The birds and the bees and the flowers and the trees and a thing called love

As our kind friends and followers keep telling us, we haven't posted a blog in a long time. Why, you ask? Well, our wedding recently took over our lives! We were married at our home on September 25th with our immediate family and close friends in attendance. The bees played an important role as you will see.  It was a fantastic day that we will always remember happily.

The bees and Tim co-produced our wedding favors!

Our good friend, Kari made this gorgeous cake with
bee and gold-leaf accents

It was so beautiful--we hated to cut it--but it was delicious
too, so I'm glad we did!

A gift of something new and something blue. There was
old and borrowed too, but not bee-themed!

My sisters created this incredibly cute bachelorette favor.
Honey-flavored candy filled the champagne flute.

There is a lot of talent among our friends. Adam and Emily
 made this lovely bee painting that they gave us as a wedding gift!

Harvest

We harvested two 'frames' of capped honey from the TBH about a week ago. It was medium colored and super sweet (tooth-ache sweet) with the distinct but subtle flavor of licorice. Everyone who tries it takes a taste, stops for a moment, gets this confused look on their face and then says, 'there's something different about this honey...I can't quite place it.' They either eventually realize it tastes like licorice, or when we tell them that's the flavor, they go 'yeah, that's it!' We harvested a couple of quarts.

And now I am rendering the wax. Hard work. I bought a crock pot yesterday ($7 at Saint Vincent De Paul. It's the cool, yellow old-school one my mom had.) and pitcher to use expressly for wax rendering. I'm starting with a double boiler, which will allow me to skim the melted wax off the top of a pot full of water and other gunk. The next step will be to re-melt the wax in my way-cool retro crock pot and then pour it through some paper towels to sift off the remaining gunk. This is hard work for just a few ounces of wax from several combs.

Word on the street is that you should only try rendering wax from cappings--the thin, pure-ish wax the bees use to cover the fully cured honey for storage. I think that's probably a better idea. But hey, we never do things the easy way, and it seems a real shame to throw out all of the honey comb.

Bee Brethren: The Mud Dauber

At the beginning of the summer, I noticed a mud dauber (this guy ) building a nest under our patio cover. I was a little aprehensive about her being there because, well because look at that thing; she looks like a stinging machine! I could just imagine a nest bursting forth with hundreds of stinging machines later in the year. But it was fascinating to watch her build the nest. She would collect mud and then plaster it into the corner of the patio, building clusters of long, narrow cells. Each day she would add one new cell. Sometimes the cells were capped and sometime open.

Intrigued, I did a little research online to find out if mud daubers have any redeeming qualities; I really don't like killing things if I can help it, but I was a little worried that the wasps might bother the bees, not to mention my friends and family! My research revealed that mud daubers build these cells and then fill them with dead insects to eat later, not baby mud daubers. Another article indicated that honey bees are too big to be a major source of food for them. And since the wasp wasn't the slightest bit interested in me, I decided she could stay. 

I haven't seen her now in months. And until today, when we decided to remove the nest and dissect it, it looked exactly as it had before she disappeared. I sometimes wondered what had happened to her, but not enough to think that the food she put into the nest might not have been for her! Tim carefully cut down the nest and we gingerly cut it open, removing bits of brittle mud plaster to reveal little caches of long-dead spiders and some sort of cocoon. As I started to cut away another chunk of the nest, I heard a violent buzzing and saw something brown and amber colored wiggling around just under where I had made my cut. 

I don't think I've ever moved so fast! I was away from our dissecting table and across the patio in a fraction of a second, screaming my head off like a maniac all the way. (Odd that Tim thinks I'm too jumpy to make a good entomologist.) 

Let me now set the record straight: mud dauber nests are full of baby mud daubers! The mother builds a mud tunnel, fills it with snacks, lays an egg in it, covers the entrance for extra coziness and then makes a get away. The babies grow fat eating the dead insects, spin cocoons and then emerge as full-grown mud daubers. The one that we watched emerge this morning, chewed her way out of the mud tunnel and immediately took flight. She made one circle of the patio and then flew off without so much as a glance back.

Not to worry friends, fascinating as they are, we are not about to get into mud-dauber keeping.

There's honey, Honey!

When we didn't have any capped honey by mid-July, I started to worry that we wouldn't get any, which I found surprisingly disappointing. I'm into beekeeping because it provides me an opportunity to observe insects up-close-and-personal. Honey is a bonus. Nevertheless I was disappointed, partly because I thought it meant I was doing something wrong.

Well, if the amount of honey in a hive directly correlates to the skill of a beekeeper, Tim and I are beekeeping extraordinaires. According to Tim, who is chivalrously holding down the fort while I'm on travel this week, the TBH has several combs of capped honey!

I'm ecstatic.

Combo the Combo Hive

Today we combined the remaining bees in the combo hive with the Langstroth colony that was originally split from it earlier this summer.

Several weeks ago, I noticed that the combo hive, which was the strongest of our spring swarms, was building lots of swarm cells. In an effort to stop or decrease the swarming, I split the hive into a Langstroth. (By the way, this never works; once a colony makes swarm cells, it's gonna swarm.) The remaining combo hive 'swarmed itself silly'--a technical term I invented to describe a colony that has swarmed repeatedly until it has too few adult bees to care for the brood.

When we checked the combo hive today, there were just a couple of combs of bees. There was larva and capped brood, so we knew there was a laying queen, or at least that there had been fairly recently. The numbers of bees had dwindled to the point where I couldn't really see the hive surviving; just a few bees went in and out of the hive in a 15-second period.

