Sadly, I discovered today that two of the three hives in my backyard have failed. One was my strongest hive, Hegemone, going in to winter with nearly two medium boxes full of honey. There were 2-3 dead bees total on the frames, lots of capped brood, no honey stores, lots of pollen, and no signs of major bee die off. It is very odd and very sad. My guess is that the numbers were too high for the early cold weather. The light activity at the entrance that I saw at random times was most likely foragers from other hives.

The other dead hive was my top bar hive. A dozen or so dead bees on the bottom of the hive, no stores, with capped brood and plenty of pollen. The few frames at the entrance of the hive had what appears to be a bacteria/fungal infection that looks like it is eating away the comb. I wasn't confident that the hive would make it through winter, but the rotted wax is unexpected. Due to the infection, the box is most likely headed to a fire pit. I took pictures and bagged a frame or two to pass along to the state inspectors to see if they can shed more light about what it is and what happened. I also bagged sections from hegemone that contained brood.

The third hive in the backyard is strong and feisty. I lifted the outer cover to check for signs of life and they almost immediately took to the air to let me know I wasn't welcome. I refilled their entrance feeder and also gave them another jar above the inner cover to make sure they have access to syrup at all times. Due to the failed sister hives, this hive will be pampered throughout the winter to help ensure it is strong enough to breed queens and make splits next spring.

Both langstroth hives had a limited amount of capped honey and the extended heat wave prevented them from being able to fully draw out all of the frames in their topmost box. They’ll most likely need to be fed at least a little bit to prevent them from reducing their stored honey even more during this hot weather. I quickly found signs of laying queen in both hives. I stopped the inspection on the middle hive after finding a frame full of eggs on both sides. This frame was found after looking at a frame full of capped brood. That hive has a really good queen.

The long hive is doing well, despite a poor hive design. I managed to snap a picture of the queen despite only inspecting a total of five frames from the hive. I noticed some tiny wax moths living on the tray beneath the mesh. There was also a dozen small hive beetles being corralled behind the follower board. I caused a jail break when I moved the follower board. I made amends by crushing all of them. Seriously, why do bees not kill the beetles or at least bite off their legs.

Long hive beetles really like to hide in the grooved bottom portion of frames. As soon as I find a frame manufacturer that sells solid bottomed frames, I’ll buy from them. Frames are not cost effective for a hobbyist to make. It might be feasible to buy frames and make the bottom piece myself since those can be batched out quickly with a table saw and router.

There are a few significant flaws that have led me to the conclusion that the next time I visit the garden, I will most likely move the frames in to a vertical hive. Here’s a short list of some of the more significant flaws.

Pests can hide between the mesh bottom and the bottom tray, but the bees cannot easily get down there

I could increase the space between the mesh and the tray to allow bees to easily climb down there. This would require completely rebuilding the rails and I’m not sure it would help. Small hive beetles and wax moth can easily move through the mesh to escape the pursing bees, but the bees have to exit the hive and hike from one of the ends. Increasing the space would allow more and larger pests to get down there.

The bees propolised the tray in place

Bees put propolis over almost any crack they can. The only way to prevent this would be to use a non wood tray to see if they don’t propolise it. Or to slide the tray frequently to prevent them from sticking it in place.

The single piece top is too heavy and bulky

I could make multiple top pieces, but that means more tie down straps to keep the wind from blowing them off and that provides a crack for rain to get in to the hive.

It’s almost impossible to replace the front inner cover without crushing bees

The bees enter the hive from the top and crawl to the inner cover opening. The outer cover is propped up in the front to allow the bees to enter anywhere on the front third of the hive. Whenever I remove the front inner cover, the bees pour out and a traffic jam starts to happen at the front edge of the hive. Any attempts to move the bees is a futile effort because scurry up from the frames and scouts continue to return home. I could possibly drill entrance holes in the front of the hive in the hope that they use those instead. That would at least reduce some of the returning bee traffic, but still doesn’t solve the problem of trying to place down a piece of wood that has four very large crush zones. The normal trick of turning the inner cover in to place can only work if I also remove the middle inner cover.

Moving frames is a pain

One of the management strategies for a long hive will require me to move the honey frames towards one end of the hive and the brood nest to the other. This needs to be done before winter because the bees will only migrate through the hive in a single direction. If there happens to be a few honey frames in the front of the hive, I need to move about 20 frames to get them positioned in to the back. The way I have been inspecting the hive has been to start in the back and deal with the jailed beetles and check their stores. I then skip to the middle to find the edge of the brood nest to make sure the queen is laying. I could switch to starting at the front and working my way back. This would mean I would pull aside the honey frames and adjust everything to the front and then add the honey frames to the back. This doesn’t work if I need to then move a frame forward.

The top bar hive is doing amazingly well. They’ve drawn out almost every frame. They haven’t drawn any past the east side of the entrance space. I merged the ~6 frames in and moved the entrance space to be in frame positions 2 & 3. The entrance frames were not drawn out straight because of the gap and I don’t want to give the bees a chance to mess up any more. I checked every frame and they are still attaching honey comb to the sides, but no attachments at the bottom. It helps to scrape the wall next to the frame to make sure nothing is connected before pulling the frame. Every frame has capped honey at the top and brood in the center, except the last 2.5 frames on the west end of the hive. Those are honey frames with the larger cell sizes and no brood. Unfortunately, there is only space for 2 more frames. Hindsight, I should have moved most of the frames to the very end of the hive instead of spacing them in the ~20 frame brood nest. I guess they’ll just have to start back filling.

I pulled three frames of capped honey (~4 quarts) from Hegemone and the super hive. Hegemone has many more frames of mostly capped honey that should be ready for harvest soon. The long hive at the garden should have ~10 frames of capped honey for me to harvest.

