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 the caught swarm, the nuc, the split and the top bar hive. I ended the day with two stings; one to my left palm while holding a frame to take a picture and the other in my left thigh after a bee from Hegemone crawled up my pants.

The caught swarm is still very weak, but is alive. I’m viewing this hive as a banked queen more than anything else. It still has many months to get strong enough to try and survive the winter, but unlike the weak hive experiment from last winter I’ll scuttle the hive before wax moths get a chance to destroy the comb.

The nuc hive most likely has a laying worker. Many eggs were laid in the cells and I couldn’t find a queen despite looking very intently. There are a few ways of dealing with a laying worker hive (Bush Bees, Laying Workers). I have plenty of hives for my needs and the nuc hive is weak, so I will most likely just shake out the bees and end the hive.

The split is also weak, but the queen is looking plumper than I remember. I plan on feeding this hive frames of brood from Hegemone and the bought queen hive to keep those hives from swarming.

The top bar hive is doing amazingly well. They’ve drawn out most of the bars I merged in to the brood nest during the last inspection. There were 3-4 frames of solid capped brood and a few more with a mix of eggs, larvae and uncapped brood. I went through each frame and removed a few attachments that the bees made to the sides. The next TBH and top bars I make will have the guide further from the edges. This might help reduce the attachments because they only seem to attach the honey comb toward the top of the hive. There were 1-2 frames with a small attachments at the bottom. After doing a better job of leveling the hive during my last inspection, all of the comb is now perfectly straight. Glad I fixed that when I did because the comb hardens with age and wouldn’t have corrected itself as easily.

I caught my first swarm of the year this evening. They were waiting for me to get home from work on the dogwood tree about 15′ from the hives. I’m not sure which hive send out the swarm. My guess is that it was Hegemone because I haven’t been in the hive in over a week and I split the other hive, which didn’t have any capped queen cells on Friday,  in to three hives. Last year, Hegemone sent her second swarm to the same dogwood tree right next to the hives. I put last year’s in to the same top bar hive, but they absconded a few days later.

There are a few basic methods used for actively capturing a swarm.

1. You can cut the branch and drop the bees in to a box.
2. You can use a bee vacuum to suck the bees in to a container.
3. You can shake the bees in to a bucket or container and then pour them in to a hive.

I like the dogwood tree and the swarm was on one of the main branches. Cutting it was not an option and I don’t own a bee vacuum.  I held a restaurant busboy tray under the swarm and then tapped the branch down quickly against the tray and most of the bees fell in to it. I proceeded to pour the bees as quickly as possible in to the top bar hive before they all took to the air. The main goal was to get the queen in to the hive so the rest of the bees would migrate in to there instead of back on to the branch.

I’m hopeful that they’ll remain in the top bar hive this time around. Instead of being a new hive, it had a lot of bee traffic in it and there is even some small pieces of comb on some of the top bars. I also (probably a going to be a mistake) put a bunch of scrap wax in to the hive to give it that old hive smell.

I planned on inspecting most of the hives today, but ended up only opening the Nuc on a Top Bar Hive. I built the hive based upon the plans provided by Michael Bush. When using the hive in such a way that there is not a solid top to keep the rain out, it works fine as is. I wasn’t able to provide a solid roof to the hive because of the Nuc sitting on top of the front half of the hive. This wasn’t so bad, as the only entrances for water were the gaps between the first and second frames that served as the entrance to the hive.

The real problem was when I decided to feed the bees using an inverted jar. I took an entrance moving screen, laid it across the hive in place of a few top bars and then put the inverted jar on that. It gave easy access to the jar for the bees, but kept them behind the screen to allow me to refill the jar without crushing bees. There were a few issues with that. The bees kept climbing on to the top of the screen, which made it impossible to replace the jar without crushing bees and it provided a nice big opening for rain to get in to the hive. The inverted jar prevent the plywood from covering the screen. My original plan was to get a drill bit the size of the jar tops and use a piece of wood to prevent water from getting in. I never found the time to make that happen, so I cut corners.

End result was that all this rain that we’ve gotten in the past to weeks made its way in to the hive and had no place to go, so it just sat there. There was about 2-3 inches of water in the bottom of the hive with many dead bees floating in it. It smelled disgusting. I ran and got my drill with a 3/8″ bit to put a few drainage holes in to the hive.  I then spent the next 30-45 minutes scooping out the dead bees and using the hive tool as a squeegee. The cardboard follower had to be tossed and this explains why there was always a mass of bees on the screen. They were desperately trying to dry out the hive.

The main lesson to be learned from this is that you should always assume that water will find its way in to the hive and it needs a way to drain out.

I’ve seen an orange insect more than twice the size of a drone flying around near the bees for the past week or so. I managed to catch a quick video of it as it tried to snag a bee from the side of a the Nuc on a Top Bar Hive. It made a few diving attacks and tried to grab on to a bee. Each time, the honey bees rushed at it. It quickly gave up and flew away. After a quick internet search, it looks like it is a European Hornet. Needless to say, the nest will be removed when found.

Yesterday, I did a quick inspection of the two beehives on the West side of my property. The one near the raspberries that has been gulping down one quart of 1:1 syrup daily is doing fine. The hive has five frames fully drawn and they were festooning on the six. The syrup should help them draw out the rest of the frames during this dearth and get them up to a good size for the next honey flow. This hive was started from a small swarm, so I’m not really worried about the speed of their build up.

The original split from Antheia that has been in a double five frame NUC is doing really well. All of the frames are almost entirely drawn out and the hive is packed with bees. Instead of giving them a third NUC box or swapping them in to ten frame boxes, I decided to do a little experiment. I had built a Kenyan Top Bar Hive (KTBH) to put at the Garner Community Garden, but the swarm didn’t stay and the hive has remained empty. I really want a KTBH, but the swarm season has passed, I don’t want to spend $80 on a package and cutting the wax from a frame and wiring to a top bar is too much effort in 80+ degree weather. My plan is to see if I can encourage the bees to build down in to the top bar hive. Two of the top bars have small pieces of drawn comb from the swarm that didn’t stay. I placed those top bars as the front two and left a gap between them. I placed the NUC hive on the Top Bar Hive so that the bees must use this gap as their entrance, which they are doing. Now all I need them to do is expand the small pieces of comb and continue to draw comb out on the top bars. The bees need to either be in the top bar hive or the NUC, but definitely not both. I’m hoping that they build up the top bars enough so that I can take away the NUC and give those frames to another hive. I anticipate the need to feed this hive a lot.

I took a short video today of the activity at the front of the hive. The bees are still a bit confused about the entrance being a foot higher up, which is why there are a lot of bees hovering at the bottom of the top bar hive. They circle until they remember that the entrance moved.

I left work early after Alissa called to let me know that “Hegemone is doing something wierd.” The hive was sending out a second swarm. If you ever have doubts about whether it is orientation flights or a swarm, look up. This swarm was nice to us and landed on a branch of the dogwood tree to the right of the main 3 hives and about 6′ off the ground. Alissa went to work with duct tape to modify a cardboard box so it could hold the 15″ top bars. Catching the swarm went well, but I did brush a bee stinger first in to my hand.

I drove the swarm over to the top bar hive I set up this past weekend at the Garner Grows Community Garden. I wasn’t sure when I would get bees in to that hive after having to effectively cancel my order of 2 packages from Busy Bee. They were delayed a week and didn’t inform me until I called this past Friday. This swarm spared me from having to cut and tie a hive in to the KTBH. I still need to make another ~10 top bars for the hive.