So, we combined the combo and Langstroth colonies using the newspaper method. Simply put, you consolidate all of the bees from the strong colony into one deep, then you place a newspaper with slits in it over the top bars of said deep, and finally, you place a second deep containing the combs and bees from the weak hive on top. The idea is that the bees on both sides of the newspaper will eat their way through, getting used to each others scent as they go, and be best of friends by the time they come out on the other side.

We'll check on the bees again next weekend and let you know how they're doing.

Bee Date

Today friends from work and their children came to visit the bees. There were 8 kids ranging from 9 months to 8 years old, and all of them were very enthusiastic about bees. We talked a little bit about how important and special honey bees are and then we took a peek inside of the bee hive. I was so impressed with how brave and curious all of the kids were. Afterward, we tasted honey from both of our hives. Interestingly, the TBH honey tastes like licorice! I'm attributing the flavor to the wild fennel growing in the creek.

All in all, a truly fantastic day!

Future Beekeepers of America!

All suited up and ready to see some bees!

Warming up with a peek through the viewing window on the top bar hive

The first glimpse of the triangular top bar honey comb

A closer look at the bees and honey comb. Lots of great questions!

Finally, we got to taste some honey!

Anna's Bee World

I stumbled across this truly fabulous native bee blog today: Anna's Bee World. Check it out!

Busy Bees

When I got home from work today around 4:45, the TBH bees were going crazy! It looked almost swarm-like, but I noticed that as many bees were going into the hive as coming out, which made me feel better. I went to the grocery store, and when I returned, things had really slowed down--just a few bees going in and out. I couldn't find a swarm in any of the trees nearby, and when I looked through the viewing window, it was just as full of bees as ever.

Your Guess is as Good as Mine

I went outside this morning to say hello to the bees, and I found a group of them dangling from the hive! I can't figure out what they were up to. Maybe this is how bees play?

Starting over

Well, the combo hive swarmed and now they are starting over again. When I arrived today, the usually bustling hive was trickling bees in and out, and when I opened it up, bees scantly covered only about 6 of the 12 filled out frames. Everyone was a little touchy too.

I found a queen on about the fifth frame. She looks nice and fat, and I hope she will get down to laying soon and preferably not exhibit the swarminess of her mother. Time will tell. I don't think we will be getting much honey from this hive, but hopefully they will be able to build up enough to make it through the winter.

I think the split from the combo hive ended up with the old queen because there was never a break in the brood cycle. I'm wondering if we should re-queen to prevent massive swarming in the future. While those of you who know me know I'm not in this thing for the honey, it would still be nice to get a little bit to share with friends and family instead of more bees, which I really don't need or have room for. Tricky!

The TBH is building like crazy. I added two more frames this week. The brood is still patchy, but the bees seem to be okay with that--there are no signs of supercedure--so I'm okay with that. They have loads of pollen stored but still not much honey.

TBH Observations.

The TBH now has 19 frames! About 18 of those are at various stages of being drawn out. I added two frames today--one with a small lobe of wax that was built by the previous denizens of the hive and one completely empty. I've been adding frames to both ends of the hive over the last few weeks, and they are happy to work them on both ends, but they store different things at the extremes of the hive.

To the left of the hive, they tend to store honey and brood. To the right it's all pollen and drone brood. They have a lot of pollen--probably 5 solid frames of it, but not much honey. Drone production seems to be slowing down now.

The queen isn't the tidiest egg layer. She tends to spread things out a bit, especially on the drone brood--a few drones here, some honey there. The worker brood is pretty regular, although it seems to be at various stages of development; eggs, next to larva, next to capped brood.

I've noticed more propolis in this hive than in the others. I'm not sure if that has to do with it being a TBH or if they are just heavy propolizers--it doesn't make things impossible, but I do spend time scraping it off so that I can move the bars more easily.

I noticed a couple of supersedure cells today--maybe the workers aren't happy with their queen's performance. Personally, I like her--she's completely black, which makes her easy to spot--I see her pretty much every time I'm in that hive. She seems to have put on some girth over the last few weeks and now seems bigger than when she first arrived. I wonder if she could possibly be a new queen.

Finally, I've noticed a red dragonfly loitering around the hive and occassionally flying through the little cloud of bees at the entrance. It doesn't seem to be eating the bees, but I do wonder why it is attracted to them.

Very mysterious

Temperatures have been creeping up over the last few days. Yesterday at 4:00pm my backyard thermometer read 100, and at 10:30 this morning as I was getting ready to open the TBH, the thermometer read 90!

As I was preparing the smoker, I noticed a very dark, large bee frantically running around among the weeds. At first I thought it was a drone, but on closer inspection, I determined that it was a virgin queen.  She was much larger than a normal worker, with a pronounced thorax, and her abdomen ended in a point. Since, I didn't know what she was up to, I decided not to disturb her.

When I opened the hive, I found the old queen looking quite healthy on the 5th frame and a happily buzzing colony. They've now filled out about 12 frames, mostly with brood. I added a frame on either end to give them something to work with. There was a lot of propolis between the top bars and the hive walls, and the hive gave off the distinct smell of propolis when I opened it.  Not much honey in this hive yet, but much of their small stores are mixed in among the brood comb. Odd.

I am baffled by the virgin queen...was she on her way to get mated? Was she returning from a mating flight? Did the bees kick her out because the reigning queen is still in good shape? Did the reigning queen kick her out? So many questions!

