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.
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)......
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.'
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.
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......
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...
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.
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:
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.
The old hive swarmed again for the sixth time. It was 11:45 am and 61 F. That makes seven swarms in total that we've had from two hives. The bees came out flew around and then merged with the bees in Alan's wooden nuc box. Easy. After the swarm I could still hear two queens in the old hive..... I'm beginning to wonder, when the bees swarm and immediately merge with another colony, whether they leave without a queen. Perhaps they are tired and just want to try and find some peace elsewhere.
Photo shows Alan's nuc box covered in bees from the swarm.
At the time of this swarm I'd placed my video camera inside the hive to try and record the sounds of the bees during a swarm. You can hear the results in this later blog.
When the bees decided to vacate one side of the TBH they left behind five beautiful lobes of comb that they had built. I took a shot of the comb through the side window of the hive:
At the top of the image you can see the individual bars (the 'top bars') with ridges running down the centerlines that the bees attach their comb to. The holes in the back are the entrance to the hive.
Here's a shot before the bees left:
You can see the hemispherical cluster that they form and then the shape of all the comb makes sense.
I took the top bars out of the hive and flipped them over to take some photos in the late afternoon sun. Here are some of them:
The dark stuff in the cells is pollen. That's Queenie in the background.
The bees had already pretty much stripped the comb of all the nectar and pollen that was stored there.... but there was still a bit left.....
Here's one of the girls getting the last bit of nectar out (if you click on the image you should be able to get a larger view):
Bees are very good at clearing up nectar. The other day when I transfered a captured swarm from a cardboard nuc box to the TBH some nectar dribbled onto the top of the top bars. The bees were straight into action.....
The old hive swarmed again this morning for the fifth time. It happened at 10:15 am when the temperature was 57 F and the sun was shining. The bees eventually formed a cluster 10 feet up on a branch of Chad's pine tree. They would have been easy to retrieve if it wasn't for the height. Fortunately it turned out that not only is Chad a cool guy he also owns a extensive selection of ladders. With both myself and Jessica holding a cardboard box below the bees, we shook the branch and bees fell in. They were transfered to Alan's wooden nuc box and placed at the top of Chad's ladder, so that the remaining bees could find their new home.
The wooden nuc box and ladder:
We had everything wrapped up by noon. Jessica went back to work and I, thinking that all the bees were settled for the rest of the day, went out. I got back at 4 pm and soon realised that everything wasn't quite the same as I'd left them. The bees from the right side of the TBH had gone, vacated, moved on!!!!
Jessica continues the story....
Tim called me at work today and said that the bees from the right side of TBH had gone. We think they moved from the right side of the TBH to the left side, leaving behind them five lobes of newly formed comb with just a bit of packed pollen. I'm starting to think of these bees as some viscous fluid that is impossible to confine. They just keep flowing from one location to another. I can't begin to imagine what they are up to, and I am a little concerned that they don't find the TBH to be a hospitable home. (We made that hive!!!) Nevertheless, they were unhappy enough with their new home to leave behind a weeks' worth of comb.
On the other hand, it may have had nothing to do with the TBH--perhaps their queen died and they decided to join their sisters next door in a last ditch survival effort. It's hard to know what their motivations are. But actually, their current configuration suits us just fine. We were a little concerned about the growing number of colonies in our little apiary. I just wonder what their next move will be!
Here is the first movie of the swarm.... for all of them just click the link....
The old hive has just brought out a dead queen. The worker bees are still giving her a lot of attention as she lays on the flight deck. While I looked at her I could hear another queen inside the hive (apparently) piping triumphantly. I thought for a moment that maybe that was it - the end of swarm season for us, but no I've just listened to the hive and there is still more than one queen inside!
I didn't post anything at the time but the new hive or split also cast out a queen sometime this morning, which surprised me since that hive has been quiet for a while and I'd assumed that there was only one victorious queen inside.
This morning is a lovely spring day. The blossom trees are still in bloom in our backyard, the sky is clear and the sun is beaming. It's cool at 52 F but warming up fast. All the hives have bees outside and the top bar hive with its southern aspect is the busiest. The new hive or 'the split', as we are now going to call it, has only pushed out one dead drone this morning (with white compound eyes), so perhaps they are starting to do better.
The old hive is still piping away with at least two queens inside, so we are expecting our fifth swarm later in the day. It will be the old hive's fourth afterswarm! We are not sure how she can keep it up.
Yesterday's swarm from the old hive was strange. The bees bolted out of the hive as usual and swarmed around our backyard and that of the neighbor's. But it seemed like the bees couldn't decide where to form a cluster. Some were on the bush in the neighbor's yard where they went to during the previous swarm, some where on on ivy bush that grows over the fence that separates the two yards, some were on the top bar hive (TBH) and seemed to be going inside, and a group favoured the wooden nuc box of Alan's. We saw lots of fanning as if the various groups of bees were trying to signal that they had found the best spot. As always there were bees fanning at the entrance to the old hive trying to get everybody to come back home. In the end the bees chose the TBH, mainly the right hand side entrance where the bees ended up in the previous swarm. We are not sure what happens to the queen in a situation like this. Does she also go into the hive and fight it out with the resident queen?
