I’ve seen an orange insect more than twice the size of a drone flying around near the bees for the past week or so. I managed to catch a quick video of it as it tried to snag a bee from the side of a the Nuc on a Top Bar Hive. It made a few diving attacks and tried to grab on to a bee. Each time, the honey bees rushed at it. It quickly gave up and flew away. After a quick internet search, it looks like it is a European Hornet. Needless to say, the nest will be removed when found.
With the help of a friend, two hives have been moved to their new home at the Garner Grows Community Garden. Both hives were two medium boxes. The hive by the basket ball hoop (with the blue top) was light. That hive started as a small swarm and has not been building up quickly. The other hive I moved was the large swarm that moved itself in to the swarm trap on top of my shed. It was much heavier and a lot more active. Unfortunately, I think the hive will get a slight set back after losing a lot of foragers. Typically, you want to move hives at night when the bees are all at the hive or at least very early in the morning before they are out foraging. That’s not really practical for my desire to sleep. I moved the hives at 9am and it was already over 80F. The foragers will return to where their respective hives have sat for the past few months and be very confused. They will think they got lost on their trip home and retrace their steps. After they fail to find the hive a few times, they will begin to circle outwards from where they last remembered their hive and eventually find one of my other hives. If they ask nicely or return bearing gifts, the other hive should let them enter and they will have a new hive to call home.
It is not uncommon for bees to drift from one hive to another. Typically bees will drift to stronger hives or toward the hives at the end of a row. In nature, feral colonies will find a hollowed tree, a wall or some other covered space they can call their own. The modern beekeeping practices are designed to reduce costs and improve efficiency…for the beekeeper. The bees do not appreciate the fact that painting all boxes the same color costs less, or that using a consistent hive design allows the beekeeper to work his hives in less time. All the bees know is that when they fly home after foraging in the hot day’s sun, they return to a row of boxes that are the same color and approximately the same height. Hopefully when the bee returns to the second box on the right, it is their hive and the pesky beekeeper didn’t add another hive to the row messing with their orientation.
Before putting any hives on my property, I spent a large amount of my free time reading about what to expect and how to be a good neighbor with a few hives. Bees need water and will use a source of water whether you like it or not. Bees like dirty water, chlorinated water and salty water. I did a google satellite search and didn’t see any pools anywhere near my house, so I didn’t think that would be an issue I would potentially encounter. Just to be on the safe side, I keep the fountain full with a few goldfish to give the water some flavor. There has always been a very active presence at the fountain. Anywhere from a dozen to a few hundred bees actively fetching water from the found. This gave me the impression that I was providing a good water source for my bees.
It turns out that a neighbor behind my property has a pool. I cannot see it from my yard, but I learned this when the owner called me about “a lot of bees” constantly visiting her yard to sun on her deck and enjoy the salt water in the pool. She was very friendly and understanding, despite being inconvenienced. Her and her family have even been stung while trying to enjoy the pool. Bees dislike being splashed, even unintentionally.
When she said “a lot of bees” , I had a mental image of thousands of bees draining her pool. Something like this.
“A lot of bees” is a relative term. It turned out to be 4-5 bees at a time, but a steady stream of them coming and going during the hotter parts of the day. Thankfully, it was not like I envisioned. The phone call was friendly, so I hand delivered a jar of honey and let her know that we’d try to do a better job of enticing the bees away from their pool. It was later in the day when I visited and didn’t see any bees going to the pool. There was a bee flying around the yard looking for something. It was interested in us, so I encouraged her land on my finger instead of anyone else. Bees in the field are usually friendly and I was trying to show that you don’t need to swat at them if they are hovering around you. In fact, you’re more likely to get stung if you do swat at them.
Given the low amount of bee traffic to their pool, I put out a giant ice bucket full of water in the back of my yard and connected it to the drip irrigation system to help keep it full. I plan to make the water more attractive for the bees by adding some lemon grass. Bees are attracted to lemon grass oil, so a 40 gallon bucket of lemon grass “tea” will hopefully reduce the bee visits to the pool to an unnoticeable level. I do plan on moving some of the hives off to other locations as soon as I pick up the pickup in two weeks. I don’t think it’s possible to stop all bee traffic to her pool because there are a few beekeepers in the area and it is a nice pool.
