Follow Up on the Bee Move

Finally today I went over to move the homeless hive to the place where their sisters have relocated.  There were about 500 bees in the box - some may have been left behind and even though we put greenery on the entry way to get the bees to re-orient, some may have left the new location to go foraging and returned to the old home place about a miles away.

The bees seemed happy and active in their new location:

I gathered up what we left the other night (screened wire, inner cover, bungee cords) before situating the hive box.

Then I place the hive box entrance facing the two hives.  There is no queen in this box, just errant bees.  Some are probably from one hive and some from the other.  The way I placed the box made it easy for the bees to go to their chosen home box.

First I set it there with the top off and the screened wire still attached.  Then I looked up at the storm clouds and thought I didn't want to ruin my equipment.

So then I took the screened wire off the entry and put the telescoping cover sort of catty corner, exposing the two frames with the most bees on them.

And this was how I left it.  I hope the bees leave this box and go home to whichever Mama is theirs.

And on the Longest Day of the Year, What did We Do?..........

We moved bees and laughed at ourselves the whole time.  Sebastian is moving and the two hives of bees at his house had to move as well.  Jeff and I were up for the job and the logical (it seemed) time in our busy lives to do it was Friday night.

Neither of us thought about the fact that Friday was the Summer Solstice and thus the longest day of the year.  The sun didn't set until 8:51!!!!!  I'm very busy these days and Jeff and Valerie have a baby who wakes them up every morning at 5 AM so neither of us were really full of energy at 8:51.

Nonetheless, we drove to Sebastian's house and outfitted Sebastian in my bee jacket, gloves and veil.  He and Jeff were to be the brawn of this move and I was the person manipulating the hives (and therefore getting stung).  Here are our steps:

1.  We lit the smoker - oops, well, I left the lighter at home, but Jeff had a lighter in his fantastic car storage compartment (more about that later!).  We smoked the bees to get the front porch stragglers to go inside the hive.

2.  We closed both hives up with screened wire with Jeff shooting the staple gun.

3.  We took the top two boxes off of the tall hive, set them on a bottom board and gave them a top for the trip.

4.  We strapped both hives tight together and bungee cord strapped the top box combo.

5.  Jeff and Sebastian loaded the three hive box combos into Jeff's car.   It was getting dark, but Jeff in his amazing car storage bin had two flashlights - a mag light and a small silver flashlight that I had put in his Christmas stocking a couple of years ago.

6.  Meanwhile an unhappy bee flew under my long-sleeved shirt, under my untucked t-shirt and stung me right in the tummy - ouch!  I'm so used to wearing a jacket that it never dawned on me to tuck in my shirt.

Note:  We left a hive box - a single box - on a bottom board with a top cover to allow any wayward bees to have a place to hangout.  I'll go back and move whatever bees are still there tomorrow.

7.  With three boxes in the car, we drove slowly to Sebastian's new house. 

8.  Jeff backed carefully into Sebastian's new driveway and we began the unloading process - we had to unload the cinder blocks and place them as well as the hives.

9.  When the hives were placed, we undid the straps.  Then I took off the top of the big hive to add the removed honey supers back.  OMG, those bees were all gathered at the top of the box, loaded for bear and wondering what the %$#@*** had just happened to their happy abode.  

I got stung on three fingers of my right hand - each finger getting several stings.

10.  For the do what I say, not what I did crowd, we would have been better served, I think, to remove the screen wire from the front of the hive before taking the top off, but I didn't think of that.

11.  We put grass on the fronts of both hives to help them reorient, leaned the inner cover from the fake hive against the fence to allow those bees to find their way home and headed for Jeff's car.

12.  In the car, I had Benadryl - the dissolve on your tongue kind - but no way to open the package.  In his magical car storage bin, Jeff had a sharp knife and opened the package for me.  

I'll go anywhere with Jeff in his car any time - that man is prepared for anything.....well, he didn't have a glass of wine and I sure could have used that, but he commented that it would be illegal to have that in his car.  

Good point.

Free Bees

Free bees is a term that typically people apply to a swarm that they capture.  They are free, but it's some work - you have to go to the site, shake the bees into some kind of container, wait around for stragglers to join their mother, drive them to your apiary and install them in a box.  Yes, they don't cost any money but they definitely cost you in time.

