Backyard Apiary

A close up shot of eggs. They are the tiny white things in the cell that looks like a grain of rice.

I went through the hives to make sure the bees have plenty of food stockpiled. To my surprise, Hegemone had lots of swarm cells. All of the queen cells were uncapped and looked to be empty. They are just preparing to swarm. I think I caught it in time to do a preventative split. I removed 11 frames of brood, pollen and honey to start the new hive. Eggs are very difficult to see in ideal conditions. Many of the brood frames from Hegemone that were not completely capped had very dark comb, which is not ideal. I was able to see eggs (possibly larvae) when I looked at the frame in direct sunlight.

The extended period of 90+ degree days has kept me from being outside and building more equipment. I have everything I need to start a 5 frame NUC, but I don’t think pulling only 5 frames would have done much to prevent Hegemone from swarming. I am lacking 10 frame hive tops and bottoms, but luckily I had scraps of plywood to make due. I used the queen castle bottom, which has a small inch wide entrance on three sides, instead of a full width entrance on one. The three entrances are designed to give each of the 3-frame mating hives their own separate entrance. The top box of the split has one frame of capped brood and my last nine assembled frames. It’s time to endure the heat and get to work assembling frames. I also need to finish building the long hive and get that moved over to the Garner Grows Community Garden.

Hive count is at eight and I need to be more attentive to Hegemone in the next couple of weeks to make sure she doesn’t swarm. If the hive caps those queen cells, then I will probably make a few more splits that will be sold. The hive has sent out 3-4 swarms this year, so it’s not really surprising that they want to send out another.

I added a second hive body to the swarm hive by the raspberries and to the split with the purchased queen. The new queen’s hive was especially unfriendly today and netted me a sting on a finger. The bees were attacking the hive tool, headbutting my veil and encouraged me to put on gloves. Such are the joys of inspecting a hive in a dearth. I also think I kept the hives open too long and triggered a little bit of a robbing frenzy. All of the hives are strong, so I’m not worried but there will be a few more dead bees than usual in front of the hives.

I was curious to see if a dead bee could still sting and also wanted to boost my resistance to stings, so I stung myself on the hand. The answer is, yes a newly dead bee will still sting and pump venom.

Yesterday, I did a quick inspection of the two beehives on the West side of my property. The one near the raspberries that has been gulping down one quart of 1:1 syrup daily is doing fine. The hive has five frames fully drawn and they were festooning on the six. The syrup should help them draw out the rest of the frames during this dearth and get them up to a good size for the next honey flow. This hive was started from a small swarm, so I’m not really worried about the speed of their build up.

The original split from Antheia that has been in a double five frame NUC is doing really well. All of the frames are almost entirely drawn out and the hive is packed with bees. Instead of giving them a third NUC box or swapping them in to ten frame boxes, I decided to do a little experiment. I had built a Kenyan Top Bar Hive (KTBH) to put at the Garner Community Garden, but the swarm didn’t stay and the hive has remained empty. I really want a KTBH, but the swarm season has passed, I don’t want to spend $80 on a package and cutting the wax from a frame and wiring to a top bar is too much effort in 80+ degree weather. My plan is to see if I can encourage the bees to build down in to the top bar hive. Two of the top bars have small pieces of drawn comb from the swarm that didn’t stay. I placed those top bars as the front two and left a gap between them. I placed the NUC hive on the Top Bar Hive so that the bees must use this gap as their entrance, which they are doing. Now all I need them to do is expand the small pieces of comb and continue to draw comb out on the top bars. The bees need to either be in the top bar hive or the NUC, but definitely not both. I’m hoping that they build up the top bars enough so that I can take away the NUC and give those frames to another hive. I anticipate the need to feed this hive a lot.

I took a short video today of the activity at the front of the hive. The bees are still a bit confused about the entrance being a foot higher up, which is why there are a lot of bees hovering at the bottom of the top bar hive. They circle until they remember that the entrance moved.

The main honey flow has come and gone. Now there really isn’t much for the bees to gather for the next month. They’ll use what they’ve stored up until the next honey flow. Many of my hives are still relatively small because they started as swarms and need to build up. For this reason, I plan on feeding them syrup. I boiled 10 lbs of water, removed from heat and then added 10 lbs of sugar. I gave a quart of syrup to the weak hive by the raspberries and to the split with the purchased queen. Antheia already has a top feeder in place and I’ll give her a gallon or two in the morning. The hive at the community garden will also get a gallon or two.

I think I’m going to make a few pollen patties. I don’t think any of my hives really need them, but I have the pollen, never made them before and it doesn’t hurt to give them more pollen. It may even get the hives to build up quicker. I need more of my hives to be good and strong if I have any hopes of being able to make a starter hive for raising queens. I still have not even unwrapped the grafting tools.

Antheia, despite being split once and sending out 2-3 swarms, managed to fill an entire medium super with honey. The super only had 8 frames in it, so there was a lot of burr comb connecting the frames together and to the walls of the super. I do not have an extractor, the honey harvesting was going to use the <a href=”http://www.bushfarms.com/beesharvest.htm#crushandstrain”>crush and strain</a> method. Restaurant equipment works well for this and is significantly cheaper than purchasing buckets and such from a bee supplier. I picked up most of the equipment from <a href=”http://www.ureco.com/”>United Restaurant Supply Company</a>.

When removing the honey frames from a hive, there are a few methods that can be used.

