Backyard Apiary

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.

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 swarm from Hegemone that moved itself up on to the shed has finally been brought down to earth. The hive is doing really because it was heavy. I almost dropped the hive at the bottom rung. I worry that I caused comb to collapse because I saw a white pupae get dragged out the front. I won’t know until I open up the hive tomorrow after work.

The weather cooperated and I was able to swap the outer covers and give the bees the candy I made for them. Antheia had eaten almost all of the dry sugar and Hegemone barely touched hers. I’m guessing that Hegemone had more stores going in to winter. I didn’t smoke either hive because I was trying to cause the least amount of disruption to the hive. It also doesn’t seem like a smart move to trigger them to gorge on their dwindling stores. Antheia was very tame, but Hegemone netted me a string. It didn’t help that Hegemone managed to glue the inner cover to the outer cover so I completely opened the hive and exposed hundreds of bees that were feeding on the dry sugar.

The sugar definitely absorbed some moisture from the hive. The newspaper that was put under the dry sugar was soaked. The bees were less than thrilled when I tried to remove as much of it as possible. Antheia now has an entrance shim above the inner cover. Hegemone required a shim below the inner cover (in addition to the one above) because of the remaining dry sugar.

Winter is in full swing and I checked up on the bees today. I slide open the bottom board’s tray and looked up in to each hive. Antheia was clustering at the bottom of the lower box. I couldn’t see the cluster in Hegemone, so I’m guessing that they were in the upper box. The weather forecast shows many more cold days and nights and the temperature should creep up above 50 on Friday. If the forecast holds true, then I’ll put bag feeder spacers on both of the hives and give them a lot more dry sugar. I’ll also get a chance to replace the falling apart outer covers with some new metallic topped ones that are a bit more weather proof.

I took advantage of Brushy Mountain Bee Farms December free shipping and ordered a lot of stuff to prepare for next year. Next year I plan on adding another hive and if the bees are strong enough, split a 5 frame nuc. I’m undecided about starting the 3rd hive from a nuc or a package. Still a little bit of time to make a decision on that. To prevent robbing and to make feeding easier for me, I purchased top feeder for all of the hives. I also bought screened tops to sit above the feeders to prevent robbing or having the bees fly at me when I refill the syrup.

As a beekeeper, there is not much to do when the weather is cold. I decided to branch out a little bit more and start tinkering with some of the various bee related crafts. I’m starting off with candle making. I ordered 10 pounds of beeswax, a votive mold and a few other essential tools of the trade. Candles and honey will probably be my gift of choice until I start making mead. If anyone know a good source of candle molds or some good mead recipes, let me know.

The recent trend of a little bit of rain almost everyday is not good for the health of the bees. It keeps the bees from flying and washes away the pollen. It took me quite a few days to realize that Antheia might need to be fed. A quick lift of the back of the hive and it was disturbingly light. I immediately brewed up a fresh batch of 3:2 sugar water for them and have been feeding a quart almost every day. Their feeding pace has been rapidly increasing from when I first started feeding. The hive feels heavier and there are now more bees bearding on the front.

Hegemone has had a constant beard from the top entrance and the nightly gathering on the bottom entrance. To prevent them from (easily) robbing their sister hive, I’ve made sure Hegemone is fed too. Despite having significantly more bees, the hive is taking in less of the sugar water. I hope they’re not depleting the honey they stockpiled during the flow. I still hope to harvest at least a frame of capped honey this year. The hives owe me back rent.

I think Hegemone is in need of another box. The bees have been bearding a lot from both the top and bottom entrances. The bearding could be caused by the heat and humidity. I’ll find out when I inspect the hives this weekend.

Hegemone bearding

My wife and I went through Hegemone and Antheia for the first time on the 24th. We started with Antheia and then went through Hegemone.

Antheia Bee Log Entry

Inspection. 4 frames of eggs, larvae and brood. Unmarked queen found. Light, golden body. Superceded? Found an emerged queen cell, a killed queen cell and a capped queen cell. Lots of capped honey on the edge frames. Queen is laying a good pattern. Foundationless frames drawn out straight with a good grouping of drone cells. Added super and pulled up a brood frame to encourage queen to lay in both boxes.

Hegemone Bee Log Entry

No eggs, larvae, brood, drone cells or queen. Lots of straight drawn comb with lots of capped honey. Hive appeared to be strong since the workers have no brood to tend.

We were both a bit panicked about Hegemone not having a queen and it didn’t help that it was a holiday weekend. We followed the advise given to every new beekeeper, “you’re going to want to, but don’t go in to the hive for 3-4 weeks.”  Had we gone in sooner, we could have noticed the pending crash much sooner and taken corrective action. It’s a good thing we went through Antheia first. Otherwise it would not have been apparrent how dire the situation was in Hegemone.

We started to call around to get in touch with mentors from the WCBA and see if we could find a place selling queens. I managed to reach a WCBA mentor and was given a few options on how to proceed. Get a replacement queen, use a queen cage and introduce Antheia’s queen in to Hegemone, combine the hives, or do nothing and see what happens.  I also posted to beemaster.com to solicit advice (post: “Hive is going to crash“).

We chose to wait until the 25th to speak with the Busy Bee queen breeder. My wife spoke with Betsy, the Busy Bee queen breeder and she mentioned that the hive could potentially have a virgin queen. The virgin queen could either be off on mating flights or we may have just missed her in the hive since they are more difficult to spot. That would explain the lack of laying worker. I plan to get Will Hicks, the state bee inspector to come out in the next few days to help me look for her. If he determines that there is no queen, Betsy will put me to the head of the line for a replacement queen.

I was a bit less panicked about Hegemone, so I decided to split Antheia to form Chloris. I like the greek goddess naming convention. Chloris was the goddess of flowers. I took the frame with the queen cell (had lots of capped brood), a frame with capped honey with lots of empty space in the center for laying and a third frame which the bees were almost done building up comb. The third frame was mostly to add more bees to the split. Chloris replaces Antheia as the hive at the end, so I’m expecting some bees to drift in to it.

I built the nuc and top from scraps left over from when I built 10 medium boxes. I picked up the bottom board and entrance feeder from Busy Bee today. It’s not pretty or exceptionally sturdy, but the price was low and it only took me about 10 minutes to put it all together with hand tools and my pneumatic staple gun.

First Two Hives in the Apiary

The nucs I ordered from The Carolina Bee Company are now happily in their new home. There was a little bit of confusion with my order, but in the end it was handled very well and I would definitely do business with them in the future.

My bees are Minnesota Hygienic and very strong. One of the queens is marked (green) and the other one must be a ninja because she couldn’t be found to mark. Even with the foragers out collecting pollen, the medium frames were full There were clear signs that she was there and laying. Since Monica couldn’t get the queen marked, I was given six frames, instead of five. I modified two hive bodies with standard window screen stapled to the bottoms. This ensured good ventilation without giving any of the bees the opportunity of riding up front with me.

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