Backyard Apiary

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.

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.

Around 9:30am, I noticed a lot of bees climbing up the front of Antheia’s boxes and flying around near the entrance in a tight circular pattern. At first I thought the bees were gathering for a swarm because I have never seen orientation or cleansing flights that early in the morning. It was about 65 F, so all of the hives had traffic at the entrances, but nothing like what Antheia was doing. By the time I put on shoes and got out to take a closer look they were gone. I wandered around the yard trying to spot a clumb of bees in the trees; a bird’s nest looks a lot like a swarm from 50-100′ away. I didn’t spot any and went back inside. About 30 minutes later I was out on the porch and saw the swarm high up in a tree.

I quickly gathered a ladder, clippers, a 3″ limb cutter and threw on my jacket. I scurried up the ladder only to realize that my shins were resting on the 3rd rung from the top and I was still not even close. I went and got the tall recycling bin from the kitchen in the hopes that I could tap the branch with it so the swarm would fall inside. The swarm was still out of reach. I didn’t have a taller ladder and I don’t have a big enough bin. Thankfully, I had rope a 100′ of thick nylon rope that I purchased almost 2 years ago. Now was definitely a worthwhile occasion to open it from its packaging. Anyone who does not have some rope in their house, needs to race out and buy some today. You never know when you’ll need it!

I used the rope to pull the branch within reach and tied it to the top of the ladder. A big warning goes along with this. You want all of the tension on the rope to be pulling the ladder up. Otherwise, you risk making the ladder unstable and you’ll probably fall and then get hit with a ladder. You also need to untie the rope before getting off the ladder. The weight of you and the ladder is holding down the branch, but if you get off the ladder might not weigh enough.

With the branch held within arms reach, I removed as much of the branch as possible to make it easy to carry one handed down a ladder. Success! I managed to clip the branch and get down the ladder and rest the branch over the boxes I had waiting. The bottom box has a screen and spacer wood attached to the bottom. I picked up the boxes and moved it on to my porch to figure out what to do next. I tapped the branch down and the bees fell in to the two, stacked medium boxes. This is a step that I will avoid in the future because this was not the final resting place for the bees. I’ll set up a place for the swarm before tapping the bees in to boxes.

I quickly set up another hive in the yard, about 50′ away from the other hives, and then moved everything over there for the final transfer. I managed to get all of the bees in to their new home by moving the frames in the swarm catch box, a bee brush for stragglers and flipping and shaking the boxes. I made a quart of 1:1 syrup for the bees as a house warming gift.

The new hive will be called, Demeter. This has been an exciting day in my beekeeping adventures and I’ve gained a lot of valuable experience. To those who are not in to beekeeping, a swarm is worth about $75. In essence, I prevented myself from losing that bee wealth, which makes up for the reduced honey harvest that I’ll get from Antheia this year.