Real free bees are the kind we found at Stonehurst Place this weekend.  We arrived for our inspection that we do every couple of weeks.  I've been in Colorado at a professional conference so we haven't been to Stonehurst in three weeks this time.

You'll remember our terrible robbing incident at Stonehurst at the end of bee season last year.  So we went into winter with one dead hive that I took down to one box and left as a swarm lure.  Then we had two live but small hives.  One hive survived the winter well enough but hasn't been bursting at the seams.  It's still only three boxes tall - enough for winter but not to rob.

The other hive dwindled and died - I don't think I reported it here, but we determined it was almost dead on May 2 and there were no live bees in it on May 19.  The hive did have honey in it - almost a full box.

The hive in the middle is the live hive that made it through the winter.

So this Saturday when we arrived to check on the one live hive at Stonehurst, to our surprise there were  truly FREE BEES!  The "dead hive" had been occupied by a swarm - and it had ivy growing up the front of the hive box!

We checked on the brood and found that there was capped brood that was medium biscuit in color (per Billy Davis).  This means that it was capped about two weeks ago.  So the swarm must have moved in just after Memorial Day.  We saw the queen - probably the gift of a new beekeeper whose newly purchased nuc swarmed.  She had a red dot on her back and was long and lovely:

If you look closely, you can see eggs in all of those cells.  She's hard at work and we were thrilled to have FREE BEES at the Stonehurst Inn.

I don't think unless some miraculous nectar flow happens that we will get any honey from Stonehurst this year, but it's nice to have two hives that we can work on keeping healthy through the winter.

Queenly is as Queenly Does

So today was the day to check on the red dot Mississippi queen in Ron's hive.  First I went to check on Sebastian's hives.  The first split hive was doing well.  The queen was laying.  I saw one frame that was almost 100% eggs!  They were also storing honey but not going gangbusters so they didn't need another box.  I gave them a powdered sugar shake and moved to the survivor hive.

The survivor hive over there was also doing really well.  They had completely filled the top box and were putting honey in odd comb formations between the boxes so even though there was one unused frame in the top box, I thought they needed a new box.

I am using the ventilated hive cover to help do powdered sugar dusting:

It's much simpler and faster than using a sifter.  I put one Sierra cup's worth of sugar on each hive on top of the frames in the brood box.  

I took a frame of brood and young larvae from Sebastian's large hive to give to the hive at Ron's.  I put it in a green pillow case to keep it relatively warm; closed up the hive; and drove to Ron's.

At Ron's my first concern was the Mississippi Queen.  Had she been released now that I removed the old queen on Monday?  I opened the hive and found her still in her queen cage.  The bees were acting eager and friendly around the cage and had eaten all but the last sugar barrier.  There were dead workers in the queen cage.  I opened the queen cage and direct released her.  She moved rapidly into the hive box and I cheered her on her journey and her life.  

I also added the frame of brood and young larvae to the same box in the position where the queen cage had been.  That should give a little boost to the hive and keep them busy.   I marked that frame as Sebastian's R's Hive so that I wouldn't give the Mississippi Queen credit where credit wasn't due and left, hoping that the next time I visit, there will be new eggs on a different frame laid by her.

Before I walked away I glanced at the hive box (no bees in it) next to the Mississippi Queen hive.  There on the side of the hive was a newly hatched luna moth.  So GORGEOUS.  She probably had her cocoon on the side of the hive just under the top cover.  They have to dry for two hours before they can fly.  Here she is in her regal glory:

A Queenly Adventure

At Ron's house we are having hive problems.  If you'll remember he got the queenless side of the Lenox Pointe split and all of Colony Square (which at the time looked queenless).....Since that time, the Lenox Pointe hive simply dwindled away.  The Colony Square hive appears to have gone through two queens.  Neither were any good.

The most recent decision I've made about that hive was to take a queen from Mississippi that I got from my friend Steve Esau and put her in her cage into the Colony Square hive.  There was no brood and hadn't been except for about three or four capped drone cells.  With no eggs and no capped brood, I assumed the queen had died.

I put the queen cage into the hive on Monday last week.  On Friday I went over and found that the hive had not released the queen.  This would imply that the hive with no brood and eggs, has a queen.

I looked through every frame and found the queen.  She was small, with a small abdomen.  I wanted to kill her but just couldn't so I tried to pick her up on my hive tool.  Instead I flipped her out of the hive.  I looked on the ground and couldn't find her, although I found several bees who were flipped out with her.

