Crossword puzzle about Hive Inspections

Just for fun, I did a crossword on hive inspections that I plan to put in the GBA Newsletter, but I thought I'd put it here as well for your fun and games:


If you'd like to work it online, here's the link.

1 2 3 4 5

6 7 8

9 10

11 12 13

14 15 16

17 18

19 20

21

22 23 24

25 26

27 28 29

Hive inspections

Across

Seeing these on an

inspection lets you know

without having to see her

that the queen is alive and

doing well

1

What it feels like a ten frame

deep full of honey weighs

3

Used to make the bees think

there is a forest fire

6

If the temperature outside is

under 60 it is probably too

___ to open your hive for an

inspection

9

What's left in the smoker

when the pine straw is all

burned up

11

Sometimes you need to use

this tool to get the bees off

of a frame for easier

observation

12

Another name for a hive

super

14

Some beekeepers just use

one puff of smoke at the hive

entry to greet the bees and

say __

16

If you see a small hive

beetle, _____ it with your hive

tool!

17

In an inspection you place

the top cover upside down

on the ground so you can

stack the boxes __ it as you

remove them from the hive

19

Really thick honey does not

pour quickly out of the cell

but is more likely to do this

20

When the beekeeper sees

this in the cells, he/she feels

great if there are multiple

colors

21

A term to describe how bees

make honeycomb on

foundation

22

This or other varieties of this

substance can be used to

refill small hive beetle traps

during an inspection

24

If you use hive drapes, you

should pick tightly woven

material. Bees have hair all

over their bodies and are

likely to get caught in the

material if it is nappy or

_____.

25

The drone is not a girl.

Instead the drone is a ___

27

State that is the largest

source of package bees in

the country

28

The last three letters of the

protective headgear worn

during an inspection

29

Down

Description of slime left by

small hive beetle

2

Bees typically land in the

entry and walk in__ their hive

3

We want to find in our

inspection that the hive is __

4

It's better for your hive to

face east or southeast than

this direction

5

What the queen is to the

bees in the hive

7

When you hurry and ____

through an inspection, you

are likely to miss something

important or to make a costly

error like dropping a frame

8

Collect this to melt and make

hive products

10

An essential implement to do

a hive inspection

13

Term for larvae

14

If you only see drone brood

in an inspection, you may

have a _______ queen

15

The key to a successful hive

inspection is to move ______.

17

Delicious product of a strong

hive

18

The drone is not the Mama

of the bees but when he

mates with the queen, he

becomes the __.

21

If you break open a lot of

honeycomb during an

inspection, you invite other

bees to do this to the hive

you are inspecting

23

An abbreviation for

Tennessee apiary! Or when

you close up the hive at the

end of an inspection, you

might say, __dah!

26

The Beekeeper's Car and the Parking Attendant

A friend of mine and I eat lunch every other Wednesday. Today we met at a restaurant where you have to valet park. We had a delicious lunch and at the end of lunch, we walked down to the valet stand and each handed the attendant our claim tickets.

Moments later David's car arrived; he got in it and rode away. The people behind me got their car; the people standing in back of them got their car. Mine had yet to appear.

Finally my car arrived from the parking deck. The attendant jumped out out of the car, and two bees flew out with him.

"M'am," he said, "There are bees in your car!"

My guess is that he arrived to get my car and saw bees on the driver's side window. He waited, hoping they would move, but when they didn't, he screwed his courage to the sticking place and finally got in anyway. Of course, he arrived with my car and without any stings, but he probably felt insecure for the whole fifty feet of the drive!

I told him that I was a beekeeper and that there are almost always bees in my car at this time of year. He and the other attendants, listening in, looked shocked and then laughed.

I haven't mentioned yet that last night my friend Gina gave me a swarm that she collected. I drove over to her house to get it at 7:15 last night and took it straight to the Stonehurst Inn where the I-Beam swarm had absconded. I have been desperate to get bees for them and was delighted to get the swarm.

I installed the swarm in the hive at Stonehurst, but as usual when one installs a swarm, some of the bees remained in the original cardboard nuc box in which Gina had dumped them.

Hive box ready for the dumping of the cardboard nuc box.

The bees are in this cardboard nuc box.

I'm ready to put the cover over the hive when I realized two things: there were bees clustered on the outside of the top box just beneath the edge of the inner cover on both the front and back of the hive.

I had put the nuc from which they came in front of the hive, but nobody was using the front door. 

Often when you install a swarm, the rest of the bees will just file in the entrance to join the queen. Not these bees.

