Backyard Apiary

I finally managed to check on the hives again today after way too long of a lapse. Both splits that I made from the super queen are no more. The 10 frame hive was failing during the last check and it had completely failed and wax moths moved in. The split in the double nuc seems to have lost their queen and the population dropped drastically. There were multiple eggs in cells, so there is a chance of a laying worker. I moved the hive and shook out all of the bees to let them find a new home in one of the other hives. The swarm pulled from my neighbor’s pine tree is doing well. It’s built up from a tiny hive to a weak hive. I’ll give it a few frames of capped brood on my next trip out to the hives.

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.

I inspected all of the backyard hives on April 3rd and the long hive has a queen! The hive has been sustained and this new queen is an offspring from the purchased queen, which has been dubbed “super queen” because of her size and how much she lays. Antheia, Hegemone and super queen are expanding nicely. Hegemone had a few swarm cells on a few frames. As far as I could tell, the cells were empty. I added another box and swapped in several empty frames to help keep them from swarming.

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.

On Friday, I inspected the long hive to see if they raised their own queen. Drones are just starting to fly, so a virgin queen shouldn’t have to wait much longer to find a few mature mates. It’s been about three weeks since I added the two frames of brood to the long hive. There were signs of a few queen cells, where one emerged and the others were ripped open. No eggs or larvae in the hive, but the queen has only been going out on mating flights for about a week. All of my hives have capped drone cells now to help spread the genes.

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.

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.

A close up shot of eggs. They are the tiny white things in the cell that looks like a grain of rice.

I went through the hives to make sure the bees have plenty of food stockpiled. To my surprise, Hegemone had lots of swarm cells. All of the queen cells were uncapped and looked to be empty. They are just preparing to swarm. I think I caught it in time to do a preventative split. I removed 11 frames of brood, pollen and honey to start the new hive. Eggs are very difficult to see in ideal conditions. Many of the brood frames from Hegemone that were not completely capped had very dark comb, which is not ideal. I was able to see eggs (possibly larvae) when I looked at the frame in direct sunlight.

The extended period of 90+ degree days has kept me from being outside and building more equipment. I have everything I need to start a 5 frame NUC, but I don’t think pulling only 5 frames would have done much to prevent Hegemone from swarming. I am lacking 10 frame hive tops and bottoms, but luckily I had scraps of plywood to make due. I used the queen castle bottom, which has a small inch wide entrance on three sides, instead of a full width entrance on one. The three entrances are designed to give each of the 3-frame mating hives their own separate entrance. The top box of the split has one frame of capped brood and my last nine assembled frames. It’s time to endure the heat and get to work assembling frames. I also need to finish building the long hive and get that moved over to the Garner Grows Community Garden.

Hive count is at eight and I need to be more attentive to Hegemone in the next couple of weeks to make sure she doesn’t swarm. If the hive caps those queen cells, then I will probably make a few more splits that will be sold. The hive has sent out 3-4 swarms this year, so it’s not really surprising that they want to send out another.

I added a second hive body to the swarm hive by the raspberries and to the split with the purchased queen. The new queen’s hive was especially unfriendly today and netted me a sting on a finger. The bees were attacking the hive tool, headbutting my veil and encouraged me to put on gloves. Such are the joys of inspecting a hive in a dearth. I also think I kept the hives open too long and triggered a little bit of a robbing frenzy. All of the hives are strong, so I’m not worried but there will be a few more dead bees than usual in front of the hives.

I was curious to see if a dead bee could still sting and also wanted to boost my resistance to stings, so I stung myself on the hand. The answer is, yes a newly dead bee will still sting and pump venom.

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.

Hegemone's 3rd swarm up in the Red Bud tree

About 2 weeks ago, I contacted the state bee inspector and scheduled for him to check out my hives today. I wanted to make sure that they are good an healthy before distributing them to other locations. It’s a lot easier to keep tabs on a hive when it’s 100′ from my back door. He went through all of the hives, even the one on top of the shed. He noticed a drone with deformed wings, which could be sign of varroa. I need to keep an eye on that hive to make sure they don’t become a problem. Aside from that, all of the hives are doing well. The split and 3 swarms all have lots of eggs and are building out comb nicely.

I moved a few empty supers with frames near Hegemone and Antheia, so that I could add more if it looked like they needed the space. They were still drawing out the frames I initially checkerboarded in my feeble attempt to prevent swarming. As I was placing the boxes, Hegemone started to send out a swarm. It’s a good sign of strength for the hive, but our potential honey harvest has dropped to an even lower amount. We’ll definitely get a few frames, but we won’t get the obscene amount my wife wanted.

I have the equipment to make a single complete hive and that is slated for Chloris. While catching the 4th swarm of the year, I was introduced to Marc, a fellow beekeeper in the development, who lost both of his package bees over winter. I called Marc and got him to bring one of his empty hives and help catch the swarm. His reward for helping was I let him have the bees. This was the easiest swarm for me to catch, despite it being about 20′ off the ground. I bought a 14′ telescoping tree pruner, a painter’s pole, a 5 gallon bucket and the least expensive hand roller that could attach to the pole. I drilled a hole in the center of the bucket, threaded the pole through and then used the hand roller as a nut to hold it all together.