Hurt So Good

I got stung on the thigh today, and it swelled up to the size of a softball! I didn't tuck my pants into my socks, and one of the girls crawled up the inside of my pant leg and showed me who was boss. Ouch! It's my first real reaction to a sting since taking up with the bees.

It hurt, but harvesting my first frame of honey more than made up for it! The gals had drawn out a frame of wax and just kept extending the cells on one side into the empty frame next door. I wasn't sure how to fix it without making a big mess, so I decided to harvest it. The bees seem to be finding plenty of nectar and pollen, so I didn't think they would miss it.

The frame was about 3/4 drawn out and capped on one side; it yielded about 3 quarts of honey! Most of it I crushed to extract the honey, but I left some of the wax intact because in my opinion, squishing the honey out of the wax into your mouth is the best way to eat honey. I'm also working on purifying some wax to make candles or lip balm.

Putting the drawn out frame into the brood chamber and creating a nuc seems to have prevented a swarm, for now anyway. I put the nuc into an eight frame Langstroth today with a follower board to keep everyone nice and snug. I'll be keeping an eye on that hive to see how things progress over the next few weeks. Hopefully we'll see some eggs soon!

Experimentation

I checked on the combo hive today, and I found about 10 swarm cells in various stages of development. Tim and I discussed what to do about it last week when I first noticed the bees starting to build swarm cells, and we half decided to just let them swarm. However, I was concerned about that for a couple of reasons; first, they might swarm themselves silly like the 'Old Hive' tried to do, and second, I don't want them swarming around the property where they are located--having a swarm of bees settle into the property owners' wall hardly seems like a nice way to say thank you for letting me keep bees there.

Most of the swarm cells, even ones that were pretty well built out seemed empty, so perhaps these are back up cells that the bees will only populate in an emergency?? There were a couple of capped swarm cells; one I left with the main hive, and the other I put into a split.

I also put a fully drawn out frame into the middle of the brood nest of the parent hive to give the bees a sense of having lots of space and maybe curb the swarming urge.

I tasted royal jelly today. I thought it would be sweet, but it was actually kind of salty with the distinct, earthy flavor of a bee hive.

The GOOD NEWS: There were two full frames of honey! Go bees, go! Having said that, the bees have slowed down wax production--they only filled a total of about one frame since my last inspection.

I am curious to see if putting the empty comb into the brood nest helps with the swarming. We shall see.

BBC News

There was a article in the BBC News today about bees and colony collapse disorder. Here's the link if you are interested....

Swarminess

I checked the combo hive today. Those bees are swarmy! They have about 10 frames now, and I'd say 1/2 of them had queen cups! They have plenty of space--I've been giving them a couple of frames a week--so I'm not sure what's driving them to swarm. I'm trying to decide what do to; split or not split. The problem is that I don't particularly want more bees. I'm going to sleep on it.

Al (my dad) recently built two TBHs with his friends, Don and Paul. They caught a swarm today and put it into one of the TBHs. I can't wait to check that hive out!

Bees on the Move

We moved the TBH to the new house today! I was surprised to find that I felt much more at home in the new house as soon as the bees moved in.

An English Apiary

I stumbled across my first English apiary the other day on a walk in the countryside between Micklover and Radbourne. There were seven hives in a circle beneath a group of trees with a wrought iron fence securing them all inside. Only one of the hives actually seemed inhabited but those bees had a meadow of wild flowers to work on. I'm not very good at spotting the different breeds of bees yet but they weren't blond like Alan's Italians or dark like his Russians. They were similar to Jessica's Carniolans but smaller and maybe be a smidge darker. Not sure if anyone can work anything out from that.....

Here's a photo of the beehives under the trees:

Digressing from beehives, I particularly liked the house to the right of the beehives:

Here's a closer shot of the red brick house, with its high pitched roof and patterned slate work, its fancy white eves, and its non-square window to keep Jessica's dad happy. It's a beaut. 

Digressing further, if you're tastes in real estate are a little grander then Radbourne Hall at the summit of the hill opposite might suite you better:

More Bees - The Tawny Mining Bee

I spotted this cute little bee in my mum's back garden the other day. After a little research, it looks like it's a Tawny Mining Bee:

Apparently the Tawny Mining Bee is solitary bee, meaning that does all of its nest building, food collection, and brood rearing on its own. It burrows or 'mines' into the ground to forms a nest. I haven't spotted one of those yet but here's a shot taken from the web:

Honeybee Graveyard

I spent some time poking around in the debris left under the Old Hive and Split today. It made me think of a honeybee graveyard. There were tons of pollen loads--mostly in shades of yellow, but I also found some gray, lavender and red pollen. The pollen was accompanied by countless dead mites, lots of bee poop, bee legs, dried bits of plants, cappings from cells, and the remains of some kind of cocoon. The pollen will be interesting to look at under magnification. 

Pollen loads from under the split.

There were some bees poking around as well. Most just took a cursory look, but a couple wandered around with their proboscis' out, and one looked like it was trying to collect the pollen loads. Others seemed to be wondering where their homes had gone. 

Update

Alan's nuc:
I think the brood I saw last time was 'mature' worker brood because this time I saw a worker bee emerging from one of the capped cells, but otherwise, there is no brood, and I'm thinking this hive is queenless. I don't see any signs of a replacement queen in the works or a recently hatched queen.

Martin's swarm:
Both of the deeps are about 60-70% full of drawn out comb with some honey. I saw a lot of drones hanging around too--some of them are really light colored. I didn't see a lot of brood, but I did see two queen cups and one recently vacated supercedure cell. How do I know it was recently vacated? I found the new queen--she looked virginal to me--on the second to last frame. Martin uses plastic foundation, and she was wandering around on a bit that had not yet been covered in wax. I will check for eggs and larva in the next two to three weeks and split the hive as soon as I can.