I didn't have a queen excluder with me.  Jeff suggested that I put it under the hive so she couldn't get back in and that might have worked, but I didn't have one.

What to do?  I decided to break open a honey cell in one of the honey combs and get honey on my finger.  I held it to the openings in the queen cage and let the caged queen lick it off of my finger so she wouldn't starve.  When she quit licking I put her back into the hive in her cage in case the queen I flipped was injured and the bees would want a new queen.  I went to the mountains for the weekend.

Today I went back over there and the queen had still not been released.  I took a queen clip (borrowed) with me and on my second try was able to capture the queen (along with a drone and about three bees).  I dropped the whole contraption into a pillow case, made sure the Mississippi queen in her cage was placed well and went home.

I didn't know what to do with the queen.  She obviously is a dud and I should kill her.  But remember my experience back in 2009?  I swore I wouldn't kill a queen again.

So I brought her home and made a nuc.  I took a frame of brood and eggs from my MS nuc, I took some honey out of Drone Layer, and a frame of capped brood from there as well.  I added a frame of nectar and an empty frame.  I closed the front of the nuc up with screened wire and left them.

I still had the queen in the clip in the pillow case.  I decided that I would slip her in the clip between the frames overnight for the bees to get used to her.  Well, I opened up the pillow case.  All of the bees except the drone and the queen had escaped the clip.

Remember how she is a small queen?  As I picked up the clip, the queen slipped between the slats of the clip and flew away.  Exasperated and relieved, I released the drone.  As I leaned down to pick up the pillow case, the queen landed on my hand.  She had returned to me, since she didn't have a home to go to and the pillow case was her last resting place.

Really?  She wanted to come back to me.....OK, so now I have her in my possession again.  I clipped her back in the clip and put her in the pillow case.  She'll probably get out and be running around the pillow case.

I decided that at dusk, I'll put her in the nuc to be with the bees there.  If they don't want her, they can kill her.  I've given them a frame of brand new eggs to use to make a queen of their own.  I've closed off the tiny nuc so that they won't return to their own old hives and tomorrow I'll open the entrance back up again.

Also tomorrow I'll take a frame of brood and eggs to Ron's hive, just for support for the new queen.

Bee Art at the Hambidge Center in Rabun County

On Betty's Creek Road in Rabun County is a gem of a place called the Hambidge Center.  Mary Hambidge was an artist/weaver who started the Hambidge Center in 1934.  She believed in art and sustainable farming.  I took a weaving class there about 30 years ago.  The Center has a gallery associated with it where art is displayed and sometimes sold.

My friends and I went to the mountains for the Memorial Day weekend.  We walked a trail on the Hambidge property (it covers 600 acres) and visited the Hambidge Center Gallery.  My dog Hannah swam in the N Georgia creek on the trail!

 To my surprise one of the items on display was this:

The sculptor had put sculpted busts into the beehive and let the bees have their way with them!

My friends put me with one of the hives for a photo:

While in Rabun county, I drove to the garden to check on my hive there.  To my shock as I drove up, I could see that the top of the hive was upturned on the ground.  The hive had the inner cover slightly askew.  I ran over to the hive.  One of the gardeners said he thought the wind had blown the top off.  

There is a surround box on top of the inner cover with a Rapid Feeder inside it on that hive.  As a result the top cover isn't propolized as it would be if it were directly on top of the inner cover.  

I checked on the hive which didn't need a new box, but I gave them a new box anyway since I may not be up there for another month and the blackberry is in voluminous bloom right now in that county.  I don't understand why the bees don't do really well in that location, but they don't seem to.

I left the hive with a brick on top of the top cover. 

A Bee-zy Sting-filled Day

This morning started with the dentist - no fun ever.  I had planned to go to the Chastain Conservancy to check on the bees there after my visit to the dentist.

I arrived at Chastain to discover that in my stress over the dentist, I had left both my camera and, more importantly, my smoker at home.  I live about 20 minutes from the site so I decided to go into the bees anyway, using hive drapes and trusting in my slow movements to keep the bees calm.

First I opened the drone-laying Don Kuchenmeister hive.  They have a queen cell but no queen yet so for insurance I wanted to move another frame of brood and eggs from our nuc that lives at Chastain.  I removed a frame to make room for the brood and eggs and promptly was stung on my left hand.  I covered the hive with drapes and opened the nuc.

