Splits and a New Small Hive Beetle Trap

My hive, Persephone, has had a hard time of it. When I saw the queen earlier before our two cold snaps and snow in the last three weeks, I should have moved the hive to a nuc. I didn't and today when I opened the hive, there were few bees, no queen, no brood, no larvae. The hive looked done in. There were solid frames of honey, though, and bees still defending the hive against intruders.

I didn't do anything to the hive today, but shut it up and decided that it probably was a goner. I do see defenders on the landing working hard to keep intruders out, so I'm not totally sure the hive is done.

However, I'd like four hives and now with three exploding-with-bees hives, I decided to make a walk-away split. Michael Bush describes a walk-away split this way:

"A walk away split. You take a frame of eggs, two frames of emerging brood and two frames of pollen and honey and put them in a 5 frame nuc, shake in some extra nurse bees (making sure you don't get the queen), put the lid on and walk away. Come back in four weeks and see if the queen is laying."

So I took two frames of brood and lots of eggs from Mellona and one frame of brood and lots of eggs from Aristaeus2. I took two frames of honey and pollen from Bermuda. I put these five frames in this nuc.

Now the bees in the nuc have the resources to make their own queen. Hopefully they'll take the cells with eggs in them and make several of them into queen cells. The bees determine what eggs will be workers and what eggs will be queens. Without a queen, they make one and she's in business in 33 days.

Borrowing from Michael Bush, here is what he labels "Beekeeping Math:"

The egg for the queen hatches in 3 1/2 days
The queen cell is capped in 8+1 day
She emerges in 16+1 day
She is laying in 28 + 5 days



I hope I put enough bees in the nuc - I was paranoid about accidentally getting the queen from the hive from which I was taking the frames. Although the picture doesn't show it, I did reduce the entry before I ended my beekeeping chores today.

Also another beekeeper, Jerry Freeman, who is apparently also an inventor, sent me his small hive beetle trap which I installed today on Bermuda. Bermuda is my strongest hive and is full of small hive beetles.

This trap has a tray in the bottom that you put oil into and then the beetles fall in and die. It doubles as a screened bottom board as well. I didn't have any oil today, so the trap isn't yet functional, but I was taking the hive down to the bottom today, so it was a good time to change out the screened bottom board.



The picture below shows how the tray slides in and out of the bottom board. When I add the oil, we'll see how well it works. This is a great hive to test it because it has always had SHB - not ever in such quantity as to overwhelm or have much impact on the hive, but I'd still like to drown those little guys in oil!



When I went through Bermuda, I found nothing in the bottom box besides empty comb. The bees had moved up to the next boxes during the winter. I removed that bottom box. The rest of the hive included two full boxes of brood, pollen, larvae, eggs and a third box of mostly unused comb. The top box is all honey. I plan to checkerboard the top two boxes to help discourage swarming.

So what you see (from the bottom up) is the hive stand, the Freeman trap, the slatted rack, and four boxes. The box I removed is sitting in front of the hive until tomorrow so that the few bees at remained in it can return to the hive.

Ministering to Blue Heron

Yesterday when we inspected my hive at Blue Heron, we found absolutely no brood, no eggs, no capped brood, no queen cells, nothing. I've been wondering what happened. The hive was boiling over with bees when we installed the nuc and there are still lots of bees but no brood or any evidence of a queen.

It's possible that the queen wasn't in the nuc or that she had died in transit. It's possible that the queen who was probably raised in the fall didn't mate properly.

A gardener at Blue Heron reported that she saw a huge swarm on Friday, hanging on a tree near the hive area at Blue Heron. Possibly the nuc hive swarmed. Sometimes a hive swarms to deal with overcrowding when they don't have enough stores and can't find another solution. However these bees were being fed and had lots of room in the hive.

The swarm being from my Blue Heron hive is less likely because there were no queen cells left in the hive - usually a hive that swarms is reproducing itself and would leave behind resources for the hive to survive. But a virgin queen in the hive would need to make her mating flight and wouldn't begin laying for a while after the hive had swarmed.

The only things to do at this point are:

• To call the supplier who hasn't yet called me back to see if he can supply a queen, since the nuc was supposed to have one or
• To set the hive up to make its own queen by giving it frames of brood and eggs from another hive.
  

The latter is a good thing to do in any event. If there is a queen in the hive, the bees will simply raise the brood I provided them and add to the numbers in the hive. If there is no queen, then the eggs in the cells with allow the bees in the hive to make a queen.