TBH: These gals are drawing out the comb beautifully. The last three top bars are almost completely drawn out. The first one is about a fifth of the way drawn out, so I added an empty top bar to the inside of it. I found the queen on the second-to-last comb. She is long, slender and completely black! Lots of brood, but not incredibly regular. I uncorked another entrance hole in the hive to give them more space to get in and out.

I'm going to wait until tomorrow to check the combo hive.

The Dwindling Apiary...kind of

I just said good-bye to the Old Hive and the Split. Mary, a lovely woman we met in the Beekeeping series at Green Gulch, is taking the bees to their new home in Oakland. It was a bitter-sweet moment saying good-bye to our first hive and parent colony. Now the backyard apriary is down to just the TBH. Can we still even call it an apiary?

While our backyard apiary is dwindling, the total number of hives under my charge doesn't seem to be changing much. Martin's apiary has gone from one hive to three in a matter of weeks!

Growing up in my family, there was never a shortage of cats. Our family maintained a stable population of four to five cats at all times--when one would kick the bucket or wander off, another one or two would show up looking for a meal and a bed. It would seem that bees are the new cats.

Xylocopa californicus

I swung by our new place this evening after work to stand in the backyard and imagine it full of lovely plants and busily humming bees. As I left, I noticed a big black bee on the ground. I think it was a carpenter bee (Xylocopa californicus). It looked like this:

I took it home to have a closer look. These photos really don't do it justice--it is a beautiful bee with a shiny yet subtly furry abdomen and thorax, black wings and furry legs. It looked positively cuddly.

Alan's Nuc Gets a Home

With the rain clearing up today, I was finally able to get into the hives. The first thing I did was move a frame of drawn comb into the center of the upper deep on the old hive. I pulled it up from the bottom box on Saturday but put it next to the hive wall. Tim and I decided this morning that the drawn comb should really be above the brood chamber in the middle of the box. The bees seemed to agree; they were trying to build comb upward from the tops of the lower frames at the center of the brood chamber. They were not happy when I removed the wax they had built above the frames. Several bees flew directly at me, and I'm sure I would have been stung w/out my protective gear. I'm not sure if this hive is just feisty and should perhaps be re-queened or if just has some insecurity issues that will be solved with time and space. 

Next I did the same maneuver on the split and added six new empty frames to fill out the box. I was a bit short on deep frames when I initially added the second deep. These bees were mellow and lovely.

Then I headed over to Martin's and put Alan's nuc into an 8-frame deep. I'm not sure about that nuc anymore. I didn't see any larva, and the cappings on the brood looked a little bit dry. Amazingly though, they had licked up every drop of honey that I spilled on my last visit. I'll keep an eye on these guys and hope for the best. 

Tomorrow I want to get the big hive at Martin's split. 

Learning

So, I gotta tell you, I've been struggling with the bees lately. It's a number of things...the bad weather (which prevents me from checking the hives regularly), bad tempers (mine and the bees' but probably mostly mine), and lack of enough hours in a day.

As you know, our apiary exploded in February, going from one hive to five in a matter of a couple of weeks, which was manageable but only because Tim was home and on swarm watch through the day. More recently, my friend Martin's bees went berserk. Martin is a very busy man, so I have been taking care of his bees. The problem is that I am a very busy woman who doesn't really have time to take care of Martin's bees either. But when it comes down to it, I simply have more optimism than sense.

Anyhoo, on Friday when I finally got around to doing an inspection of Martin's hives, it had been two weeks since my previous inspection. Let me tell you right now, not a good move in the spring. If you take nothing else away from this blog ever, remember this: get into your hives every week or be prepared to deal with the consequences.  

Let's take this one hive at a time:
Alan's nuc: This is a swarm of bees that Martin literally sprayed down from a very tall tree a few weeks ago and put into a nuc box (on loan from Alan). Miraculously, the queen seems to have survived the dousing because there was brood when I checked the hive on Friday. However, she might not have survived the honey flood that I created when I removed the lid and accidentally shook loose a full lobe of comb that the bees had attached to the lid because they were missing a fifth frame. What a mess. I removed the lobe from the bottom of the nuc box and looked for the queen among the dead--I didn't see her. The plan is to get that colony into an 8-frame deep ASAP.

Matin's Swarm: This is where it gets crazy. Someone sold this swarm to Martin in early February. Yes, a swarm in early February--perhaps the first sign that madness would ensue. It consisted of one deep and two supers. Originally, it had one deep and one super and then a super was added between the two original boxes--creating a rather strange hive configuration. For a few weeks, the bees were building drone comb perpendicular to the frames and we had to remove it. This week, I was relieved to see the drone comb going parallel to the frames, and all looked stupendous until I got into the deep and found 10 swarm cells!

I have to confess, I wacked them! I was leaving for the weekend and Martin was unavailable, and I knew that the bees would swarm themselves silly like our hive if I left the swarm cells in tact. I hated to do it, but I cut all of the swarm cells from the frame, letting them fall to the ground. Odd as it sounds, I was somewhat consoled by the fact that the queen cells provided sustenance for some chickens in a neighboring yard. I momentarily considered sucking out the royal jelly, as one old timer beekeeper highly recommended, but that SO did not happen!