So I shook and brushed the excess bees onto the inner cover. I used my bee brush to gently roll the bees on the upper edges of the top box up and onto the inner cover.

I noticed bees with their bottoms in the air, signaling to their sisters that the queen was in the hive. That felt comforting but the lack of use of the front door was distressing to me, since the I-Beam swarm hadn't taken to these quarters. 

The bees began to treat the hole in the inner cover as their entry and started moving into it. I love to watch the process - it's like a slow moving river of bees.

To me this view from farther back gives you the feel of the move to the center hole. To get this moving flow of bees, I had shaken the cardboard box, shaken the empty box I had used as a pouring funnel, and brushed the bees off of the hive sides to the top. 

Although typically I would have left the cardboard nuc until the next day, I wanted to return it to Gina because the restaurant where I ate lunch was close to her house. Also it was supposed to pour rain today and I didn't want the box to get ruined. I took the cardboard box (with the few remaining fifteen or so bees) to my car. 

Thus the adventure was created for the parking attendant! 

I was so concerned after the I-Beam swarm absconded. I returned to Stonehurst tonight to check and indeed, the bees had found the front entrance and were using it well. Typically I put in an entrance reducer, but decided to leave this one wide open for now. I can reduce the entrance in the next week's visit.

Bee-Surprise at Home in the Process of Managing Swarms

The invited swarm at Tom's house that moved in in response to my swarm lure appeared to be queenless when I opened the hive a couple of weeks ago. As you'll remember from my last post, my plan was to take them a frame of brood and eggs every week for the next few weeks.

I decided to take the frame of brood and eggs from my survivor hive that overwintered as a nuc and has a queen from the Bill Owens' survivors that I own. At this time of year at the height of the nectar flow, I rarely take a hive down to the bottom box. Mostly I look at the top box to see if they need more space for nectar.

I opened the survivor hive and started lifting off the heavy eight frame boxes full of honey. When I got to the next to the bottom box, I thought there was a possibility of a brood frame there, so I started pulling frames. To my horror, the brood frames were back-filled with nectar - no eggs, no brood. On two frames I saw newly opened queen cells.

The top box on this hive contained four fully capped honey frames and four untouched frames to the right of them. This has been the case for two weeks of heavy nectar. So now I know they have been placing the nectar in empty brood frames.

Oh, no, these bees are without a current queen or at least have a brand new queen. Both queen cells had been ripped open from the side, so probably represented the new queen killing her potential rivals.

Finding all brood cells back-filled with nectar in that second box, I went into the bottom box of the hive. There I found more back-filled brood cells but on one frame, I found highly polished empty cells, waiting for the queen to return to fill them. I felt some relief, thinking that the queen was on her mating flights and that this hive was, indeed, OK.

This morning I saw bees flying in with pollen.

I am feeling reassured. But to make sure they didn't keep back-filling the brood chambers, I went ahead and put a new super on above the four filled frames.

The brood frame for the queenless hive at Tom's house would have to come from a different hive.

Swarm Follow-up

I've gotten four swarms this year. The first was up high in a tree in Buckhead. The second was in an I-Beam down south of Atlanta past the airport in Forest Park. The third was in a holly bush in Buckhead. I also got a fourth swarm which just found and moved into an empty hive at Tom's house.

So to follow up:

When I captured the third swarm, I immediately housed it in an eight frame box at the community garden in my neighborhood.

The first swarm was given to me by the caller even though they were his own bees from his own beeyard. I housed them at my house in a nucleus hive for a little while to get them good and started, but I had promised that they would go to the community garden. So about two weeks after I got them, I moved them, still in the nucleus hive to the garden. The greenery on the front is to help the bees know that they need to orient to the new location.

Since they were in a nuc, I kept the moving strap around them. We've had vandals at the community garden who are fond of opening the top of the hive and leaving it like that - terrible for the bees. It's fun to keep bees in a nuc - like a tree. We also keep stones on the tops of those hives - not like we have wind, we don't, but rather to let the vandals know that removing the top is not suggested.

I checked on that hive yesterday as well as the holly bush hive. The nuc hive was boiling over with bees. The holly bush hive also was almost ready for a new box, so since I was there and had the box, I went ahead and added it.

Here's what the nuc hive looked like when I got there:

At this time of year, unless I have reason to worry about a hive, I mostly am opening the box to see if they have used up their storage space and need more room. The nuc hive was bursting at the seams. The minute I put the new box on, the beard disappeared and the bees were happy. 

The difference in the entry is remarkable.

