First Aid in the Beeyard

 Today Dadant posted a very good article on first aid in the beeyard. I wanted to link it here to be sure you have access to it.

To read the article, click here.

Hope everyone is having a productive bee season.

Baking Greek Fig and Honey Bread

 I just got back from a wonderful trip to Greece with my sister and wanted to bake something Greek. This bread has honey show potential. I think that for the honey show, I would use more honey - perhaps 3 T or even 1/4 cup to make the bread smell and taste more honey-forward. It's delicious bread but you smell the figs as much as the honey and honey judges want the honey smell and taste to dominate.

Here's the video on how to bake it:

Making Food-Grade Beeswax Polish

 I enjoy making products with my beeswax and sometimes with honey. Most of what I think of as products of the hive are made with wax, however. I was asked to write an article for the GBA Newsletter about how to make furniture polish with beeswax. This is a great recipe because it is spreadable, is completely made with food-grade ingredients, and works beautifully on anything wood in your kitchen as well as on your furniture.

Here's a video of how to do it:

The value of having a resource nuc

 It is very helpful to have a resource nuc in your apiary. We tell new beekeepers that they should start with two hives for a number of reasons. One is that if your queen dies in one hive, you can take a frame of brood and eggs from the second hive to provide your queenless hive with eggs to make themselves a queen. However, if you are taking from one of your production hives, you are removing their resources to save the second hive. 

If you have a resource nuc in your apiary, your expectation of that hive is that it is for providing aid to the bigger hives. 

Swarm (Again) to Become a Resource Hive for my Apiary

 Last year I sold my original chicken coop to a friend from Butler, Georgia for money and a swarm of bees which he would deliver during swarm season. He puts up swarm traps on his farm in Butler and catches numerous swarms every year. So I took the money, gave him the chicken coop, and waited for my swarm.

Greg's life is complicated and he caught a great swarm for me in about May 2023, but circumstances kept delaying his delivery of this swarm. Long story short, he didn't get the swarm to me until October 2023 and it was still in the swarm trap up in its original tree location for all of that time. In Atlanta, October isn't a time to move bees, so I left them in the swarm trap for winter and hoped for the best. 

I tried something different this winter and wrapped my hives with purchased hive wraps that I only employed around the brood area of the hive. Totally wrapped hives in Georgia often result in a moisture problem, but I reasoned that keeping the brood area warmer might be a good thing. So I also wrapped the swarm trap. 

When spring arrived, all of my hives in my yard lived through the winter and were bursting at the seams with bees. My friend Peter came over to help me open the swarm trap and move the bees into a hive. In the swarm trap there were five deep frames but in addition to building comb on the deep frames, these bees had drawn comb below the deeps to the bottom of the swarm trap. Their length was about the height of three medium boxes. I didn't want to disturb them by cutting and wiring the comb into frames, so we just put the five frames into the box and filled in the sides of the boxes with regular medium frames. 

I can inspect the two medium boxes on the top of the hive above the transferred frames, but I can't really manage the brood, etc. in the bottom three boxes. Meanwhile, it's swarm season and this hive that was trapped in the swarm trap for a year just can't get enough of swarming!

So it sent out a primary swarm on May 24 and I gave that swarm to a new beekeeper who didn't have bees yet. Then on April 3, it swarmed again and landed on my deck rail. I gave that one away to a beekeeper whose hives had died over the winter. Then on April 5, it sent out another secondary swarm, again landing on the deck. I decided I should keep this one as a resource nuc. 

Here's the video of the whole process:

April Fool's Day Swarm Capture

 My bee club Metro Atlanta Beekeepers has a SWARM COMMANDER, Dave Marshall. He fields all the calls that come in (812-369-0401) about swarms in the Atlanta area. He has a list of over 50 beekeepers who have signed up to collect swarms. Each has registered his/her wishes as to how far one will go to get a swarm; how high one will climb to get a swarm; how experienced one is in catching swarms, etc. Then as calls come in, he texts those of us on the list based on our position on the list and with all of those preferences in mind.