In my anxiety and partial blindness (it's hard to see through bee veils) I was moving too fast, and I stepped on most of the queen cells. But after I had re-assembled the hive, I looked down and noticed a virgin queen running around frantically on the swarm cell she had just emerged from. I picked her up, placed her on the 'flight deck' and watched two guard bees arrest her. I don't know if she was allowed to live or not.

Anyway, if you're looking for a beekeeping resource with all of the answers, this is obviously not the blog for you. Every day, often through trial and error, I learn volumes about bees and myself. Some lessons, I obviously have to learn more than once. The big ones being move slow, send the bees love (as they say in 'The Secret Life of Bees'), don't work bees when you're in a hurry.

There's lots to say about our hives, but I am going to leave that for another blog.

Thanks for reading.

Keeping it All in the Family

Today my Aunt Chris and Uncle Mic became beekeepers! They mentioned that they were interested in beekeeping when we got our first colony last fall, but I was still surprised and delighted when Uncle Mic called me a couple of weeks ago to say that they were ready to start a hive.

I offered them Martin's nuc, and for about a week we talked a lot about bees and how to prepare to start a colony. Then, about a week ago,  I looked in the nuc and saw a gorgeous solid brood pattern across four of the five frames. It was evident that the colony was about to explode with new bees and that they needed to get into a full-size hive as soon as possible.

When I told Uncle Mic, he got right down to business building his hive boxes. He and Aunt Chris came for dinner tonight and left with Martin's nuc strapped to the bed of their pick-up truck! (Thanks for the loan, Martin. I promise we'll get the nuc box back to you.)

Dad (left) and Uncle Mic strapping the bees into the truck bed!

Me with the proud new owner of several thousand bees!

My dad asked if I was sad to see Martin's nuc go. In a way I am, but mostly I'm just thrilled that the bees are going to people who are enthusiastic about them. And it makes me so happy to think of what an amazing season of discovery Uncle Mic and Aunt Chris are about to begin!

Bee Booties

Note: Added second deep to the old hive.

English Bumblebees

I'm in England at the moment staying at my mum's house in Mickleover, Derbyshire. Spring has arrived here after an unusually hard winter and my mum's back garden is in full bloom with daffodils, grape hyacinth, primulas, and other spring flowers. It's difficult for flowers not to do well with long sunny days and the odd rain shower to keep everything well watered. There are also birds and insects everywhere. What's really surprised me though is the large number of bumblebees in the garden (and the complete lack of any honeybees). There are bumblebees everywhere and several different species to boot. All of them are huge.

I've had a bit of fun trying to take photos of the bees and work out what they are all called. There is a good website that helps with identification. The website also mentions cuckoo bumblebees which I'd never heard of before. This is a figure showing the most common bumblebees (click to enlarge):

The bumblebees in the back garden were tricky to photograph as they never stayed put for long, but here are my attempts....... 

This is the bee that I've seen the most of and I'm pretty sure it's a queen Buff Tailed bumblebee:

Here's another Buff Tail that got trapped in the house. It's out of focus but the different coloured bands are visible and its buff coloured behind is clear. This bee's body was over an inch long:

There are also smaller bumblebees with white tails. I'm thinking these are either worker Buff Tails or queen White Tails:

 

I haven't seen them as often but there are also black bumblebees with red rear ends. I didn't manage to get a photo of one but here's an example that I've stolen from the web:

There was also this one which I assumed was another Buff Tail but when I looked more closely at the photo and saw the yellow band bridging the abdomen and thorax I wondered whether it was a queen Garden Bumblebee?:

That's it for now.....

Tug of War

Today, I checked Martin's nuc, the old hive and the TBH.

I noticed some resistance when I pulled the top bars apart. I thought maybe the bees had bridged two combs together, but then I noticed them festooning across multiple frames of comb. I was playing tug of was with bees. It amazed me how strong they were!

The TBH has released their queen! I didn't actually see her, but the queen cage was empty. Hopefully, we'll see some eggs or the queen next week.

Martin's nuc is turning out to be a really strong little hive. I need to get it into a regular Langstroth ASAP. All of the frames are at least 1/2 drawn out, and there are ALOT of bees on the frames. I saw the queen. She has a nice long body, but she's not terribly fat. Nonetheless, she's doing a bang up job of filling the frames out with brood. They were packed. They seemed to have a good amount of nectar and pollen in storage too. Also, when I walked out into the yard this afternoon around 4:00, it looked like this hive might be preparing to swarm. It kind of freaked me out at first, but then I remembered that they don't have a spare queen. They did eventually settle down. Maybe late afternoon orientation flights?

The old hive is still a source of concern for me. There are LOADS of bees. I have to get a second deep on them this week. But the brood pattern is irregular, and I saw one of the bees with diarrhea in the hive. Not good. I'm hoping that will clear up with the better weather. There was also a supercedure queen cup on the third frame, and I have to confess that I removed it. There was nothing in it, and in a moment of panic thinking that the hive might swarm, I cut it out. In hind sight, I realize that it wasn't a swarm cell, it was a supercedure cell, and that the queen might be having problems and need to be replaced. Hopefully they will build another one if they really need it.

All of the hives have pretty decent stores.

Formic Acid in the Bee House

I just treated the split for varroa mites using a formic acid pad. They got pretty loud when I placed the pad in the hive, making me think that they aren't exactly thrilled with its presence. I hadn't realized how hard it is on the bees until I read that there is a fourteen day brood mortality. Not sure what that means exactly, but it doesn't sound good for a hive that's just starting to produce brood again. It's kind of a which is worse situation...mites or formic acid? The mite load was pretty high thanks to the fact that this hive got pretty much all of the drone brood from the split. And they're still making more drones!