So the last two stories are not happy fairy tales. After all the work to get the I-Beam swarm - two trips to Forest Park, a whole day's worth of time removing them and installing them at the Inn, I went to the inn to check on them and they had vanished. They did not like their quarters and had left. Discouraging. I will need to make a split to give the inn because currently they have no bees.

And the swarm that accepted my invitation and moved into Tom's empty hive appears queenless. When we first inspected that hive after Tom informed us about the swarm, there was a laying queen but the hive had also made queen cells. Sometimes swarms do that - move with the old queen and then fairly quickly get rid of her and make a new queen. Or she may have mated badly. So the next time I inspected there was no pollen coming into the hive and no sure signs of a laying queen. 

Tomorrow I'm taking them a frame of brood and eggs from one of my five backyard hives. I'll do that for a week until I know they have a good queen in the hive, or until they succeed in making one. I'm hoping I get over there tomorrow and find that they, in fact, have an obvious laying queen.

Atlanta is a big city. My hives in my backyard in Virginia Highlands are doing quite well - making lots of honey and thriving. Julia's backyard hives in the northern part of town are not making much honey - at least not as much as last year. It may simply be the difference in location. Also she has lots of construction and forest DEstruction going on behind her house. 

But Tom's hives are also located in her part of town and neither hive needed a new box at my last visit.

Where do Bees and Babies Come From?

Today I spent my morning giving a presentation on bees and beekeeping to the second-grade classes at Chestnut Elementary School in Dunwoody, Georgia. The kids were adorable and listened with open mouths when I told them all about the bees and the beehive. I took an observation hive with me and after hard looking, at the very end, one of the students found the queen on the frame for all to see.

I'm explaining to them the jobs of the bees in the hive. I tell them that the queen bee is an egg-laying machine and that she lays eggs all day long. I also tell them that in the dark, she knows when it's the longest day of the year on June 21, and at that point begins to slow her egg-laying down until the shortest day on December 21. Sometimes by the winter solstice, she may have ceased laying eggs altogether. But that date is also the marker for when she begins to increase her egg laying to build up the population for spring.

I explain that the bees in the hive take care of the queen - they feed her, they groom her, and, ...wait for it..., they carry out her poop! Their eyes get big for a second and then they start laughing.

Then I turn to the drone. I ask them if they know what a couch potato is? They all laugh and say yes.

I tell them that the drone is the couch potato of the beehive. They've all seen The Bee Movie and I tell them that it's all wrong. The boy bees don't do any of the work - they just get fed by the girl bees.

"Just like in my house," a little girl says.

Then I say that the drone has one job to do and that is to fly up into the air every day to hang out with other drones in the drone congregation area. The drones all wait, I say, for a queen to fly through the drone congregation area and they try to give the queen a "special hug."*

"A special hug?" they question.

At this point, as the speaker, I am in a bit of a bind. These are seven and eight-year-olds. Have their parents told them about sex yet? Maybe some have, but surely some haven't, and it's not my job.

"Yes," I say, " A special hug.....and then the drone dies."

He dies?

They gasp! They don't get this. He dies?

One little girl says, "Probably the queen hugged him too hard."



*(thanks to Dean Stiglitz for the special hug explanation!)

Safety First in Beekeeping or Where has my Girl Scout Training Gone?

When I was a Girl Scout and later as an adult, when I was a Girl Scout leader, we always emphasized fire safety. Building a fire meant clearing an area of combustible material and taking every precaution to make sure fires could not spread from the site of the fire we built.

As a beekeeper, I have been working my bees for eleven years without paying good attention to my smoker. I light it on top of beds of pine straw; I set it down amid combustible material on the ground; I am simply ignoring all the possible dangers.

The President of GBA (the Georgia Beekeepers Association) several years ago literally burned up her apiary - hives and everything - from not being careful with her smoker.

Jeff, my son-in-law, was helping me at Tom's house where we light the smoker on top of the pine straw Tom has strewn over his hillside. 

I told Jeff about Tom bringing out a GIANT fire extinguisher the last time I had worked the bees there. I mean, look at that photo - it's a conflagration about to happen! But Tom's fire extinguisher is huge and heavy and I can't imagine lugging it about in my hive kit.

So the next time I saw Jeff, he had gotten me a present:

It's a fire extinguisher in a small can - a fabulous thing to have in my hive kit. I will never go to a beehive without it again. So grateful to have a son-in-law looking out for my bee-ing safely.

I hope I never have a reason to try it out, but if I do, like a good Girl Scout, I am now prepared.