Lucky me, on April Fool's Day, Dave texted me about this swarm at Emory. I live only fifteen minutes from the location (that's saying something in huge Atlanta) and I will not at age 75 go up on ladders. This was the perfect swarm for me since it was on a picnic table and so close to my house, so I hopped in my car and headed to Emory. They had already called Orkin who was on the scene when I telephoned the woman who called Dave. Orkin would not spray the bees but would "call a professional" to come and get them (and charge Emory, of course). Laura Hunt, the person who called Dave, said I would come for free. I spoke to an Emory rep who was there and assured him that I was qualified (a Master Beekeeper and past president of the Ga Beekeepers Association who had kept bees for nineteen years) so he agreed for me to come and rescue the swarm.

There's a church on the Emory campus nearby where feral bees live in a tree. A groundskeeper who had noticed the swarm at 8 that morning said the tree bees had swarmed before, were within a football field's distance (how far a queen might fly) and these probably came from there. It was a small swarm and I'm guessing it was a secondary swarm with a virgin queen. It's bigger than it looks because the bees were tightly packed and wrapped around the pole near the table top edge.

Collecting it was a challenge (like the one I collected from a mailbox last year) and I don't have it filmed well because I didn't have my tripod, but here is the YouTube video of the collection and installation:

Capturing My Own Swarming Bees and Installing them in a Hive

 One of my own hives tried to swarm two days ago. They swirled all over the yard and were landing in all kinds of places. I think the queen didn't go with them. I also wondered if they may have confused a virgin queen leaving for a mating flight with a message about time to swarm. But the queen may also have just not been persuaded to leave the hive. This hive has been wanting to swarm all spring.

I watch the hive for the rest of the day but it never swarmed. Then the next day it poured rain all day and no bees were flying. So on the 27th (the following day), I went to walk my dog and when I returned a swarm had obviously emerged from a hive while I was gone. I assume it was the swarm-defeated hive from a couple of days previous.

I captured the swarm easily (it was just at my right height for a capture) and installed it at the community garden where I have no hives so far this year. 

Painting Hive Boxes Efficiently

 I do this every year so decided to include it in my beekeeping tips on YouTube and to share it here:

Swarm Lure Attracts HUGE Swarm

 Yesterday I came home from the mountains around 4 PM. I was sitting in my den when I felt bored and thought I'll do this same work out on my deck. I stepped outside into a whirling mass of bees. A swarm was moving into my top bar hive.

Last week, I was sure a swarm had already moved in because there were so many bees flying in and out of the hive. I had actually thought whatever moved in was a secondary swarm because I had not seen any pollen coming into the hive, which would mean there was a laying queen. I even thought they were there overnight, but clearly I was wrong. 

The bees I had been seeing were just hundreds of scout bees, responding to my old equipment and the swarm lure I had rubbed on the upper edge of the entry and on some top bars inside.

The swirling bees yesterday were part of the enormous swarm that had been investigating the hive for a couple of weeks. I taped the whole hour and fifteen minutes that it took for the thousands of bees to move into the hive, but I've shortened it to about ten minutes for you to see how amazing it was.

Beekeeping Tips for Spring: Making and Using Swarm Lure

 We appear to have begun an enthusiastic and intense swarm season in Atlanta. In most of the country, this month or in the next couple of months, swarm season will begin. 

I've been posting some videos on my YouTube channel that might be helpful in getting ready for spring.

One of the best ways to get free bees is to bait an old hive with swarm lure. Every year hives are driven to swarm because it is the evolutionary push for the beehive as an organism to split into two hives. Previous to swarming (when the old queen will leave with about half the hive - taking 75% bees under two weeks old) scout bees look for a new home. 

It's just like when humans move. When I moved during the pandemic, I looked at lots of houses that were for sale before I found the house I moved into in 2021. Bees are just the same. They send out scouts to find the right sized place for the swarm to move into and start a new life. 

Every year, old equipment in my yard is scouted by bees looking for a new home. And almost 100% of the years, bees move into the old equipment. Truly these are free bees. I didn't lift a finger to help. Just provided the empty space. 