I have to leave the formic acid on the hive for twenty-one days. Fun.

Hive inspection notes

I briefly checked the split, the TBH and the combo hives at lunchtime today. Here is what I saw...

Split: small stores, lots of drone brood, and horror of horrors, a queen cup! I also saw a bee emerging from one of the capped cells. I need to treat this hive for varroa. There are wingless wonders about, and I have actually seen mites on the bees. The bees are in the lower box only, but it seems pretty full; I'll be making deeps this weekend.

Combo hive: a whole frame of honey, loads of bees on all of the frames, gajillions of uncapped larva. This hive rocks!

TBH: The bees seem fine. They have not released the queen yet, but she seems to be in good health--workers were mobbing the queen cage and have eaten a good bit of the mini marshmallow.

Sassy Bees

When I got the package of bees on Saturday, I noticed that some of them were light in color. Everything about them was 'blonde,' from their very light stripes to the fuzzy hair on their heads and thoraxes. They look very different from the darker bees in all our other hives.

Besides differing from our other bees in appearance, these blonde bees are sassy! When I accidentally grazed one of them while working around the hive, she put her little bee-hind in the air and stuck out her stinger! I have never seen any of our other bees do that.  At first I thought I had hurt the bee and that she had partially ejected her stinger intending to actually sting me, and I felt bad for killing her. But then she retracted her stinger!

To see if this was standard be behavior,  I started blowing on individual bees to see if they would stick their stingers out. Only the blonde bees in my yard seem to do this! 

Fascinating!

1 Mini-marshmallow, 3 plastic bags, and a ream of tape later...

I installed my first package of bees! Alan dropped the bees off around 6:30 tonight. I thought it would be too late to install them and that I would have to wait until Monday (rain tomorrow). But Alan said I could do it tonight, so that's what I did.

I made a video, which I will eventually get uploaded for your comedic enjoyment. But basically, the bees come in a little wood and mesh cage, which includes approximately 10,000 worker bees, a tin of sugar syrup and a protected queen bee, who is separated from her subjects by a tiny cage with a cork stopper in the end.

I took a few of the top bars out of the top bar hive to make a space to shake the bees into. Then I removed the tin of syrup, which blocks a big hole in the top of the main cage. At this point a few of the bees started climbing out. Next, I removed the queen cage and set it aside. Then I picked up the cage of worker bees and shook for all I was worth to get them all to drop out of the hole in the top of the cage and into the top bar hive. Another example of demo videos making it look way easier than it is. You really have to shake those bees!!! Poor things.

Next, I replaced the cork in the queen cage with a marshmallow and rubber-banded the queen cage to one of the top bars. Then I tried to get as many bees into the hive as I could, and finished by placing the tin of syrup, which has holes in the bottom, over a hole in a specially designed top bar, which allows the syrup to drip into the hive where the bees suck it up.

It's going to rain tomorrow and possibly tonight, but I couldn't put the lid on the hive because the sugar syrup tin was sticking out the top. So, I taped plastic kitchen bin liners over the top of the hive. Ain't no water gettin' in thar!

I think I deserve a big glass of wine now:)

Right on the nose!

I was stung today for the second time since beginning bee-keeping. The first time I was trying to capture a swarm and one of the bees got caught between my thumb and my glove, the tips which are cut off to protect my hands but leave my fingers free.

Today, one of the girls from the combo hive flew up to me, grabbed my nose, and stung me...right on the tip! Well, that is how it seemed to me immediately following the incident. In retrospect, I was putting my nose pretty much in the hive, trying to get a close look through the inner cover. Someone flew up to check me out, I got nervous and tried to brush her away, she felt threatened (who wouldn't with a giant swatting at you) and I got stung. Owe!

Thank goodness I don't react like Tim or I'd have a giant red clown nose the size of a giant tomato!!!

Movies, movies, everywhere.....

It's taken time but I finally got on top of all the movies that I took during all the swarms we had and then the subsequent hive inspections. They are mainly a record for Jessica and I, but they are fun to watch if you are interested. They are tagged on the end of the relevant posts written at the time. My favorites are these though. They were taken during the time that the old hive and the split hive started to swarm at the same time...... it was a little bit of a shock to be there at the time and it all happened on my birthday.

Bee Foe or Faux Bee?

This stout fly landed on the empty top bar hive the other day. At first we thought it might be some type of bee or wasp, pretending to be a honey bee in order to sneak into the one of the hives for insidious reasons. On closer inspection, we wondered if it was a fly of some sort disguised as a bee for personal protection. (I certainly wouldn't eat a bee!) 

In the end, a quick check of google revealed that it was indeed a fly. The big compound eyes, only one pair of wings (bees have two pairs), and no jointed antennae were apparently the big give aways. From the great Red Plant Inc website it looks like our visitor was a Syrphid fly or more specifically a Transverse Flower fly.......

BTW, the title of this post was Queenie's idea..... I'm not that smart.

The Queen of the Split

Jessica and I managed to get a good closeup video of the new queen in the 'split' hive. Check her out:


If your internet connection can handle it you should select 720p (or 1080p) and go to full screen to really get a good view.

New Bees on the Way: Details

Here's how things broke down when we looked into each of our new hives on 3/27:

The Split: 

The bees were calm. Seven of the eight frames in the bottom box are fully drawn out with the eighth frame being about 1/2 drawn out. The comb is wavy but stays within the confines of the frame. The super is still empty. We found open and capped brood on the seventh frame and the queen and eggs on the eighth frame. The brood pattern seems fairly compact. The queen was heavily attended with workers touching her abdomen; we wondered if she was actually laying.  