The caught swarm is still very weak, but is alive. I’m viewing this hive as a banked queen more than anything else. It still has many months to get strong enough to try and survive the winter, but unlike the weak hive experiment from last winter I’ll scuttle the hive before wax moths get a chance to destroy the comb.

The nuc hive most likely has a laying worker. Many eggs were laid in the cells and I couldn’t find a queen despite looking very intently. There are a few ways of dealing with a laying worker hive (Bush Bees, Laying Workers). I have plenty of hives for my needs and the nuc hive is weak, so I will most likely just shake out the bees and end the hive.

The split is also weak, but the queen is looking plumper than I remember. I plan on feeding this hive frames of brood from Hegemone and the bought queen hive to keep those hives from swarming.

The top bar hive is doing amazingly well. They’ve drawn out most of the bars I merged in to the brood nest during the last inspection. There were 3-4 frames of solid capped brood and a few more with a mix of eggs, larvae and uncapped brood. I went through each frame and removed a few attachments that the bees made to the sides. The next TBH and top bars I make will have the guide further from the edges. This might help reduce the attachments because they only seem to attach the honey comb toward the top of the hive. There were 1-2 frames with a small attachments at the bottom. After doing a better job of leveling the hive during my last inspection, all of the comb is now perfectly straight. Glad I fixed that when I did because the comb hardens with age and wouldn’t have corrected itself as easily.

Black widow spider wrapping a bee in teh front of a hive at the community garden

I inspected the garden hives this past weekend and there was a giant black widow spider that set up shop under the leftmost hive. I tried cruising it’d with a stick, but it fled under the hive and I wasn’t going to go chasing after it.

The other weak hive that overwintered at the garden is no more. The hive was queenless and the population was only a few hundred bees. The hive was too weak to save and wax moths had started to move in. I shook out all of the bees and have begun the process of cycling frames through the freeze to kill off the moth eggs, larvae and worms. I can only fit 3 frames at a time and have left the others out in the yard for the bees to clean up. The tulip poplar is blooming so the bees are only visiting the free meal on days that it rains.

The long hive at the garden is doing really well. Many frames of capped brood!

There was a carpenter bee burrowing in to the side of a box. The box walls are only 3/4″ thick, but apparently that is more than enough room for a carpenter bee to make a home. After I chased it out, I plugged the hole with sticks. That really won’t do much besides slow it down a little bit, but hopefully that’s a good enough measure until I can permanently plug it.

The backyard hives are doing well. The nuc split had three frames with capped queen cells. I gave one to the mostly drone hive and another to the hive I captured from my neighbor’s tree. Now there is no doubt that every hive in the yard has or will have a queen.

The foul weather on the 29th has the bees in a really unpleasant mood. While standing about 15′ in front of the hives, a bee cited me for loitering and stung me right next to my eye. I’ve been stung a fair number of times as a beekeeper (two in a week) and I must say that this is one of the most unpleasant places to get stung. I took some allergy medicine in an effort to prevent swelling.

The top bar hive bees are booming! They’ve already drawn out two bars of wax and started working on a few more. I cleaned out the scrap pieces of wax at the bottom.

One of the splits has a capped queen cell. The other split is mostly emerged drones and I didn’t see any queen cells. The split needs to be merged with a viable hive or given eggs so the can raise their own queen. I got a good picture of a few drones almost completely emerged.

The morning of April 8th, the long hive and Antheia were moved to the community garden. Both bee yards have a mix of genetics and at least two strong hives to help ensure any issues can be addressed easily. Both hives originally at the garden are weak and possibly caused by me leaving the top feeders filled for too long. Their queens didn’t have much room to lay because every cell was being filled with syrup. They’ll get more space and a brood boost soon. There were not many forages out when the hives were moved because it was early in the morning and a little chilly. I put a nuc about 15′ from where the long have sat. There were not the typical dozens of confused bees flying around trying to locate the hive. I found two bees in the nuc this evening and dropped them off at the entrance of Hegemone. Any forages from Antheia would have drifted to the super queen because her hive is now on the end.

I inspected all of the hives on Saturday and need to start my swarm prevention steps. To keep the long hive’s numbers up, two frames were moved from Antheia containing the full range of brood. Hegemone’s queen was laying in the top (3rd) box and all of the frames were fully drawn and being filled. A fourth box was checker boarded on top. Antheia will get her fourth box as soon as I finish rotating the cleat from the wedged frames to make it a foundationless guide.

I poured the last bit of the 2010 harvest in to a half gallon jar and a quart jar. It’s slightly crystallized, but still delicious.

The long hive is also in a dire situation. There are a lot of bees, but no sign of a queen. No capped brood, eggs or larvae. I pulled a frame of eggs from the purchased queen hive and a frame of capped brood from Hegemone. The plan is to help the hive limp its way along until mature drones are flying and they can raise their own queen. This will slow down the other hives and will hopefully help prevent as much swarming as last year.

I found the queens in langstroth hives and they are doing well. The purchased queen is an amazing layer and she filled almost every free cell with eggs. I gave the hive another box with a few drawn frames to give her more space to lay.

I wanted to give the long hive a couple empty frames to fix the spacing issues.  Frames from the same box will slide together nicely because the wax was built with the neighboring frame as a guide.  The frames from the different boxes didn’t line up so well.  As always, I didn’t have any frames assembled and quickly put together a few foundation-less frames.  The only unused frames I had were pulled from the hive that was killed by wax moth, and I don’t plan on using those frames again until I get the chance to scrape the wood and cycle them through a deep freeze to make sure I don’t pass wax moths eggs in to a healthy hive.  I added two frames to the bee side of the follower board and put a few behind it to help keep it in place.  When I removed the inner cover, the bees were covering all of the frames. It was a good sight to see.