The bees got a flavorful treat this evening. Alissa was canning blueberries and some of them leaked. The water turned dark blue. Instead of dumping the water down the drain, I used it to make a batch of syrup for the bees. They seemed to like it better than regular syrup and more of the ladies turned out for the feeding. I also refilled the quart jar on the NUC on a Top Bar Hive with some of this blue water. I’m hoping they draw out some blue-ish comb. If they draw out any blue tinted wax, then I’m going to start experimenting more with different natural colorings. I think the ladies of that hive either don’t like blue or were not too pleased with my attempts to put the jar on the screen that they were obstructing. They send a representative bee to state their objections above my left knee. No noticeable swelling yet.
Here in NC, we’re in the middle of dearth. The only thing the bees have to eat is what they can find and what they stockpiled during the last flow. I am fortunate to have my hives located where I do. More urban areas tend to have more in bloom because people landscape their yards with non-native plants that bloom throughout the year. I also happen to have several garden nurseries and home improvement stores within the forage range of a bee.
I wanted to give them a little food boost to help them draw out more comb in preparation of the fall flow. Yesterday, I put out 10 lbs batch of 1:1 sugar syrup (10 lbs sugar, 10 lbs water). I was at work and asked my wife if there was any activity at the feeder. “There are a few bees”, she responded. I expected her to see more than just a few bees. The feeder was completely empty of syrup when I returned from work. There were still a few small clusters of bees, a few yellow jackets and a spider with a butt the size of a quarter. I put the local newspaper to good use and played whack a mole with the yellow jackets. After I killed four of them, the rest had scattered. I’m not sure what the spider was doing, but it would hide whenever it saw me.
I put out another batch of the same size this morning. There were about a dozen bees crawling around looking for any leftovers from yesterday’s feast. There were a lot of ants crawling around in the dry feeder. I refilled the feeder, drowning many of the ants. I put away the now empty stock pot and fetched my camera to take some pictures. I was back outside in about 10 minutes and took the below video. Thousands of bees feasting. I couldn’t see a single ant anywhere near the inside of the feeder. I did notice a few crazy yellow jackets landing and trying to feed.
The preventative split I made from Hegemone has several capped queen cells, which is great news. Whichever queen emerges first will be the proud matriarch of the backyard hive. The slightly bad news is that the capped queen cells were the swarm cells that I moved over. I had hoped that I split them before any eggs were laid in them, but I was obviously too late. I didn’t open up Hegemone to check and see if they tore down the swarm cells I left behind. It was excessively hot and I was not too eager to lift two boxes with my sore back. I’m out of equipment to make more splits, so the most I could hope to learn by inspecting Hegemone is if I will watch a swarm fly off and start a feral hive. If there were no signs of the split raising its own queen, I was going to take a frame of eggs from the new queen.
The smoker was still going strong so I did a quick check of the two hives on the western edge of my property. The NUC on a top bar hive didn’t really draw out much comb. It seems that they like to festoon off the bars, but have not been doing much wax building. I did find a dead carpenter bee at the bottom of the top bar. The honey bees were in the process of dragging it out.
The other hive, by the basketball hoop, has started to draw comb in the top box. This hive would be great in an observation hive because it doesn’t really propolize anything.
Antheia 2010 Honey. 2 quarts, 2 pints, 12 half pints and one 4oz jar for grandma.
I found time to bottle some of the honey Antheia harvested during the spring flow. It delicious with a beautiful amber color. I cannot get honey that is more local, unless if I were to bring a hive indoors. Most of what I bottled today is already slated for family. A 4 oz jar for grandma, mom gets a pint, siblings get an 8 oz jar, except my sister who gets a quart because she’ll give me a few bottles of mead made from the honey. The rest of the honey will be sold to help cover the larger than expected equipment costs this year.
There are still 9 frames of capped honey in Hegemone that I wasn’t sure if I would harvest this year. They have plenty stored and there is still the fall flow for them to harvest more. I didn’t harvest at the same time as Antheia because crushing and straining a box is a lot of work. Next year I will need to use an extractor.
It’s fun thinking about how much honey I could harvest next year. I pulled 6.5 frames from Antheia this year, despite the hive being split and sending out 2-3 swarms. If I were to average the same number from each hive next year, that would net me 52 frames worth of honey. If I can keep them from swarming, then claiming 10-20 frames per hive should be no problem. This winter, I will need 14 more boxes and 140 frames to allow each hive two honey supers. That doesn’t include equipment to allow me to hive swarms, make splits or put queens in to mating NUCs. It’s very clear to me that I’m quickly transitioning from being a hobbyist to a commercial scale operation.
Future beeswax candles sitting in a tray waiting to be put out for the bees to clean
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