Definitely Two Queens in Proteus

I inspected Proteus from top to bottom (well, almost) today. There are definitely two queens. What should I do now? That is the question.

Proteus Bee, the top three boxes above now the queen excluder, had a skimpy brood pattern and not many bees. The first two pictures are from Proteus Bee. I was nervous as were the bees so I didn't snap pictures that were as good as sometimes.

The queen excluder was put on 8 days ago. You can see young larvae on the right of the second picture. That larvae was from eggs laid more recently than 8 days. That said, I was concerned about the spotty, skimpy brood pattern in this box.

The second two pictures are from Proteus A. Again you can see young larvae, suggesting a second queen in this bottom box. The comb on this box is dark from being used over and over both due to age and due to being honey bound by the honey frames in Box 2.

If you look you can see young larvae scattered all over this frame.

I am going to leave the hives as an apartment complex with the queen excluder in between the bottom two boxes and the top three. We'll hope that both groups will thrive and I can move them into two hives.

If Queen Bee does not survive, I will still have one good hive.

Bee with Varroa Mite

I took a lot of pictures in Proteus hive today and right in the center I found a bee with a definite Varroa mite on her back. She's in the center of this picture. The mite is the red tick looking thing on the back of the bee.

GROSS.

Powdered sugar shakes happen for this hive this weekend.

A Moment in the Middle of SEVERE Drought

Yesterday at my office I heard a strange sound and thought I must have a mouse behind my couch because of the regularity of the click, click, click. I walked over to look and realized that it was raining outside. So much time has passed since our last rain, that I didn't even think to identify the sound as rain hitting the window!

On the maps we are having severe drought in Atlanta. In my part of the Atlanta area, we can only water our gardens on Saturdays or Sundays between midnight and 10 AM. If you have vegetables or herbs in your garden, you can water any time. I gave up tomatoes because the squirrels ate every single one of them and currently am only growing cucumbers and herbs. So no watering for me until Saturday.

In past summers in Atlanta, the usual course of the day includes a sudden, brief afternoon thunderstorm. The state climatologist says we are in extreme drought conditions "defined as those expected once in 50 years, based on many indicators."

For the period of March through May, the Atlanta airport only recorded 5.07 inches of rain. Whatever happened to April showers bringing May flowers? My cleome in my garden is normally growing tall at this point. Today the plants are only about 10 inches tall and are blooming at that height. The water level doesn't support their normal growth.

The bees must be suffering. I see them languishing on the front porch of the hives without any nectar to gather.

It did rain last night for about 30 minutes around 9 PM and we must have had quite a storm late into the night because my computer had restarted when I got up this morning.

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.