Marc held the bucket under the swarm and I used the tree pruner to remove extra limbs and then finally the branch holding the swarm. Most of the swarm fell nicely in to the bucket and stayed there until I the bees in to Marc’s hive. The entire process took less than 10.

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.

The swarm 25-30' up in a tree

Luck is on my side this year with the bees. Instead of going in to work today, I took my son to the doctor and then planned on telecommuting the rest of the day. I was checking on the bees when I noticed a lot of bees flying in front of Hegemone. The bees started to expand their flights further in front and above the hive as more bees started to pour out of the hive. It got to the point where there were bees zig zagging in every direction I looked and they were flying throughout 1/4 of my yard.

Eventually they decided upon landing on a tree next to my shed. They chose a limb that turned out to be in the most difficult location. It was about 30′ above the ground and the tree didn’t have a trunk that I could lean a ladder against. A beekeeping neighbor, whose hive in his front yard is what gave me the idea of keeping bees, was home and available to help. I’m not sure if I would have caught this swarm if it were not for the telescoping tree pruner my neighbor borrowed from another neighbor. While standing on the shed (with a rotting roof), I tossed a rope tied to a brick over the limb. It took many tries before it made it all the way over so that the neighbor could grab the other end. I used the pruner to cut limbs blocking the ropes path, but couldn’t quite reach the swarm’s limb.

Box that had most of the swarm

My beekeeping neighbor had another friend in the area who let him borrow a longer tree pruner that also had a saw blade on it, instead of just clippers. I repeatedly had to cut down a limb with the cluster on it. Each limb would fall a few feed, dislodge the bees and then they would reform the cluster on another branch. While cutting and shaking the swarm out of the tree, I noticed that there were a few dozen bees fanning at the entrance of the hive on top of the shed. I thought they were just a bit confused by the swarm lure I poured in that trap box because I didn’t see the queen or a mass of bees inside the box.

Swarm bees orientating to the hive on the shed

There were several small clusters of bees and when I was done cutting, one even formed on the saw blade at the end of the pole. The cluster was eventually low enough for me to hand down branches full of bees and brush those on the main trunk in to a bucket. I’ve read in many places about “pouring bees” from a bucket and it finally makes sense. You literally just dump them out of the bucket as if they were water and they flow out and splash a little bit (as some of them fly). There were a lot of bees in the box on the ground with more flying in, but there was a beard of bees on the front of the shed right below the entrance to the hive.

Since the bees were all going in to one of the two hives, I left them alone to figure out what they would do with the plan of combining the boxes closer to dusk. About an hour and a half later, I went outside to take some pictures and there were no bees at the entrance to the box on the ground. I opened it and it was completely empty. I looked up above the shed and there were a dozen bees flying around the entrance of that hive. It looks like they made the decision to move up to the penthouse. While the swarm was sending out scouts, I noticed many bees flying around the entrance to that hive. I wonder if they had already decided to move in to that box before my actions that encouraged them to get out of the tree. I guess I’ll never know, but I do know that opening and pouring swarm lure in a box is a lot more attractive to bees than the lure properly installed in another box.

I was given some alternative methods for getting difficult to reach swarms to the ground. This is actual advice, but I have never tried or seen how well these methods work.

Use a Hose. The stream of water should knock the cluster off the tree and the water would keep them from flying.

If outside city limits. That qualifier let me know that this would be an interesting method. Shoot the cluster with a shotgun. The lead shot shouldn’t kill too many of the bees, but the shockwave should knock the bees out of the tree. You’ll want to spread a tarp below the cluster before shooting. I don’t ever plan on trying this method, but it makes me want to purchase an Airzooka to see if that would successfully remove the bees from a tree. If it could do so at 30-40′, then it would be a lot better and faster than pruning a tree with a poleaxe.

For the past few days, the hives have started to beard. This is common as the temperature increases, but I noticed that Antheia had a little beard at 8am when I was getting ready for work. A clear sign that the hive was not too hot, but short on space. I opened up the hives today to give them more space. Every box was overflowing with bees. I would pull out a frame and the bees would just pour out behind the frame. It is really cool to look down between some of the frames and see a row of hundreds of little faces staring back at me.

Antheia had a single capped queen cell at the bottom corner of a frame and many empty swarm cells. Oddly, there were a few frames of nothing but capped drone cells. There was some uncapped brood, so she is still laying or at least was laying a few days ago. I can’t see eggs through the veil. Perhaps she didn’t have much space and laid the drones in honey cells. At least all the other hives in the surrounding area will get the chance to gain some good local genetics.

The queen did something odd. She jumped out of the hive. I saw her large dark body crawling around on the ground in front of the hive. I picked her up with the hive tool and put her on the top of the frames. I had to encourage her to stay in the hive by blocking her attempts to escape. She eventually went between the frames instead of off the edge. Hegemone’s queen was in the top box between 2 frames that were combed together. She contrasts her sister queen with a golden body. The hive had a good amount of capped drone, honey and pollen.

All frames in both of the hives were drawn. As I shifted frames of brood and honey up to the new super, I put a foundationless frame in its place. In less than 5 minutes, I noticed the bees festooning on one of the new frames I added. I will be surprised if they have many undrawn frames before the flow.

I’ve been using my droid to record inspections. It has turned out to be a very effective hands free way of keeping track of what I see. I am looking in to an easy way of posting the audio clips in case anyone cares to listen.