The Queen in a Nuc Gets Busy Fast

The other day I was looking at the fantastic picture on my beekeeping friend in Turkey, Halil Bilen's blog. He takes lovely pictures and although I can't read his blog, I learn a lot from looking at the pictures.

The picture below is his picture from his blog in April. I noticed that this was a comb hanging down from the top of something and that there are eggs in the comb. Now these eggs look like possibly laying worker eggs because there are two eggs in several cells. Nonetheless, the eggs in the cell in the comb hanging from the top reminded me of what I saw in two of the nucs I recently purchased.


(Thanks for the use of the picture, Halil Bilen!)

In the nucs I bought, there were four frames and a spacer in the five frame nuc. The spacer was simply a board the width of a frame with nothing under it. While hanging out in the nuc, the bees took the opportunity to build comb.

When I removed the spacer before shaking the bees into their new hive home, I slid my hive tool under the comb and disconnected it from its spacer roof. I carried it into my house planning to melt it down in the solar wax melter.

After seeing Halil Bilen's picture, I found the comb I had cut off and examined it closely. In most of the cells the queen had laid an egg! The workers took advantage of the space to build beautiful comb of their own and the queen had obliged by laying in it. I hadn't even seen the eggs when I removed the comb!



If you want to see the eggs, double click on the picture below to enlarge it, and they should be fairly easy to see, even without holding the comb up so the sun is behind you as one would do in the beeyard. I can use these combs to show the Girl Scouts what they are looking for in the hive when they look for eggs.

Haagen Dazs has a new bee commercial

Haagen Dazs has put together a touching and quite lovely commercial effort in their positive bee approach that I wrote about earlier. You can watch the commercial HERE.:

The Queen, The Queen, Long Live the Queen

Today I went to PN Williams' apiary to get a queen for the queenless nuc I had purchased from him. He had told me the queen was in a "queen motel" and would have no attendants and would need to be installed in the hive as quickly as possible. I was free, luckily, this afternoon from 2 - 5, so I could drive the 30 minutes to his house, pick her up, drive 30 minutes to my house and install her before going back to work in a few minutes.

It turned out that the "queen motel" referred to a shoe box sized ventilated box containing a number of queens in cages but not with attendants as they would be in a package. He gave me the queen cage with a candy plug (already opened) and I headed for home. I hung the cage on a frame with a wax foundation so that I could use a twist tie to support it.



I put the frame back into the hive and the bees were all over it. They have been desperate for a queen for 10 days now. When I closed up the hive, I couldn't see the queen cage because it was covered with bees.


Within five minutes of closing up the hive, a worker bee dragged this pupae out the front entrance and dropped her on the ground. I had supplied this hive with a frame of brood and eggs to help them make their own queen. The shape of this pupae caught my eye and I took its picture. I wonder if this were a queen in the making, but the minute the real thing arrived, they cast their creation out.



Below you can see her a little closer up - I'm having a hard time with the macro focus on my camera, but this at least lets you see her back.


While with the bees I added sugar syrup to several feeders on the nuc hives and opened one of the swarm hives that I hadn't checked since I installed it. There is definitely a laying queen there - I saw eggs. They've built out the lower box and I added a new brood box.

Much Activity in the Hives

Today the man who supplied my nucs called to say that my queen may arrive tomorrow afternoon. If she does, I'll need to pick her up and essentially take her straight to my hives and establish her presence there. He said she would be in a container with no attendants.

So on the way to work tomorrow, I will be stopping at the hardware store to purchase #8 hardware cloth to make a push-in queen cage. I've been to two lectures on how to do this - one at Young Harris last year and one at my bee club this year - but I've never done this myself.

Actually I've never introduced a queen. I've ordered nucs that already had a queen in them and I've given hives frames of eggs to make their own queen, but I've never ordered and then introduced the queen to the hive. So this will be yet another first in my life as a beekeeper.

In addition my hives are going really well right now. I checked Bermuda this morning and they are slow to work on the top box. I am thinking that they probably swarmed when I wasn't home. They are acting like a hive rebuilding rather than a hive that is moving into honey production. Mellona is doing great and today I added a honey super.

The small swarm from the Dunwoody yard has not been opened because I suspected that it has a virgin queen who had to be mated and return to the hive. I opened the top of that hive today to see how it's going in there and they seemed angry. I am wondering if they are in fact queenless. I did give them a frame of brood and eggs a week after they arrived, but I'm not sure they have made a queen. They had built out all of the frames in the boxes they had so I added a third box.

Tonight I built frames and waxed in starter strips of foundation. I expect that before the weekend at least two more hives will need more growing space and probably Bermuda will need a honey super (cross your fingers).

Working with the Girl Scouts

On Monday it was really hot in Atlanta - my car said 81 degrees when I got into it at 6:30 PM to go to talk to a group of Girl Scouts. This troop was presenting a "Try-It" to their service unit. The idea was to introduce Brownies and Junior Girl Scouts to the idea of beekeeping and to teach them some about the purpose of bees in the world.

