What I Take to a Bee Hive Inspection

Once Jerry Wallace gave a great program on what he takes to an inspection. I talked about my re-purposed knitting bag as a bee bag in an earlier post, but thought you'd like to see the contents all laid out (upper left to right)

Flour sacking towel for hive drape
Squirt bottle with sugar syrup in it
Kitchen twine
Wet ones to clean hive tool between hives
Frame gripper
Thumb Tacks
Benadryl
Baby powder (on your hands it keeps bees away and if you use nitrile gloves it helps to slide them on)
Hive tools - prefer to use a different one with each hive as per Jennifer Berry
Plastic Zip Locs for whatever
Magnifying glasses
Swarm lure (in jelly jar)
Large rubber bands
Lighter for smoker
Swiss Army knife
Pruners
Sharpies
Ball point pen
Nitrile gloves
Bee Brush
Frame rack
Clip board with notepaper on it

OK, that's it. What do you carry in your hive kit that I don't?

Setting Up an Old Hive as a Swarm Lure

As you know, my hives on my deck died last fall so I went into the winter with no bees at home. I do have the hive boxes and drawn comb from the defunct hives. I decided to set up one of the hives in my yard as a swarm lure.

I set two hive boxes up with old drawn comb. I took the swarm lure that I made a couple of years ago with lemon grass essential oil (still smells great and lemony) and put some on the hive.



I smeared swarm lure on the landing.


I smeared swarm lure around the hole in the inner cover.






I smeared a little swarm lure at the front of the frame bars in the top box.




The comb in the hive is this past year's comb (only a year old) so it still looks pretty good from when the bees made it.



Now, if I'm lucky and the scout bees fly my way, I may capture a swarm through little effort on my part.

Holly: A Bee Treat

When Dr. Paul Arnold analyzed my honey a couple of years ago, he said that it was predominately flavored by holly. I had never paid attention to the holly when it bloomed, although I always appreciated the resulting red berries. I have two types of holly in my yard and I can smell the sweetness that informs the honey in the bloom.

The pictures below don't have any honey bees in them, since right now my home apiary is bee-less, but you can see the flower and how intense it is. I wish there were bees on these blooms gathering nectar.....

Topsy Check

Today Jeff and I did a quick Topsy check over lunch. We hadn't opened this hive since spring came around. First thing we both noticed was that there were signs of bee poop around both entrances. This could mean nosema or it could mean desperate release after the cold weather. In any event, we documented it with a photo and will see if it's worse when we return.



More bee diarrhea around the entry hole.



First we pulled up the honey comb. Losts of beautiful new wax. Some was cross-combed and we broke it off and tried to straighten it out.



You might remember that we put some old comb into the hive to make it smell attractive to the bees. We tried to lift this one honey comb and found that the bees had barely attached it to the top bar. They had attached it to the sides and to the old comb in the bottom of the hive. We didn't try to move this but we did remove all the old comb except this one piece from the hive bottom.

I don't know what to do with this errant comb - especially since they are storing honey in it.



The first comb at the beginning of the hive was being used for honey storage.



The second comb and several others contained brood and young larvae. We didn't see the queen and in the glare of the 1 PM sun, we couldn't see eggs, but obviously the queen is laying and building up her numbers.



On the down side of things, we saw 2 hive beetles and killed one wax moth larvae. In this photo magnified, I can see two bees with DWV (deformed wing virus) which is vectored by the varroa mite, but I don't see any varroa on the backs of any of the bees.  We also (on the down side) still at some point need to deal with the errant comb - maybe we just harvest it so the bees have room to expand the brood nest.

Installing Ten Packages at Linda T's Bees

Last weekend we installed ten packages of bees into our ten new hives.  We fed each installed hive one gallon baggie of sugar syrup.  We left the bees and will return this weekend to see how they have fared.

Here's what we did to install the packages.  At each hive we put an empty super on over the hive box.  The function of this super is to contain the bees as they are shaken into the hive.  The empty super also serves as a surround to allow interior feeding of the bees both with a baggie feeder and with the jar of syrup that came with them.

Then we pried off the wooden cover over the syrup, worked the syrup feeder out of its place, removed the queen cage.  We took the cork out of the candy end of the queen cage and wedged the cage, screened wire down, between two frames near the center of the hive.  We also tacked it just to be sure.

Next we shook in the bees and either added the baggie feeder before or after adding the bees.

We'll check on them on Saturday this week and see if the queens have been released.