The Old Hive: 

The bees were fired up--lots of buzzing and a few bees flew at Tim. We spotted some really patchy brood on the fourth frame. By patchy, I mean that there was a small hand full of capped brood over the whole frame. On the fifth frame, we spotted a fat queen with distinctive dark bands on her abdomen. We saw the same patchy brood pattern on about three frames. We are a little concerned about this queen. We wonder if she is just young and inexperienced or if something is wrong with her. The hive certainly seemed defensive, and the bees sort of just hang around on the flight deck in the morning. We have heard that a queenless hive will have bees milling around without direction. We wonder if the same behavior would indicate a queen in poor health or badly mated. We will keep a close eye on this hive. 

Alan's Nuc:

This is the star colony. We saw the queen and gajillions of eggs on the first frame, which was about 2/3 drawn out. The fourth frame, which Alan lent to us as drawn out comb to lure bees, has been filled with honey and pollen. The fifth frame is about 2/3 drawn out and has a fair bit of pollen stored in it. The rest of the frames are nearly fully drawn out and chock full of eggs, larva and capped brood!

Martin's Nuc:

This is the little hive that could. They have partially drawn out (about 1/3) all of the frames, and the queen is doing her best to fill it all out with eggs. We found the queen on the third frame. She seems to be well mated and in good form. We are going to continue feeding them to stimulate wax production so that they can draw their frames out fully ASAP. Hopefully the bee:larva:egg ratio is balanced well enough to get the next generation of bees to adulthood and foraging. If that all works out, I think we'll have a nice little colony. Sadly, this colony seems to be beleaguered by mites. I saw a worker the other day with about four mites on her, and she was trying to get them off. I actually saw a mite walking across the comb on this inspection. I had really hoped that the long break in the brood cycle would knock the mite population back. 

Alan always says that having more than one hive is helpful in understanding what is going on with your colonies. He is so right; by comparing our four colonies to one another, we can see what it means for a hive to be weak or strong and how colonies behave at different stages of development and growth. May the learning never stop!

Here are the movies of the inspections (click on the link for all of them)......

The Split:

New bees on the way

We looked in our four hives yesterday and saw a queen in each and signs that they were actively producing new bees! We'll fill in the details soon.

Sprouts!

It's amazing how a little thing can really make your day. The thyme and cornflowers that we planted on 3/17 sprouted yesterday, and a few of the poppies sprouted today. I was ecstatic!

To see what else we planted, take a look at the 3/17 blog, 'Bee Garden.'

Our Crazy Swarm Season

Assuming that our bees really have now stop swarming, merging and absconding then here's the final diagram of what they did......... you can click on the image to enlarge if you really want to.....

February 28th: Inspected the hive and found multiple swarm cells. At the last count we had 3 swarm cells in the bottom deep and 12 in the top deep. After the events of the last few weeks it's clear we had more swarm cells in the bottom deep that we missed.
March 1st: Performed an even split of the Langstroth hive in the hopes that it would prevent the bees from swarming. Saw and heard a new queen. The lower deep box remained in the original location and became known as the 'old hive', the upper deep box was moved to the side and was called the 'new hive' and then later 'the split'.
March 2nd onwards: Continued to hear multiple queens piping in both hives.
March 5th: Prime swarm from the old hive (swarm 1)
March 6th: Prime swarm (swarm 1) from the split with a simultaneous first afterwarm (swarm 2) from the old hive. The two swarms formed one cluster in Chad's arbor. When collecting the swarm we definitely saw two queens in the cluster but we think there was an extra one. The bees we hived in the Top Bar Hive (TBH) and the next morning there were two dead queens on the mesh at the bottom of the hive.
March 7th: Second afterswarm (swarm 3) from the old hive. The bees were hived in Alan's wooden nuc box but 30 minutes later they absconded and merged (merge 1) with the bees in the left side of the TBH.
March 8th: No swarms - the day was cloudy and windy and the temperature never got into the 60s  
March 9th: Third afterwarm (swarm 4) from the old hive. The bees never settled and eventually merged (merge 2) with the bees in the TBH.
March 10th: Dead queen found outside both the old and split hives. We didn't record all of the dead queens seen  over the entire swarm period but the bees were bringing out dead queens on a fairly regular basis.
March 11th: Fourth afterswarm (swarm 5) from the old hive. Later in the day the bees from the right side of the top bar hive absconded and merged (merge 3) with the in the left side of the TBH.  
March 14th: Fifth afterswarm (swarm 6) from the old hive. The bees never settled and eventually merged (merge 4) with the bees in Alan's Nuc Box  
March 15th: Sixth afterswarm (swarm 7) from the old hive.   
March 18th: Bees absconded from the left side of the TBH leaving the whole hive now empty 


Contents of the Hives:
Old Hive: The remaining bees after seven swarms left
The Split: The remaining bees after one swarm left
Alan's Nuc Box: Swarms 5 and 6 from the Old Hive
Martin's Nuc Box: Swarm 7 from the Old Hive
TBH: The prime swarms from both the Old Hive and the Split, in addition to the first, second and third afterswarms from the Old Hive. All these bees were ultimately lost when the they absconded. It was our biggest colony by far :( The TBH is currently empty.