So today I brought a nuc filled with three frames of brood and eggs as well as two frames of honey to Blue Heron.

Important note: When we opened the hive, the bees did not make the characteristic "queenless roar" of a hive without a queen and we didn't use smoke and the bees were not angry and attacking as they were on Day one at Blue Heron.

Sam, Julia's son, helped by spraying the foreign bees and frames with sugar syrup to ease their introduction into the hive.

First I hung a frame rack on the side of the hive to hold the frames I planned to remove. Sam is holding the spray bottle and I have a bee brush to help with clearing the frames of bees when I swap them out.


We pulled the frames from the hive to make space for the nuc frames of brood, eggs and honey.

The frame in the picture below came from my hives at home. It had tons of eggs and some capped brood as well as nurse bees. Sam is poised to spray sugar syrup on the nurse bees as we put the frame into Blue Heron.

We successfully moved all five frames to the hive and took out five frames. Yesterday I had put a new box on the Blue Heron hive so these frames were not used yet. It was easy to remove the bees from them and make room for the frames from home.



When we finished the transfer, we shook the bees off of the original Blue Heron frames back into the hive and closed up the transfer nuc.

Yesterday I noticed the box that I brought over for the second box on the hive had one side broken. In addition to the frame transfer, I also moved all of the frames in the second box into a box that didn't have any damage. I left an empty box on the Blue Heron hive because we have been feeding sugar syrup in baggies, but I should have removed that box. We will feed with a Boardman to avoid disturbing them while they make a queen.

I am in a dilemma about the empty top box. If I leave it they will probably make a mess of comb in it since there are no frames in it (set up to shelter a baggie feeder that is no longer there). If I remove it I'll disturb them in the queen making process.....hmmmm.

Probably the best solution will be to leave the empty box on until a queen cell is probably capped - that would be in about 9 days - so I'll leave the empty for 10 days for good measure - until March 18 - and then remove it.

In the picture below I am moving the frames to the box that is not in disrepair. You can also see the transfer nuc sitting atop Julia's hive.

Blue Heron: The First Inspection

Julia and I visited Blue Heron this afternoon. We installed the nucs on February 25. We've given them sugar syrup about every three days since then. We haven't opened the hives because we wanted to get them well started. Usually you wait at least a week after installation to check on the hive.

There's good news and there's bad news. In the bad news category: We opened my hive which was boiling over with bees. They are in an eight frame box and although we had given them the five frames that came with the nuc and three frames with starter strips, they had already built out the wax in all eight frames. The comb was beautiful, but the cells were all empty. There was absolutely no sign of a queen - not any capped brood, no eggs, no larvae, nothing.

This hive will die out if there is no queen. I called the bee club president who purchased the hives we are using at Blue Heron and he told me to call the supplier, so I did. Hopefully I'll hear back from PN tomorrow, but just for insurance, I'm going to put a frame of brood and eggs into this hive tomorrow from one of my other hives.

We put a box on the hive since they had more than built out the frames so they could keep busy and because the frame I'll bring tomorrow is a medium. We also gave the hive a baggie of sugar syrup.



There was much better news when we opened Julia's hive. Note that the first frame we removed was the next to the last frame - not the last frame. In an inspection, bees get killed but to minimize this, removing a frame that is not next to the hive wall helps. When you are returning that last frame to the hive, having it be in position 2 or 9 makes the bees on the frame press against other bees or wax rather than the hard wood of the hive box and saves bee lives.


Julia's hive is in a 10 frame box. The bees were doing well with capped brood on at least four frames. The remaining frames that we put in the hive when we installed it were empty frames with starter strips of wax. Below you can see a built out frame of wax drawn by the bees. In the lower left corner we saw her majesty (circled in red!). We were so relieved and thrilled to see her.


We put a baggie of sugar syrup on Julia's hive. We didn't put a new box on Julia's hive because there were about 3 frames that hadn't been even started by the bees and the fourth was barely started (see below). In that photo you can see how the bees begin to build out the wax from starter strips.

Note: We found the queen on the second to last frame in Julia's hive. She is likely to be found there in future inspections so we made sure to notice where we found her.

Her hive will need a new box next weekend.

More hive news

My son-in-law was home today while I was inspecting the bees so he shot a picture of me in my new Golden Bee Suit. Now that I've gotten the hang of the headband, I love the suit - comfortable, easy to wear and move around in it.


