Backyard Apiary

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.

Here in NC, we’re in the middle of dearth. The only thing the bees have to eat is what they can find and what they stockpiled during the last flow. I am fortunate to have my hives located where I do. More urban areas tend to have more in bloom because people landscape their yards with non-native plants that bloom throughout the year. I also happen to have several garden nurseries and home improvement stores within the forage range of a bee.

I wanted to give them a little food boost to help them draw out more comb in preparation of the fall flow. Yesterday, I put out 10 lbs batch of 1:1 sugar syrup (10 lbs sugar, 10 lbs water). I was at work and asked my wife if there was any activity at the feeder. “There are a few bees”, she responded. I expected her to see more than just a few bees. The feeder was completely empty of syrup when I returned from work. There were still a few small clusters of bees, a few yellow jackets and a spider with a butt the size of a quarter. I put the local newspaper to good use and played whack a mole with the yellow jackets. After I killed four of them, the rest had scattered. I’m not sure what the spider was doing, but it would hide whenever it saw me.

I put out another batch of the same size this morning. There were about a dozen bees crawling around looking for any leftovers from yesterday’s feast. There were a lot of ants crawling around in the dry feeder. I refilled the feeder, drowning many of the ants. I put away the now empty stock pot and fetched my camera to take some pictures. I was back outside in about 10 minutes and took the below video. Thousands of bees feasting. I couldn’t see a single ant anywhere near the inside of the feeder. I did notice a few crazy yellow jackets landing and trying to feed.

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.

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.

Spring weather is finally starting to appear and the bees are busy. The hives were topped off with dry sugar and a 2:1 syrup was put in a feeder hive in front of the other 2 hives. It took the bees a while to find the syrup, but they’ve started to chomp away at it. Having lots of activity at the entrances and the large number of bees eating the dry sugar in the top of the hive gives me hope that I’ll be able to increase the number of hives this year with splits.

First video shows the hives with the outer covers off and lots of bees.

The second video shows the activity at the entrances.