I had to work all day and planned to leave straight from my office to get to the meeting to talk to the girls at 7:15. So I took all of my "props" with me - frames of honeycomb, wax comb with eggs in it, homemade hand cream and lip balm, photos, my bee hat and veil. I opened the back of my car at 6:30 to find that my car had been like a solar wax melter, melting the honeycomb off of the frame. Thank goodness it fell onto a ziploc baggie containing other stuff and didn't ruin my photographs!

I brought honey for the girls to taste. I spoke to a large group of Junior Scouts. These girls are Brownie Scouts. They were a little cautious about trying the honey until they actually tasted it. Yum!

You can see on the table some of the items the girls worked on - they had drawings of a bee to teach the girls the anatomy of the bee, they did some geography (had a contest to see who could figure out the most states with the bee as their state insect!), and they played some games with the girls. I certainly enjoyed my part.


I am mentoring this Girl Scout troop as they begin their own beekeeping. They ordered a nuc of bees which arrived this past weekend. On Sunday I will meet with them to help them do their first hive inspection. If the way they conducted this "Try It" is an indicator of the job they will do with their bees, they will be quite successful at the task!

Nuc Hive without a Queen

Yesterday I went into my hives with the video camera, planning to make a video on how to do a hive inspection. The reason there's no video with this post is that I didn't get a good film. I opened four hives and in each instance, there was an auditory issue - in three of the four hives, an airplane flew overhead as I began the inspection! In the fourth hive, my dogs started barking loudly, making it difficult to hear.

The next problem is that I did the inspection at noon while the sun was overhead and thus the lighting was terrible. As a result you can't see anything on the frames that I pulled out. I also positioned the camera so that it focused on the hive. So when I pulled a frame and held it up to look at it, the frame was out of sight of the camera.

I may post one of these films to keep my promise to make one this weekend, but I definitely will be doing it again and differently.

The most upsetting thing I found in inspecting these hives was that one of my nuc hives appears to have no queen. These three nucs were installed last Friday, one week ago. Two of the hives have very active queens - I've seen Her Majesty in each of those hives and can see eggs and new brood in those hives.

In the nuc hive on my deck, there is absolutely no new brood after a week. I searched through the hive again today and still didn't see the queen on any frame and there were no eggs, brood or young larvae.I called the man from whom I purchased the nuc and he said he would get a queen for me and call me when she arrived so I could come and pick her up.

Meanwhile I have a queenless hive full of bees and eager to draw out comb, etc. They have polished the cells where new workers are hatching and are waiting, but there's no queen to lay eggs in them.While I am waiting for the new queen to arrive, I borrowed a frame of eggs, brood, etc. from Mellona to add to this hive.



If you double click on the frame above, you can see eggs in the 12:00 position in each cell. These are newly laid and will give the hive a chance to make its own queen. There is some capped worker brood in this frame on the side you can see as well as lots of pollen both in picture one (side A) and in the picture below (side B)



You can see how many bees are in Mellona in the picture below. You can see where I took the frame of brood and eggs. In its place I put a starter strip frame on the side of the box and pushed the frames closer together to make up for the space from my removal of the frame.

When I took the frame out, I shook it hard to send any bees remaining on it back into their home hive, Mellona. The remaining bees clinging to the frame I was moving were nurse bees. I checked each bee carefully to make sure I wasn't moving the queen out of her hive and then placed the frame into the nuc hive.

What's Involved in a Hive Inspection

This weekend if the weather cooperates I'll make a video of an inspection - I'm no master of inspections, but I'll show you what I do when I do one. Meanwhile, there is a slideshow that I made last year when I went on a hive inspection of the beehives at the Atlanta Botanical Garden. Here's the link.

I spend a lot of time observing my hives from the outside. I watch them when I am at home for meal times and sometimes I just sit on my sunporch and watch their comings and goings.

However, this post is about inspecting the inside of the hive.

It's important to know why you are inspecting the hive. There could be many reasons.

• As a beginning beekeeper, inspecting the hive is the only way to know what goes on in there in the dark since the bees don't have windows!
  
• You can learn to tell the difference between the drones and the workers
• You may see the queen
• You can observe the difference in capped brood, capped drone brood, and capped honey
• You can observe what a queen cell looks like (even a hive that has a good queen and/or isn't going to swarm usually makes a queen cell or two for insurance)
• You may see where the queen is laying by looking for larvae and eggs (hard to see)
• You may see an emerging bee in the capped worker brood
  

• It's also important to look for signs of problems in the hive

• Is the queen's laying pattern a good one? That means that the capped brood is in more or less a football shape in the center of the frame. The brood is pretty solidly capped - not many skipped cells or empty cells
• Do the workers show signs of illness? Deformed wing virus is easy to see - the wings of the workers are shriveled or malformed. You might even see a varroa mite on the back of a bee - it looks like a red tick (as in on a dog)
• Do you have small hive beetles? If so, you might want to invest in a trap - vinegar or oil. And I smash as many as I can with my hive tool.
  
