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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Laziness paid off for me today. After catching the first swarm, I left the ladder and other tools right where I caught the swarm. A few hours later, I went back to cleanup and noticed a second swarm. I moved the ladder over 5 feet and got everything ready to capture the new swarm.

The first swarm was high up in a tree with sparse branches, but the second was much lower in a denser tree. I had to clear away lots of little branches to get close enough to the swarm. The bees were huddled on a relatively thick branch that needed the 3″ limb cutter instead of the hand clipper. This really needed a third hand, so I had to get creative. I used one hand with the other limb cutter arm against the ladder. My other hand was holding the limb. The plan was to cut the limb and carry it down the ladder like last time. Things do not always go according to plan. The limb was jostled when it was cut about half way through. This caused bees to rain down on me. Bees in a reproductive swarm are very docile. Despite having hundreds of them land on me, I did not get stung and none of them were aggressively flying at my veil.

I shifted the plan a bit. I have a hive body with a screened bottom that I use for holding frames during hive inspections. The screen is there to prevent bees from having access to the ground and then finding their way under my shoe. It also makes it easy to pour any stragglers back in to their hive. I use this box to literally catch the swarm. Instead of holding the limb, I held the box under the bees and continued to cut the limb. This caught any bees that fell from the limb being jostled while cutting and caught the limb and bees when it fell.

Learning from mistakes I made during the first swarm, I had set up a hive for them right below where the swarm was resting in the tree. I was not expecting to have 5 hives so soon and was low on equipment. I had to use an empty box in place of cement blocks as the base. The hive had an inner cover, but no outer cover. I used a hive body on its side to block light entering the hole in the inner cover. I later replaced that with a piece of wood panel. This hive is named Melissa, which is greek for “honey bee”.

As the sun was setting, I scrambled to assemble a few frames with wax foundation. I prefer foundationless, but having some reference frames help the bees draw out straight foundationless comb. I put the new frames in to the hive and removed the tree limb that they were still huddling around. I shook the bees off the limb and leaned it against the entrance so the bees could climb up in to the hive. I noticed a small piece of drawn wax about the size of a quarter attached to the limb. It’s a good thing I didn’t wait until morning, otherwise I would have been dealing with more burr comb than I’d want. Now they can get back to building on the provided frames.