The Sound Inside a Swarming Hive

By the time the bees in our backyard had swarmed six times I was getting a little tired of filming them. Each swarm was getting progressively smaller and the action at the entrance as the bees left the hive was getting less dramatic. I decided to try something different for the next swarm. How about trying to record the sound inside the hive during the event? Perhaps the queens would pipe differently or more often in the build to the swarm? It was getting easy to predict when the old hive would swarm. Almost everyday if it was warm and sunny and the queens were piping then the bees would pile out. On the morning of the 3/14, I placed my camera in a ziploc bag with a hole positioned over the microphone, set it recording, and positioned it in the empty super above the main body of the hive. I had three hours of recording time... the bees only waited 40 minutes before they swarmed.....

If you click the 'see...movies>>' link below then you'll see the recordings I took. I'm not suggesting that any of you will want to listen to 50 minutes of noise from inside a hive but it's fun (I think) to sample a little bit here and there. For instance, if you listen to the first video you'll hear the two queens piping, a good sample starts at 00:56. You should turn your speakers up high for this and leave them there. You'll also get a sense of the general hum within the hive on this video. It's a shame youtube doesn't work faster but if you then jump in time through the videos you can get a sense of the build up in noise within the hive. In the middle of the third video you are at the point of peak noise within the hive as the bees go crazy and swarm out of the hive. I wonder what the noise level would have been for the prime swarm nine days before? As the bees leave the hive the noise begins to diminish but later on you hear the two queens piping again. I think they both forgot to leave.... perhaps they both assumed that the other queen was going to go......

A Nice Fat Queen

We peeked into the colony that swarmed most recently this morning. We saw a nice fat queen and closed the lid:)

Happiness is a queen-right hive and a man who can spot the queen

Today we decided to check the hives to see how things are going. We looked into the split, the old hive and the nuc next to the TBH in hopes of seeing eggs, larva or a queen.

Our peek into the split was disappointing. We found a bit of honey but no eggs, no larva and no queen. I have to admit that I was completely focused on eggs and larva, so there could have been a queen, but neither Tim nor I spotted her.

The old hive came next. We only looked at four frames. Once we found the queen on the fourth frame, we sealed the hive back up. She was darker and a bit smaller than Helen, and I couldn't decide if she was mated or not. The hive generally seemed to be doing well. I didn't see any eggs or larva on those first four frames. In fact, most of the cells were empty--maybe they are being prepared for some serious egg laying?

The nuc was doing really well. We found a more blonde queen with a few stripes and a distended and lengthened abdomen. She looked much bigger than the unmated queens we were seeing earlier--so maybe she's done the deed. No eggs or larva. We need to do the math to figure out what we should be seeing in a healthy hive right now.

Tim gets all the credit for spotting the queens and making me oh so happy. I feel much better knowing that at least two of our hives have a queen! Now if they will just stop swarming and start laying some eggs!

Oh, and we decided to stop feeding them. They have loads of stuff stored and plenty of things are blooming now. I think they should be okay.

Yay!!!

The new queen in the 'old' hive:

The new queen in Alan's nuc box:

For the super bee-curious, the movies of the inspections are just a click away...

Too bad, so sad

As Tim has filled you in, the TBH bees absconded today. I am more upset about it than I would have imagined, mostly because it's so mysterious, and I fear I won't figure out why they left, not to mention all of the work that went into building the hive.

I'm trying to peel away my disappointment and worry to expose my curiosity. I have lots of questions...Why did they leave? Was it too drafty with the screened bottom? Maybe they don't like us spying on them (we probably look in through the windows once a day). Or maybe it's the wood we used or the glue? Perhaps they are just confused bees. I don't know, but it seems serious because they left behind a lot of comb, which you wouldn't think they would do without good reason. One thing is certain, the bees will do as the please!

The really disappointing thing is that the TBH was our strongest colony. I worry about the strength of the remaining hives since they are the results of multiple swarms. I took a peek into the old hive today, and they haven't even started to draw out the frames in the super. Will we get a honey harvest at all this year? And what about the TBH? Bees have left that hive twice. Should we try to introduce a package?

So many questions! Maybe a bit of sleep will help.

All Gone from the Top Bar Hive

I was pretty confident that all our bees had settled into their respective homes and I haven't been keeping a close eye on them, but then about 20 minutes ago I heard the now distinctive hum of bees and wondered what was up.  I could see a swarm of bees high (really high) up in Chad's pine tree and couldn't believe that they were ours. The old hive and the split looked normal with no fanning bees at the entrance. Perhaps it was a swarm from somewhere else? But then I looked in the TBH and it was empty!!! I guess Jessica's fears have been realised - our bees don't like the TBH. The bees are too high in the pine tree up to retrieve, so it looks like after all our efforts we are going to finally have say goodbye to some of our bees and hope they find a good home somewhere else.

1:50 pm update: I just saw the bees take off and head south from Chad's pine tree. They really have gone.

This is a shot of them high up in the pine tree as they take off to leave:

A Bee Garden

Today I planted a bee garden. This past winter, I bought seeds with the idea of creating a potted garden full of pollen and nectar so that the bees would find food close to home when they first ventured out after the winter. But winter in our part of California is a rather benign thing, and our bees foraged all winter except on very cold and rainy days. They were swarming by February, which is when I had envisioned starting the garden.

Well, I finally got some seeds in starter pots today. I planted Blue Boy Cornflowers, Pepperbox Breadseed Poppies, French Thyme,  Persian Violet Nigella, Whirlybird Mix Nasturtiums, and French Lavender. I also have some sunflowers and alpine strawberries, which I hope to get started next week. Thanks to Julie for the strawberry pot. 

I tried to pick things that the bees would really like, but I had a slightly selfish bent too; after the flowers die, the poppies and nigella leave behind gorgeous seed pods.