I was working hard through this process and didn't take as many pictures as I often do....but FWIW, here they are:

Bee Sting: Myth or Med

I've always heard that bee stings help with arthritis and other aches and pains; that eating local honey prevents allergies; that eating propolis is preventive medicine.  I rarely get stung and these days when I do get stung, a couple of hours later, I can't even tell you where I was stung.

As you may remember from my earlier post, I had 120,000 bees in my kitchen in packages overnight on Friday night.  Whenever you take bees from a beeyard, inevitably some bees come along for the ride who aren't a part of the package or nuc.  These 12 packages were no exception.  A few homeless bees clung to the outside of the packages housed in my kitchen.

 When I reloaded the packages into the car the next day, all the clinging bees did not choose to go into the car with their sisters.  I noticed on Saturday night that there were some errant bees clinging to my kitchen window blinds.

On Sunday when I arrived home from dinner with my daughters, I saw that my dogs had dislodged the rubber pet door from its screws.  I knelt down to take the door off of its base with a screwdriver.  I had on a sleeveless vest and a long sleeved shirt over it.

Suddenly I felt a piercing pain in the tender flesh of my left underarm.  It burned and felt sharp and uncomfortable.  I looked down on the floor and saw my tormentor, a bee from the clingers on the packages.  I guess she was in the vicinity of the pet door and flew up into my exposed underarm.  It was the most painful sting I can remember.

In the January snow a couple of months ago, I took the dogs for a walk and fell hard on the ice.  Catching myself, I injured my left biceps muscle and have had a hard time getting comfortable to sleep every night since then.  I lie down and feel a tearing pain in my upper arm.  I move around, move around, move around until I find a place where my arm hurts the least before being able to sleep.

Last night for the first time since I fell, I went to sleep with absolutely no pain in my upper left arm.

I'm a believer.  Thank you to the bee who stung me in such a vulnerable, painful place.

Laying Worker, Lost Hive

After we picked up bees last weekend, Julia and I went over to her house to inspect her big hive, Poppy. The hive was thriving. We saw lovely brood in the top boxes.



We saw her majesty and she allowed a photo opp! (I am so glad to get a really good picture of her!)


Julia's other hive was quiet. Only a few bees went across the threshold while we worked on Poppy. When we finished Poppy, we opened the hive (called Leslie's hive),and found only enough bees to cover a frame or so and we didn't see brood, to speak of.

As we examined the frames we discovered cells with several eggs in each cell. This is a clear sign of a laying worker.

See the eggs in the cells below? They don't stand as upright as when the queen lays them and several cells have more than one egg in them.



The old way of thinking says that if the queen is alive and active in a hive, her pheromone production serves to suppress the hormones of the workers. All the workers are fully developed females but they have not been fertilized. Consequently a worker is only capable of laying drone brood.

However, without the pheromone of the queen, the survival instinct of the hive would inspire a worker or workers to begin becoming "productive" at least as much as they can without fertilization females.

However in the Wisdom of the Hive, Seeley says that it is now "clear that the pheromones that provide the proximate stimulus for workers to refrain from laying eggs come mainly from the brood, not from the queen." (Seeley, Wisdom of the Hive, 1995, p. 11) This determination came from Seeley's own study in 1985 and one by Willis Winston, and Slessor in 1990.

Seeley also writes that in a queenright colony, the worker bees police the worker-laid eggs, destroying them when they find them. Isn't that interesting. From a Darwinian point of view, it is for survival of the fittest, but too complex to go into here.

Julia brought the frame in and took the photo below of the frame with no bees on it so we could better see the multiple eggs.

There are 120,000 Bees in my Kitchen

When Julia and I arrived at my house we parked my car in the carport and opened all the doors and windows.  Maybe I would just leave it there, all opened up until tomorrow morning when it was time to go to S Georgia.

We went to lunch (in Julia's car) and worried about the bees - it was supposed to be 80 degrees today in Atlanta and what if they got too hot?  So over lunch, Julia suggested that I take them into the house two at a time, maintaining the nailed-together status.  Maybe, she said, I could slide them onto something like a cookie sheet.  Then it dawned on me - my pizza peel!  Nothing like re-purposing a kitchen utensil for a beekeeping purpose!

Here I am sliding two packages onto the pizza peel.



We did have to saw one set of four boxes apart (I'll duct-tape them back together in the AM) But otherwise they all came into the house easily on the pizza peel.



And then my kitchen was FULL OF BEES!  My dogs didn't know quite how to make sense of this.

One industrious little bee (see the lower right of the package below) walked all over the screen trying to find a way to remove a sliver of wood from their living space.



So here's how it sounded in my kitchen at 4 PM on March 18, 2011: