Backyard Apiary

Did a quick inspection of five of the hives to make sure they are doing okay. The giant swarm hive that I relocated off of the shed roof has been doing lots of orientation flights this past week. I gave the hive a second box and moved three frames up. I saw the queen. She is huge with a golden redish brown abdomen. I expect this hive to start to expand quickly.

The next hive I checked was the split with the queen purchased from the Carolina Bee Company. Monica was not exaggerating when she said the queen is one of the best layers she’s ever seen. There was a full frame  of eggs, both sides and I didn’t notice any empty cells. Each had an egg placed squarely in the middle of the cell. The hive is doing awesome and will need a second box in maybe a week.

I didn’t inspect Antheia because the hive is strong and I can tell from looking at the entrance. There are always several hundred bees wash boarding on the front of the hive and lots of activity at the entrance all day.

Hegemone was in a foul mood today. I used a lot more smoke than I normally would and they were still acting aggressive toward me. I didn’t get stung, but they clearly wanted to let me know they were not pleased with my presence. During the last inspection, I was worried about the hive being queenless and gave it a frame of eggs from Antheia. That was  12 days ago, so all of those eggs would have been capped ~3 days ago, and they were. They didn’t use any of the eggs to raise a new queen and I saw uncapped brood, so there is a queen in there somewhere. The best tip I read somewhere was that unless you absolutely need to find the queen, don’t look for her. Instead, look for signs of her being there. It would take a very long time to find the queen in Hegemone. She could be anywhere on the 40 frames of bees and she constantly moves around. It doesn’t help that the hive has lots of drones, so every frame has many larger than worker sized bees roaming about to distract me.

If the hive is pissy during the next inspection, then I might split it down in size and use the opportunity to raise a few more queens from the purchased one. Hegemone’s queen isn’t showing herself to be worthy of her crown.

The split that is in the double NUC is doing well. Nothing special, but they’ve recovered their numbers from when losing lots of their foragers during the hive swap. The other swarm hive over by the blackberries and raspberries is doing okay. Not building up that quickly, but the hive is stronger than I thought it would be after seeing the low activity at the entrance.

I inspected five hives today, gave each of the ~100-150k bees a reason to sting me, but they did not. While mowing the lawn, I discovered a yellow jacket nest…when they started stinging the crap out of my ankles and legs. I ended up with 4 stings, but it would have been more if the 2 yellow jackets stinging my shoelaces were a bit smarter. I counted over a dozen of them flying around the lawn mower when I returned with the can of wasp spray. I couldn’t see the entrance to the nest, so I decided to “nuke’em from orbit” and just sprayed anywhere they were hovering. I don’t mind yellow jackets. They are a beneficial bug, but they are not beneficial enough to give them a pass after stinging me. Wasps have been known to raid honey bee hives and kills lots of the bees, so I can never let a wasp nest get too strong.

The new split was not a very large split and I’m sure it has been losing its foragers as they fly back to Antheia across the yard. To help give it a boost until the brood starts to emerge, I swapped the location of the hive with Chloris. For the past week, Chloris has had a lot of bees hanging out in the front of the hive. After swapping the hives, there were over a dozen bees flying in front of the hive acting confused. That’s a decent number given that it was raining. A forager brought back white pollen, landed and walked in to the hive. It walked out a few seconds later, flew around and then repeated the process. If bees could talk, this one would say, “wtf? I have the right address, but this isn’t my house!”

Hegemone, Chloris and Antheia

The weather cooperated today and I was able to do a quick inspection of some of the hives. I started by adding a fourth medium box to Antheia and Hegemone. Despite both hives swarming, there were a lot of bees when I popped the tops and all of the frames in the 3rd box were fully drawn. I didn’t even have hives this time last year and they are already as strong as they were at the end of last summer. The bees get to keep whatever is in the lower 3 boxes, the rest of the honey is mine! I expect to get at least 10 full frames of honey (~50 lbs) because the tulip poplar trees are still blooming.