I have a large top bar hive that was in my daughter's yard, empty of bees. They swarmed several times last year and failed to make a new queen and dwindled away. I moved it into my yard into a great sunny place and as soon as any semblance of warm weather began in Atlanta, the scouts began to visit. Last Tuesday (March 12) a swarm moved into the top bar with no effort from me. 

If you want to up the chances of a swarm moving into old equipment, then bait your hive with swarm lure. Here is a video I posted on YouTube last week of how to do just that - make your own very effective swarm lure. 

You use the swarm lure by smearing it not too lavishly on your old equipment. I typically put it around the inner cover, on the upper edge of the hive entrance, and on the top of a couple of frames in the top box. Here's a video on how/where to apply the swarm lure:

 

I've posted on this before but thought it would be a good idea to refresh your knowledge and put this right in front of you.

Good luck and I hope that everyone who reads this gets some free bees! 

Note: If you do, leave me a comment either here on the blog or on YouTube. 

Metro Atlanta Beekeepers Short Course is a Week from Today

 If you live in the Metro Atlanta area and have wanted to become a beekeeper, the best short course you can possibly imagine is happening next Saturday, the 27th at Peachtree Road Methodist Church in Buckhead. Registration is still open. Just click here.

Rosalyn Carter and the Bees

 As Rosalyn Carter's memorial service was held in Atlanta yesterday, I was reminded of how I was lucky enough to meet her through beekeeping. My friend Curt Barrett and I were volunteering for the butterfly festival at the Carter Center in Atlanta, representing the Metro Atlanta Beekeepers.

Mrs. Carter was there to attend the festival and to dedicate a butterfly trail. As part of the festivities, she participated in the inspection of a beehive. I helped her with her gloves, always too big for women's hands in those days (2016).

If you'd like to see the original post, click here.

Secondary Swarm Saturday, March 11, 2023

I'm sure it's not a national holiday, but it was a day of celebration for me that both started and ended with secondary swarms. 

I was still in my pjs when I got a call from a beekeeper who belongs to my local club, Metro Atlanta Beekeepers. She has two hives and no extra equipment and her hive had swarmed. She asked if I would like the swarm. I was THRILLED to go and get it; threw on my clothes and was out the door. Like most beekeepers at this time of year, my swarm collection gear is always in my car so I can literally jump in and head out, as long as I have put on my own clothes!

She had made a split from her largest hive and there was good evidence that it had swarmed as well. Then a few days later she sees this little teardrop of bees in the tree above her hives:

The swarm was quite small, as secondary swarms often are. The original swarm leaves with the hive's queen mother and about half the bees. But if there are virgin queens in the hive as may happen as queen cells emerge, a virgin queen may head up a smaller secondary swarm. This swarm has less of a survival chance because after the secondary swarm is rehived, the virgin queen still has to fly out, successfully mate, and return.

I have sworn not to go up ladders this year but this swarm was small enough and on a shrub at about seven feet off the ground. I climbed the ladder (very carefully!) and was able to snip off the branch and lower the bees into a honey bucket. 

Here's the video of the collection and rehousing of the bees in a nuc at my house.

Later that afternoon, I led a MABA hive inspection at the community garden where the two swarms I collected last week are installed. The first hive is going wild - building tons of wax and filling it with brood and nectar. They looked fabulous except for a couple of wonky combs in my foundationless frames. 

As I drove home from the inspection, my cell rang and it was the man who lived at the house where I collected my first swarm last week, the one mentioned in the paragraph above. He had another swarm in his yard and wanted to know if I wanted it. When I arrived, he told me that he had discovered the origin of the bees. He lent me his binoculars to look fifty feet up into a nearby tree where the bees were living.

The swarm was another secondary swarm, my second in this wonderful Saturday. It was equally easy to collect. 

Here is the video of that swarm capture and installation in my backyard.

 

What a wonderful, bee-filled Saturday! I'll take a day like that any day.