I opened this hive, Persephone, last and didn't have time to look through the box before going back to work. (I smelled like a campfire but nobody at the office said anything). This hive will move into a medium nuc box this Saturday.


My strongest hive is also my oldest hive. The bees below are from Bermuda - my four year old hive. Bermuda lost her queen over her third winter and requeened herself. This queen is doing well. If you look closely at the photo below (click on it to enlarge it), you'll see brood in all stages, pollen stored, uncapped honey and capped brood.

On Saturday I think I'm going to use frames from this hive and from Aristaeous2 to make a split. I've never done that and want the experience. It is the right time to do it. I'll in Bermuda combine making a split and opening up the brood nest as a way to manage the possibility that this hive will want to swarm this year.



BTW, the top box in Bermuda was heavy, heavy with stored honey.



Just to show what experience does for you, for the first time in three years of beekeeping, my smoker remained lit throughout my inspection today!!!!

Good Hive Inspection News

Today was warm and lovely. I took the opportunity to inspect well two of my hives. First I opened Aristaeous2. This hive was a swarm gathered on April 1 last year.

The bottom box held no bees, no brood, no stores. I took it off of the hive. I now have a box of beautiful drawn comb in medium frames to use somewhere else.

The second box looked like this when I opened it. The bees looked good in this hive. It is a very active hive, often flying in temperatures that surprise me. I expect it to have a really good year.



I pulled a frame from the second box and found good examples of what you can see during good brood production. In case you haven't seen them before, the yellow arrow from the yellow number 1 below points to eggs. Seeing these lets me know that the queen is alive and well.

The yellow arrow by the number 2 points to tiny c-shaped larvae. If you click on this photo so you can see it larger, you'll see examples of brood in all stages of development. The arrow from the number 3 points to capped brood. The queen is laying all around the capped brood, filling in the frame.

I didn't see her but I didn't need to because the evidence is so present.

I left the hive smaller but stronger and look forward to adding another box on the top of this hive very soon.

Newbie Questions at the Beginning of Bee Season

Here at the beginning of bee season, there are many questions that the first year beekeeper asks. I have posted a lot about my challenges and what I have learned. Here are some of the links to posts that may be helpful if you are just getting started:

The basics: What you need to get started in beekeeping
How to build a hive box
How to build a frame
How to install a nuc (a four or five frame mini hive of bees)
How to light a smoker (as if I really can!)
How to do a hive inspection (and why?)

If you get through all of that, there are numerous posts on harvesting honey to produce clear honey, chunk honey and cut comb honey as well as posts on how to melt wax with a simple, cheap solar wax melter - just look on the right side of the blog under videos and slideshows.

Also be sure to search using the Google search bar on this blog for any questions you have and after 500 something posts, I imagine you'll find that I've probably been challenged by the same question at some point!

Feeding Blue Heron in the Cold Weather

Yesterday we had significant snow in Atlanta, but since it's March by this afternoon, all of it had melted away. Around 2 PM I went to Blue Heron to add food to the hives. There was still a tiny bit of snow as you can see in the first picture.



When I arrived at Blue Heron, my car said the temperature was 42 degrees. The jars of sugar syrup had been in my car for the last couple of days and in the cold, unscrewing the top was quite a challenge.

If I had been at home, I would have held the lid under a hot stream of water until I could easily unscrew it. However, no such condition was possible here so I used my Swiss Army knife to loosen the lid. I then substituted a solid lid with tiny punched holes in it.


There were a few bees actually flying around the hives, but unprotected by veil and gloves, I put these two Boardman feeders on our hives. We have added food to these hives now about every two days.

Don't you love Julia's Apis Mellifera?


In case you didn't believe the bees were out and about, I took a picture of one who landed on the grass right in front of the hive!

A Miserable Day for Bees

It's March in Atlanta and guess what! We have snow. It snowed all day long. This picture was snapped around 1 PM. The snow fell thick and beautifully all day. I imagine the bees wished for sun and temps over 60, but instead, in Atlanta's inimitable spring way, the temps were a little above freezing all day long. Tonight it will drop into the 20s. I hope for the best for the bees.

If you're wondering about Bermuda back in the corner with five (5???) boxes, there is an explanation. You'll notice the hive is in all medium boxes. Wintering in mediums requires three full boxes - sometimes four. This hive went into winter with the bottom three boxes full of bees and honey. The fourth box was skimpily filled but did have honey that I never harvested. Above the fourth box is a ziploc baggie so the last box is simply empty, surrounding the baggie.