Chloris has a decent number of bees. I didn’t inspect any of the frames and only wanted to replace some of the frames in the second box because a few of them were assembled, but didn’t have wax or a starter strip. I didn’t have enough frames ready when I made the split and I wanted to make sure there were 5 frames to prevent them from drawing comb out from the inner cover. They didn’t expand in to the top frame yet.

Melissa, the second swarm hive

I next inspected Melissa, the second swarm located on the Western side of my yard. The hive was drawing out nice straight frames. I didn’t see the queen, but I did see eggs laid in the cells. A single egg laid in the center of each cell and she put one in every bit of comb that she could. It’s been 9 days since I caught the swarm and eggs are 0-3 days old. This confirms that a virgin queen swarmed and this raises my confidence that this swarm also came from Antheia. It’s crazy that the hive swarmed twice in the same day.

Demeter after the remodeling

The final hive I opened was Demeter, the first swarm I caught and currently located next to the shed. I didn’t have enough frames made when I caught the swarm, so some of the comb they made wasn’t straight. They decided to attach to combs to the edge frame. When I first went back in to the hive and dropped in a foundation-less frame, they did as I expected and attached the comb on to that frame. They didn’t attach it enough to prevent it from collapsing when I cut it off the original frame. End result is the picture on the left with the collapsed comb removed from the broodnest. They stocked away a lot of pollen in that little bit of comb sitting in front of the hive. I moved the comb up to a top feeder. I couldn’t find where I put the screened tops, so I used one of the utility hive boxes with the screened bottom. This was to prevent robbers from having access up there and to keep them from attaching comb to the outer cover. There was a lot of honey dripping all over the place from the collapsed comb, so I reduced the entrance as much as possible with the scraps of wood I had laying around.

Demeter after the remodeling

Hindsight, I should have brought some string with me so I could tie the comb on to one of the frames they haven’t drawn out yet. That wouldn’t have set their wax building back as far. It would have also spared them the effort of now transferring all of the pollen and honey down in to new wax that they have to make. Demeter was a larger swarm than Melissa and it shows by how much faster they are building up.

I inspected the hives today with Dan as a helper. It’s good having a second set of hands and eyes when inspecting a hive. Both hives will swarm. Due to the weather keeping me from getting in to the hive earlier than the last inspection turns out to mean that I missed my opportunity to prevent a swarm. Antheia has over a dozen capped swarm cells and Hegemone has a few. It seems that I was too late with the checkerboarding and the queens ran out of space. This explains all of the drone comb in the top box. The queen must have been desperately looking for empty cells to lay and the only ones available were previously used for honey storage. I’ve read about queen piping, but never heard it myself. I had the opportunity to hear piping queens in Antheia. It’s an interesting sound and had I not read as much as I did about beekeeping, I wouldn’t have recognized the sound. The lesson from this is to keep reading as much as possible because you never know when you’ll find the information to be useful.

I had wanted to split Antheia during the previous inspection, but didn’t due to the questionable queen status. Since the hive is going to swarm, I chose to make a split using the queen cell that was capped last time. I took 1 frame of capped honey, the frame with the queen cell, 2 frames of capped brood and a foundationless frame that was only partially drawn. The hive will share the name of last year’s attempted split, Chloris. The queen cell was capped last week, so she should emerge in the next couple of days and will hopefully be laying before May 1. This hive is slated to be relocated to a friend’s property about a mile away.

I have no chance of preventing the swarm, so I’ve shifted my strategy to swarm catching. I placed two empty hives with swarm lures. One is placed on top of my shed and the other is located on a play structure. My hope is that when the hives do swarm that they take up residence in one of the provided boxes, or stay in my property long enough for me to get home and catch the swarm. If I manage to catch two swarms, then I’ll need to scramble and make more equipment to hold the two packages I will install on May 1.

I made it through today’s inspection without getting stung despite earning at least one. My bees must have phoned ahead to my friend’s hives in Wake Forest. I visited Dave and had the opportunity to see his hives that were moved on to his roof. While standing on the roof about 15′ from the hive, I got “tagged” in the ear. It took a few minutes before it hurt at all, then it turned red and is now comically swollen. He apologized and felt bad. As a beekeeper, I expect to get stung whenever I am near a hive.

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.