1. Use a fume board to drive the bees down lower in to the hive. This works relatively quickly, but I don’t ever plan on fuming my bees.
2. Use a bee escape to prevent the bees from being able to re-enter the box that you want to harvest. This could take a couple days and you need to close up the top to prevent robbing. I have a few bee escapes, which I cannot find so I didn’t use this method.
3. Brush the bees off each frame as you take it out.
4. Rest the box on it’s side and blow the bees out of the box using a leaf blower or air compressor.

Lucky me, I have an air compressor and I must say that it works really well. 100 psi at 6-12 inches will blast the bees off a frame without killing them, even if one get pinned down. I placed each cleared frame in to a busing bin and used a screened hive cover to keep bees from trying to reclaim the honey. I removed 7 of the 8 frames in the box. The one I left behind had half of the frame uncapped. The bees cap the honey after enough of the moisture is removed and its ready for long term storage.

It took about 1.5 hours to cut, mash and scoop the honey comb in to the screened bucket. I tried a lot of different techniques for removing the honey to figure out which works best. A long deboning knife worked pretty well for cutting off the caps and cutting the comb from the frame. I don’t own a <a href=”http://www.brushymountainbeefarm.com/Cappings-Scratcher/productinfo/787/”>Cappings Scratcher</a>, but a fork work well for opening up the caps. Scratching the caps is something you normally do when using an extractor. When crushing and straining, it serves no purpose, but I was curious to see if a fork would work and it did. One of the 7 frames I removed had a lot of uncapped honey on one side of the frame. Scraping the capped side with the knife, I was able to remove the capped honey without damaging the other side.

Most of the honey has dripped through the screen and the collection bucket is filled past the 5 liter mark. I also collected about 1.5 liters in a smaller bucket by squeezing the wax in the screen. That was probably a bit unnecessary but definitely shortened the amount of time I’ll have to wait for it to all strain through. That honey is not as clean as the large bucket because I ended up dropping some wax in it. Oh well, I can run it through the screen again when I transfer it in to the big bucket. When it’s all done, I should have at least 15 pints of honey (over 20 lbs).

After I was finished with the frames, I swapped them for clean undrawn frames in Antheia. The bees will clean up the honey left on the frames and store it. A few of the frames were wired wax foundation, so they got that back too.  I put the rest of the honey covered equipment about 100′ from the hives for all the bees to clean off. Given that I have 6 hives in my yard, I was a little disappointed at how slowly the bees were cleaning everything up. It didn’t help that a lot of the bees managed to submerge themselves in the honey. A few of them were still alive when I played lifeguard. I even carried them back over to one of the hives and dropped them at the entrance so the other bees could help clean them off. This is one of the main differences between a hobbyist beekeeper and a commercial one. The hobbyist will try and save every single bee.

Did a quick inspection of five of the hives to make sure they are doing okay. The giant swarm hive that I relocated off of the shed roof has been doing lots of orientation flights this past week. I gave the hive a second box and moved three frames up. I saw the queen. She is huge with a golden redish brown abdomen. I expect this hive to start to expand quickly.

The next hive I checked was the split with the queen purchased from the Carolina Bee Company. Monica was not exaggerating when she said the queen is one of the best layers she’s ever seen. There was a full frame  of eggs, both sides and I didn’t notice any empty cells. Each had an egg placed squarely in the middle of the cell. The hive is doing awesome and will need a second box in maybe a week.

I didn’t inspect Antheia because the hive is strong and I can tell from looking at the entrance. There are always several hundred bees wash boarding on the front of the hive and lots of activity at the entrance all day.

Hegemone was in a foul mood today. I used a lot more smoke than I normally would and they were still acting aggressive toward me. I didn’t get stung, but they clearly wanted to let me know they were not pleased with my presence. During the last inspection, I was worried about the hive being queenless and gave it a frame of eggs from Antheia. That was  12 days ago, so all of those eggs would have been capped ~3 days ago, and they were. They didn’t use any of the eggs to raise a new queen and I saw uncapped brood, so there is a queen in there somewhere. The best tip I read somewhere was that unless you absolutely need to find the queen, don’t look for her. Instead, look for signs of her being there. It would take a very long time to find the queen in Hegemone. She could be anywhere on the 40 frames of bees and she constantly moves around. It doesn’t help that the hive has lots of drones, so every frame has many larger than worker sized bees roaming about to distract me.

If the hive is pissy during the next inspection, then I might split it down in size and use the opportunity to raise a few more queens from the purchased one. Hegemone’s queen isn’t showing herself to be worthy of her crown.

The split that is in the double NUC is doing well. Nothing special, but they’ve recovered their numbers from when losing lots of their foragers during the hive swap. The other swarm hive over by the blackberries and raspberries is doing okay. Not building up that quickly, but the hive is stronger than I thought it would be after seeing the low activity at the entrance.

I inspected five hives today, gave each of the ~100-150k bees a reason to sting me, but they did not. While mowing the lawn, I discovered a yellow jacket nest…when they started stinging the crap out of my ankles and legs. I ended up with 4 stings, but it would have been more if the 2 yellow jackets stinging my shoelaces were a bit smarter. I counted over a dozen of them flying around the lawn mower when I returned with the can of wasp spray. I couldn’t see the entrance to the nest, so I decided to “nuke’em from orbit” and just sprayed anywhere they were hovering. I don’t mind yellow jackets. They are a beneficial bug, but they are not beneficial enough to give them a pass after stinging me. Wasps have been known to raid honey bee hives and kills lots of the bees, so I can never let a wasp nest get too strong.