The nuc is full of bees.  It has rained a lot over the past few days and the bees were none too happy with my intrusion.  A bee flew under my bee jacket and stung me through my t shirt.  Then as I removed the frame, checked to make sure I wasn't taking the queen, and shook most of the bees off of the frame, I got attacked full force.  I usually wear hiking pants to inspect the hives - they are loose and I rarely get stung through them.  This morning I had on jeans and got five stings on my legs during this process.

I closed up the nuc and headed for home, put on my work clothes and headed for my office (I do have a real job!).

I had a break in the afternoon and came home to walk my dogs.  I thought I might stop by the Morningside garden to see if the pesticide kill is still ongoing.  I stopped and walked up to the hive - no protective gear - all in my work clothes.  I walked up to the hive as I often do in my street clothes and took a photo with my phone.  There are a lot of new dead bees so the kill is still happening.

One of the bees really didn't appreciate my presence.  She began head butting me on the side of my head, the back, and finally she landed on my nose right by my nostril where she planted her stinger.

I've gotten stung once before in the nose and it was the worse sting ever. This one matched it.  I began to sneeze and sneezed once per second all the way to the car.  In the car I sneezed all the way to my house where I took Benadryl and put ice on my nose!

Then, lucky, lucky me, my dear friend Julia called me to tell me that she was going to pick up a swarm at Atlantic Station.  She doesn't want/need it and wants to give it to me.  I was thrilled but I wasn't going to be home from work until around 8 PM.  Julia said she would leave the swarm in my backyard and I could install it when I got home.

 Julia sent me photos of the swarm collection.  Atlantic Station is a pedestrian mall in Atlanta near Midtown.  Here's what she found when she arrived:

                                                                                                                                                                            I'm not sure if the blockade was for the bees or for something else.

You can see the bees on the center part bench below.  The are clustered on one front leg.

Here they are up close:

Julia brushed and cajoled them into a large file box that she covered with screen.

At my house when I arrived at 8, I found the bees clustered together in the box - about the size of one cat.

I set up a two box 8 frame medium hive with the insert in the screened bottom board.  I shook the swarm into the hive:

Julia, with all the brushing, wasn't 100% sure that the queen would have escaped without injury, so she suggested that I put in a frame of brood and eggs.  I took one from the package hive in my apiary and put it into the hive box before shaking the bees.  And then I got another sting on my finger.

While I was out there, even though it was getting late, I decided to check and see if the Mississippi queen I had installed in a nuc was released.  I opened the nuc and to my dismay, my nuc making was unsuccessful.  Most of the bees had returned to their original hives (I should have closed it up for 24 hours, but I didn't) and the queen was in her cage surrounded by a handful of bees, but not released.

I pulled the cage out, jumped into the car, drove to Ron's and put the queen cage in his queenless hive that we gave brood and eggs to on Saturday.  The bees seemed eager to meet her.  Her queen cage is the plastic item at about the center of the picture with bees crawling all over it.

And I got my last sting of the day....the best news of the day was that now that I have developed a tolerance for bee stings, my nose stayed its normal size for the rest of my day in the office!

Truth be told, I get stung all the time.  Jeff says that if I would just wear gloves......, but in fact I rarely get stung more than once in a round of inspecting five or six hives.  Today was rather constant - a bee-zy, sting-filled day.

Pesticide Kill - Sad Story

Jeff and I checked on the Morningside hive on Saturday.  It was exactly a week ago that I discovered the pesticide kill in front of the hive.  I had been back there for the next three days after the discovery and there were no more new dead bees.

But on Saturday, thousands of new dead bees were in front of the hive.

What this means is in my mind one of two things:

1.  Someone is spraying their garden on Thursday or Friday and the bees are getting into their flowers and dying.  We've had enough rain that after the spraying, the rain washes off most of the poison, but the neighbor who sprays did it again this Thursday or Friday, bringing a whole new wave of thousands of deaths.

2.  The bees are getting nectar from Carolina Jasmine which is blooming in force right now and is poisonous to bees.

The first is more likely than the second.  If the second were the case, then there wouldn't be these gaps in bee deaths.

I'm sick about it - my best hive being brought to its knees buy someone's uncaring act of poisoning their garden.

Jeff and I took the whole hive apart again.  No pesticide smell, but fewer bees, although this is quite a hive.