Antheia is strong and doing well. The queen is laying in the bottom two boxes and the third box is mostly capped honey. As the strongest hive in the yard, I think that the hive has been getting most of the syrup from the communal feeding. Since all frames were fully drawn or mostly drawn, I gave the hive back it’s fourth box and pulled a frame of brood up from the second box. They already have plenty of stores for winter, so I’m hoping that they’ll draw more frames that can be given to other hives.

The split with the purchased queen is doing well. They still haven’t fully drawn the second box. I refilled the entrance feeder for the first time since the spring honey flow. The hive is strong enough that robbing shouldn’t be an issue.

Hegemone is doing well. I found some cocoons on the outside under the outer cover and on the bottom of the hive below the screened bottom. Could possibly be wax moth, but I’ll never know because I crushed them all. I saw a hornet snatch a bee off the top of the hive. My attempts to burn the hornet with the butane torch failed and it flew off.

I wanted to keep feeding the top bar hive without the flaws of using the screen. I bought a 2.75″ hole drill bit. This is the size needed for a regular mouth jar. It’s a very snug fit, so its best to either widen the hole with a file or use the drill to widen the hole a little bit.

The real problem was when I decided to feed the bees using an inverted jar. I took an entrance moving screen, laid it across the hive in place of a few top bars and then put the inverted jar on that. It gave easy access to the jar for the bees, but kept them behind the screen to allow me to refill the jar without crushing bees. There were a few issues with that. The bees kept climbing on to the top of the screen, which made it impossible to replace the jar without crushing bees and it provided a nice big opening for rain to get in to the hive. The inverted jar prevent the plywood from covering the screen. My original plan was to get a drill bit the size of the jar tops and use a piece of wood to prevent water from getting in. I never found the time to make that happen, so I cut corners.

End result was that all this rain that we’ve gotten in the past to weeks made its way in to the hive and had no place to go, so it just sat there. There was about 2-3 inches of water in the bottom of the hive with many dead bees floating in it. It smelled disgusting. I ran and got my drill with a 3/8″ bit to put a few drainage holes in to the hive.  I then spent the next 30-45 minutes scooping out the dead bees and using the hive tool as a squeegee. The cardboard follower had to be tossed and this explains why there was always a mass of bees on the screen. They were desperately trying to dry out the hive.

The main lesson to be learned from this is that you should always assume that water will find its way in to the hive and it needs a way to drain out.

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.

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.

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.

Inside the NUC on a top bar hive

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.