A Very Bee Week So Far

 It's only Wednesday, but I've been very bee-sy. On Saturday I discovered my community garden hives were both gone...the first died before winter and the second was without a queen (who had been there two weeks ago) and was in terrible shape. I didn't open the hive two weeks ago - just lifted up the top and took off the feeder. The bees were flying in with pollen and I felt pretty sure that we were coming out of winter fine. Then I did an inspection on Sunday and found them broodless and queenless with a tiny diminishing population.

These are teaching hives and the MABA philosophy is that our swarm hotline will supply swarm calls to the teaching hives first until we have two hives for teaching. I called the swarm commander, Dave, and he called me so quickly the very next day, on Sunday, with a swarm ten minutes from my house. I got it  in the early afternoon.

I installed that swarm at the community garden with a queen excluder to keep the bees there. Swarms have often left that garden after being hived - maybe they don't like the GA Power electrical lines - so now I routinely put a queen "includer" between the bottom of the bottom box and the entrance, keeping the queen (and unfortunately the drones) in the hive until I remove it.

Monday I was called for another swarm, literally six minutes from my house. It was on a mailbox and much more difficult to collect. I was there for over an hour, coaxing the bees onto frames of old comb. When most of the bees were in the nuc box, I left the box propped slightly open and went home to get the queen excluder (which I have forgotten - I always forget something!). 

I took those bees to the community garden and installed them in a second hive and put a queen "includer" on that hive. 

Yesterday, Tuesday, in my own yard, I did a walkaway split with my one and only hive in my yard. It was boiling over with bees and I was afraid they were already making swarm plans. It was an old hive that I had neglected when I moved into this house in 2021 and the brood boxes were full of cross comb. The original hive died and before I could clean it out, a swarm moved in while I watched! So this new occupant is dealing with crossed comb and I can't inspect the brood boxes. So a walkaway split is the ideal way to manage this. I could see looking between the frames that there was brood and hopefully eggs in both boxes. Because I am not sure about this, I am trying an experiment.

I used a double screened board and did the even split but kept the boxes stacked on each other with the double screened board between what is now two hives. If one of the halves does not have a queen in three weeks, I'll recombine them. 

Bees testing out new hive's entrance

The red arrow (above) points to the Snelgrove or double screened board between the two colonies. The center of the board has a movable entrance, open on the upper side to allow bees from the upper colony to have an entrance. 

Then I drove over to the community garden (20 minutes there and 20 minutes back) and removed the queen includer from each of the hives. There were still bees at the queenless hive - appearing to protect the entrances so I know they weren't robbers - but what are they doing there?

I hadn't been back at home five minutes when my phone rang. It was the beekeeping teacher at SPARK where there is a hive of bees. They had had an "incident" in which a teacher was stung. I haven't been in that hive this year, so I got back in the car and drove 20 minutes to the school. There I found a healthy hive, boiling over with bees with not a queen cell in sight. There were, however, plenty of eggs in the brood frames.

So to change the atmosphere over there, Whitney (the new beekeeping teacher) and I made an even split into the second empty hive on the school rooftop. The bees will be calmer, will be distracted by the need for one half of the split to make a queen, and they are not likely to swarm. 

Needless to say, when I drove home 20 minutes in the Atlanta 5:00 traffic, I was bee-exhausted and truly tired from four solid days of Bee-Ing!

A Swarm on a Mailbox - Never an Easy Collection

 On Monday, I was called to collect a swarm from a mailbox in a neighborhood near mine. It's never easy to collect a swarm from an unmoving landing spot. Some difficult ones I've had in the past included a swarm on a I-beam; a swarm on a chain link fence; and a swarm on a bench. I don't ever like being violent with bees but a gentle shake into a collection box is much easier than trying to seduce the bees away from the solid item they've chosen to land on.

This mailbox, while quite accessible, was a challenge. I took a nuc box filled with drawn comb frames to use to gather the bees. I haven't done this before and it wasn't easy but as time passed (a lot of time - I was there over an hour!) I got better at sort of scooting the drawn frame up under the bees, sliding from the bottom up. In the very end, I had to brush the last of the bees into a scoop but that probably amounted to only about three hundred or so bees. 

