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.

On Jan 30th, I discovered that one of the small, late season swarms at the garden didn’t make it. The hive had plenty of food stores, but they either couldn’t get to the food or they were too weak to stay warm. I didn’t find the queen’s body, so I have no idea what happened to her. The hive should have been merged with another before the winter, but I left it separate as an experiment. The other two hives at the garden were doing well at that time.

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.

All the bees left from the swarm installed in to the top bar hive at the Garner garden

I went to the Garner garden to check on the swarm that I put in the top bar hive and add the rest of the top bars I made. There was very light bee traffic at the entrance of the hive and when I opened it up there were only small cluster of bees. I looked through the cluster and didn’t see the queen. It’s really depressing seeing the small cluster of bees continuing to work despite there being no hope for them. I don’t know what happened to the rest of the bees that were put in the hive or what became of the queen.

A few possibilities:

• I never caught the queen
• The queen died or was critically injured during the transport out to the garden
• The queen died on a mating flight
• The queen didn’t like the top bar hive and flew off with the swarm and the bees clustering in the hive were left behind.

I screened up another hive that will be moved out to the garden tomorrow and any bees left in the top bar will be shaken out at the entrance of the new hive. Hopefully they are accepted in to the hive and help boost its productivity.