• Do you have a wax moth problem? This usually only occurs if the hive is very weak. The wax moth is always present, but a strong hive keeps the wax moth from growing there. A weak hive doesn't have the resources and the hive can be overrun with wax moths.
• Does the hive smell funny? Wax moths and SHB make a sicky sweet rotting kind of smell - otherwise the hive will simply smell of delicious honey
  

• Do you need to do something to help the hive prosper?
  
  
• Does the hive need a new hive box added? The general rule of thumb is if the hive has built out and used 80% of the top box, it's time to add a new box (that means 8 out of 10 frames in a 10 frame box).
• If there's lots of burr comb on the tops of the frames, you may want to scrape that off. You'll see Gerard do that in the Botanical Garden hive inspection. It's not necessary, but you may want to make the hive easier for you to manipulate
  
• Is the hive honey-bound? This means that above the brood box in the next brood box, instead of brood, you have a solid box of honey. Usually, at least here in the south, the bees have brood in two boxes. If the brood is stopped by a wall of stored honey, the queen usually won't pass by the honey to lay in the box above that, so you'll want to move the honey filled super and put a new brood box below it.
  
  
• What does the hive sound like?
  
  
• When I first open the hive and pop the top cover, I listen for the bees. If I am quiet and gentle in my movements and the hive is doing well, usually there is a humming buzz, but nothing more.
• If there is a problem before I do anything, the hive buzzes with a roar. Sometimes the roar means there is no queen, so I want to pay attention to that
• When I do something intrusive like a powdered sugar shake, the bees roar and grumble - I would too - who wants to have a powdered sugar shower on a perfectly lovely day for foraging?

Those are the purposes and thoughts I have for inspecting. Here are some other aspects of the hive inspection that I try to follow:

1. I use as little smoke as possible. I always light the smoker in case I feel a need to discourage the bees from bothering me, but mostly I light the smoker and set it aside while I work. I do puff one puff of smoke at the front door of the hive when I begin the inspection - it's like knocking on the door to announce my presence. Then mostly I forget about it.
2. Always approach the hive from the side or the back. It is disturbing to the bees to walk straight up to the front of the hive - the guard bees will greet you and you will get started on the wrong foot with the bees.
   
3. Move slowly and gently. You will kill a few bees, but remember that there are up to 60,000 bees in an active hive and it's impossible to do an inspection without killing a few.
4. Be careful in lifting the frames out of the box. I usually take out frame #2 or #3 and hang it on a frame rack while I move the other frames in the box. I don't want to risk losing the queen so for the most part I hold the frame over the box to look at it (then if she's on the frame and falls, she falls into the hive.)
5. Don't assume that you can just grab the frame and lift it up. Most of the time the frames are propolized to the side of the box and need you to break the grip with your hive tool before lifting the frame.
6. You only need to go through enough boxes on the hive to satisfy your reason for inspecting. For example, if you are looking to see if the queen has a good laying pattern, as soon as you find a frame that represents the good laying pattern, you can stop your inspection. You don't need to look at every frame or in every box on the hive.
   
7. Always put the frames back in the box in the same orientation in which they were when you lifted them out. Unless you have a reason to manipulate the frames, put the frame back exactly where you found it. It's the bees' home and they have it arranged just the way they want it.
8. When you replace the boxes back on top of one another, slide them onto the box below so that the bees can be gently pushed out of the way rather than squashed

Everyone has their own tragic stories - I've dropped frames, dropped the inner cover on top of the bees below, squashed bees, killed bees with my hive tool, killed a bee when I was trying to smash a small hive beetle, brushed bees badly, etc.

You'll have yours too - it's just part of bee-ing a beekeeper.

OK, those are all of my thoughts for the moment. I'm sure I'll think of more about inspecting, but I'll save it for the video if I do it this weekend.

Useful link: Mother Earth

My Apiary 2008

This year I am starting the season with seven hives. Here are four of the deck hives - left to right:

• Bermuda - starting her third season with a queen they replaced in the fall

• Mellona - starting her second season - I haven't seen the queen yet this year

• Small Swarm collected on 4/8 in Chamblee - may or may not have a viable queen in two medium hive bodies and isn't named yet
  

• Swarm collected on 4/1 from an office parking lot shrub in Sandy Springs in my former swarm lure hive - also without a name
  

In front of Bermuda is my first as yet unnamed nuc hive, hived on 4/11

In my yard in a flower bed is nuc hive #2 also unnamed as yet, hived on 4/11

Also in my yard under another tree is nuc hive #3 unnamed, hived on 4/11

So I need five hive names - Greek/Roman mythology, here I come!

My yard guys are going to quit. I've let them ignore the deck because they are uncomfortable with the bees. I've been thinking I'd hang a veil for them to use on the fence so that my backyard gets cut this summer. We'll see.

A couple of years ago, I went to an Appalachian festival in Frostburg, MD where my daughter, Becky, lives. A woman there had goats that she named alphabetically according to year. The year we met her goats, they all had names that began with M: Muriel, Mabel, Maryanne.

I love this yellow paint that my friend Tracy gave me. I think for the year 2008, every box I paint will be yellow and every top, SBB or bottom board will be painted blue.