees below the excluder, clustering on the four frames of honey.

Box 3 which may contain Queen Bee, I simply put back on the hive above the queen excluder. Then I put back on the hive Box 4 which contains four frames of capped honey and six frames that are relatively untouched. This means that Queen Bee has room to continue her laying on the right four frames of Box 3 and that she can move up to room to grow in Box 4.

One thing I didn't think about until I read a post about something else on Beemaster: The drones in the upper hive group (boxes 3 and 4) will not be able to go through the queen excluder because they are too large. In order for this to work, the hive has to have an upper entrance. Thankfully, since I prop the top of all of my hives with a fat stick, this hive does have an upper entrance through which the drones can come and go (as well as the other bees if they choose).

At the end of a week or so, I'll check to see if there is new brood in both Box 1 and Box 3. If so, I have a two queen hive and will split the hive into Proteus A and Proteus Bee. If not, I'll simply remove the queen excluder and let Proteus continue in its unique approach to life as a hive.

Hotlanta Nights and the Bees are starting to Beard!

With slatted racks, screened bottom boards, and propping the hive tops, my hives are about as ventilated as I can accomplish. But as the Atlanta nights get hotter, so does the interior of the beehive. You can see the beard on Bermuda (left in first picture), Mellona (the tall hive). Even Proteus with its mixed up configuration has a beard beginning.

It entertains me to see that the small swarm nuc has its own version of a beard! Of course, that nuc doesn't have a screened bottom board, a slatted rack, nor is the top propped, so even though it is the smallest of my bee colonies, it is probably the hottest temperature-wise.

Report on the Small Swarm Nuc

Here sits the small swarm nuc with a pot of mint on top for beauty and inspiration. Mint represents hospitality and wisdom.... so maybe this will influence the bees to be happy and welcomed in my little deck beeyard.

Two pieces of good news (potentially) anyway:

1. The queen cells were all opened (see second picture). I didn't search for the queen because I wanted to disturb the hive as little as possible. I did not see any new brood or eggs, but if she has returned from her mating flight, she would have just barely started laying.

2. The last picture represented the second piece of good news. I had added a third frame of brood and eggs to the nuc before I left to go out of town on Thursday. Today the frame shows that the capped brood had hatched (you can tell by seeing the empty cells which had caps on them last week) and they did NOT use the eggs to make a queen cell so they must at least feel as if they are queenright for the moment.

One of my Hives may be a Two-Queen Apartment Complex

Today I opened the Proteus hive (the one that made crazy comb earlier in the season) to see if I could make sense of the hive configuration. Here's what I had noticed last week:

*The bottom box was full of brood
*The next box up was full of honey, capped wall to wall
*The next box up had eggs and young brood
*The last box was an empty super with some honey beginning to be stored

I posted a query on Beemaster to see what might be going on. The responses included the possibility that I might have two queens - in effect one hive living on top of the other.

Typically in a hive the brood nest is continuous. The queen works her way through the frames in the bottom box and then moves up into the next box. In this hive a full super of honey separates the brood nest - this is not the usual formation in a hive. However, the bees are using only one entrance, for what that's worth.

Today I wanted to see if there were a laying queen in the upper box. In opening the box, a honey comb opened. I love the circle of bees sealing the edges of the honey spill and gathering it back up to use in the hive!

In the second picture you can see who I think is the queen, backed into a cell in which she is laying an egg. All of the cells to the right and upwards from the queen each have a single egg in them. If you look carefully you can see the eggs - they look like a grain of rice standing on end. There is only one egg in each cell, eliminating the possibility that this might be a laying worker (who often lay two or more eggs in each cell).

I also checked the small hive beetle trap on this visit and found no beetles in it or any of my other traps. A post on BeeSource (see Rob-bee's post at the bottom of the page) suggested that my holes aren't large enough for the SHB. They are supposed to be 3/16". I plan to take the traps out next weekend and enlarge the holes. The bees have propolized the holes in the trap on Proteus (the apartment complex hive).

I also am having a mild, mild infestation of SHBs this year. Last year they were everywhere by this time. I'm wondering if the hard freeze of 20 degree days we had the first week of April wreaked havoc on the SHB population.