Then when I arrived at the community garden to install the hive, I used a method I saw on a Cotswold, England beekeeper's YouTube channel. It was a miracle to watch the bees march into the hive. They looked like a school of fish made of bees as they flowed into the entrance. 

Now we have two hives of bees at the community garden, ready to grow and be a part of the MABA hive inspection program. My first inspection is on March 12!

First Swarm of the Year: February 27

 I was called to get this swarm because the teaching hives at the community garden died. One died before winter - it was full of really mean bees and I don't miss them a bit. The other was alive two weeks ago with good signs like bees flying in with pollen on their legs. But I opened the hive on Sunday, the 26th, and there was NO brood, about half a nuc box worth of bees and two solidly filled medium boxes of honey. Clearly there was no queen and the hive would not make it.

Metro Atlanta has six teaching sites with hives for hands on hive inspection sessions to teach new beekeepers how to do it. We are first in line for swarms for these teaching hives if a hive dies. So I called our swarm hot line and literally the next day, Dave, the swarm commander, called me to go for this swarm which was about a seven minute drive from my house.

Below is the YouTube of the capture of the swarm and its installation at the community garden. I left a queen excluder under the bottom box and above the entrance because swarms have left the community garden location before. It's on Georgia Power land and I don't think the bees like the current in the electrical lines. So I hived the swarm and left the excluder on for a day and a half. I removed it yesterday.

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Short Course Metro Atlanta Beekeepers January 28, 2023

 Most beekeepers, if they are lucky, get to participate in a short course. Many bee clubs offer short courses. Metro Atlanta's is one of the best. If you are interested, want to learn to keep bees, and live within driving distance of Atlanta, we offer a great course. It's a one day course in all that you need to know to get started keeping bees. Location of the course: Peachtree Road United Methodist Church in the heart of Buckhead, Atlanta.

Julia Mahood, Claressa Lucas and I are the co-chairs and organizers of the course. We would love to have you! We all teach in the course. Julia is a master craftsman beekeeper, Claressa is a journeyman and I am a master beekeeper. Our instructors are all well-trained and very experienced. You can get hands-on experience at our in-person hive inspections after the course is complete for the whole of 2023's bee season. Also you automatically become a member of the Metro Atlanta Beekeepers. If you come from another area, we will pay for your dues at the club of your choice.

Here's a link to the registration for the course.

For 2020 and 2021, the course was held online. This year it is in person. The photos below are from 2019, the last year we had a face-to-face course.

Ed Hoehn demonstrates to some of our 2019 attendees how to light a smoker.

The course includes a vendor to help you in ordering supplies. And you can spend the lunch hour in a small eight person group, eating with an experienced beekeeper. You can ask all the questions that might have not been answered during the morning's talk.

Join us if you are in the area! If not, find a local beekeeping short course and take it. You won't regret it and will surely add to any knowledge you already have about keeping bees.

Here's a link to the registration for the course.

Tomorrow is the last day for bidding at BIP

CLICK HERE TO VISIT AUCTION SITE!

 

Bee Informed Partnership Auction

 I am excited to support the Bee Informed Partnership where we all get so much good information about our bees. I have two quilted items in the auction this year. The auction runs from now until November 7. 

Here's a link to the auction...there are wonderful items up for bid, all of which benefit this organization which is so helpful to bees and beekeepers.

Below are photos of my two quilted items in the auction: a bag, suitable as a knitting bag or a purse and a bee-themed table runner.

It has a lined pocket on the outside and inner pockets as well. The closure is a bee button.

The table runner has bee fabrics from those I have collected for years and is about 32 inches long:

In addition to my items, there are tons of bee items on which you can bid. Go and support this great organization.

October Crossword: Fun and Facts about Wax

As we begin the fall season, many beekeepers use this time to deal with products of the hive. The October crossword that I made is about wax - a very important hive product and one that most beekeepers have access to. Enjoy!