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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

I spilled a little bit of sugar water on the concrete block.

Bees walking across the wax bridge to their new home

I transferred the hives from the traveling boxes in to their permanent homes. These bees are extremely friendly. I had my jacket, but didn’t even light the smoker. Without any fuss, they climbed their way in to the hive. I also repeatedly adjusted the entrance reducers without any protection. The ladies didn’t seem to mind.

I’m still in the process of building them better entrance reducers. I currently have scraps of wood left over from building the hive bodies. They are not all tall enough to block the entrance and the bees will nudge them just enough to make a new entrance.

The ladies of Hegemone are finding a lot of pollen. Hopefully it's from the blooming Tulip Poplar trees. Tulip Poplar honey is delicious.

The Anteia Ladies are working hard this Saturday morning.

The following day, both hives were already hard at work bringing in the pollen and nectar. The left hive seems to be a bit stronger and had a constant flow of traffic. The right hive was not as active, but still had a steady stream of foragers. We still have not picked names for the hives, but at least we’ve settled on a naming theme. All of our hives will be named after Greek gods/goddesses.

While typing this entry, I’ve made the executive decision that the left hive will be named “Hegemone” and the right hive will be named “Antheia”.

[b]Hegemone[/b] – A Goddess of Plants and she was in charge of making sure they bloomed and bore fruit as they were meant to. Her name means “mastery”.

[b]Antheia[/b] – The Goddess of Vegetation, Lowlands, Marshlands, Gardens, Blossoms, the Budding Earth, and Human Love.

There was a lot of activity at the entrance of Antheia with lots of bees flying around in front. The hive was also buzzing a lot louder than earlier in the day. It was the weaker of the two hives and I feared it was getting robbed. To be on the safe side, I suited up and lit the smoker. I gave a puff to the entrance and then proceeded to reduce it to the point where only 1-2 bees could pass through at a time. I took off the top for a few moments to have a look inside. Probably not the brightest move since I thought they were being robbed, but it turns out it might have been a good thing to do. A local beekeeper, Bob, later told me that taking the top off the hive will get the bees to return to the hive to help defend it.

A few minutes after the entrance was drastically reduced and the top was put back on, the hive settled down. I did notice something a bit odd though. It looked as if the queen was flying around outside the hive. I don’t know if she left when I opened the top or prior to that, but I watched her circle a few times and then go back in to the hive. She was about the size of the other queen (maybe a little bigger), except with a much darker abdomen.

The most likely explanation for all of the activity would be many of the worker bees switching roles to becoming foragers. That would make sense due to the hive losing many foragers that were left behind when I picked up the frames in the middle of the day. During the whole “robbing” experience, foragers were still bringing back pollen.

Some other tricks mentioned by Bob.

• Turn on a sprinkler so the robbing bees think it is raining and leave.
• Put a brick in front of the entrance so the bees have to climb over and down in to the hive entrance.

It’s very enjoyable to watch the hives. The new foragers orientating themselves and dancing to tell their sisters about all of the Tulip Poplar trees in the area. I purchased a tripod to make it easier for me to take many pictures of my ladies.

A lone bee on the tree gator