If you remember, the previous swarm ended up moving in with the TBH, but that time after forming a cluster and being placed in a nuc box. The swarms are getting smaller in volume each time and apparently getting tied of doing the whole swarming routine.
Here's a closeup movie of the swarm in action.... you can kind of get a sense of the speed that the bees are leaving at...
Here's one of Jessica as she chats about where the bees are going:
Here's Jessica summarizing what happened in the end:
The following is a summary of the swarms that have happened so far. This is more for my memory than for anything else:-
1st swarm: from the old hive - swarm placed in right hand side of the top bar hive 2nd and 3rd swarms: simultaneously from both the old and new hives - joined larger swarm placed in the left hand side of the TBH 4th swarm: from the old hive - swarm placed in wooden nuc box but 30 minutes later the bees leave and mostly go in the right side of TBH 5th swarm: from the old hive - swarm never gathered anywhere all together but in patches in several different places. Eventually all the bees again went into the TBH, mostly on the right side.
So, with all the merging that's been going on we only have two extra colonies even though we've done 1 split and had 5 swarms.
The temperature didn't get into the 60s today and the bees were pretty quiet. No swarms but we fully expect one from the old hive when they get a warm day. The queens were piping in that hive all day.
It's cold (50 F), windy and cloudy in Livermore this morning. From the weather forecast it looks like it's not going to brighten up all day and it may even rain later. Hopefully the cold weather will prevent another swarm as the old hive still seems to want to continue the same routine. I heard multiple queens piping again in that hive. Thankfully the new hive (the split) is quiet.
The swarm that Adam and I just collected in a wooden nuc box stayed inside the box for about 30 minutes before they decided to leave. I thought they were going to swarm again but instead they decided to move in with their neighbours in the adjacent top bar hive. At first, there was a mass of bees in the air, bees on the top and sides of the top bar hive, and a jam of bees at the right hand side entrance. I couldn't decide if the bees inside were happy with the situation but over about one hour all the bees moved inside. I've just checked inside the nuc box and it's pretty much empty. It has been another unpredictable day with the bees.
The old hive swarmed again. Just a little one which landed on a tree branch in our other neighbour's yard. Adam was here at the time and we managed to easily collect the bees in a wooden nuc box.
Here's Adam showing off his filming skills....
This one shows Adam getting togged up to move the bees...
We are getting used to the fact that our hives just seem to want to swarm at the moment. The 'old' hive has swarmed twice and the 'new' hive once, and our tally of beehives has increased from one to four in a week. The question is will they swarm again today? I've just listened to the hives and I can hear multiple piping from the old hive and the new hive seems quiet. Could the old hive really swarm for a third time......?
To confirm, both hives ('old' and 'new') swarmed simultaneously to the same spot in Chad's backyard that the old hive swarmed to yesterday. We collected the swarm and put it in a cardboard nuc box on top of the uninhabited left-hand side of the top bar hive. (The left and right sides of the top bar are separated by a follower board and can temporarily be used as two separate hives). We're now weighing our options: Keep them in the nuc box and sell them? or put them in the other side of the top bar?
Selling them is quick and easy. Putting them in the top bar commits us to either making another top bar or combining the two colonies at some point in the future. We are a little worried that the hives are weakening themselves with repeated swarms, and keeping this swarm would give us the option of re-combining the colonies if either one begins to struggle.
At the end of the day my parents stopped by to check out all the bees and the new top bar hive in action. Here's a photo of me, Carol and Al (Master Woodworker).
The new hive started to swarm and the old hive decided to join in for its first after-swarm!!!! We think that the two swarms have merged and are now on the same post as yesterday. Not sure if that's possible but that's what seems to have happened. More later.
The new hive has suddenly come alive. We have a few dozen bees outside the hive. We are not sure if they are just orienting themselves or preparing to swarm!
I'm sitting in the backyard in a sunny spot right among our three hives. The old hive is humming along with foragers coming and going, bringing in pollen--basically business as usual. The only oddity is that we are still hearing at least two queens tooting and quacking away. We might be in for another swarm!
The new hive seems to be struggling a bit. They are kicking out dead drones by the tens, no one is foraging and we've only seen a small hand full of bees coming and going. After giving them a few days to get their act together, we decided that it was time to give them some food today (1:1 sugar:water). I suspect that they ended up with a good chunk of the drone brood from the complete hive when we split it and that the majority of the worker bees that came along and stayed were nurse bees. The drones are dying off because of the mites, which we are not yet sure we want to treat. We think the bees may be exhibiting hygenic behavior by ridding the hive of the drones, and we'd like to give them a chance to turn the situation around before medicating. We've also heard that a break in brood cycle caused by splitting the hives can get the mites under control as well. The nurse bees should be turning foragers any time now, so they should start bringing in some food. This hive is still tooting and quacking as well!
The top bar is just plain fascinating. We put windows on the hive so that we can look in on the bees from time to time. We couldn't resist a look today. They were clumped up around the entrance holes in the top for most of the morning. Now they are starting to leave the hive and orient. Entering through wine-cork-sized holes in the side of the hive rather than a nice long slot with a ramp presents a steep learning curve, but they are figuring it out. We also laid under the hive and looked up through the screened bottom. We saw two dead queens! I sure hope a third queen was hiding somewhere in the masses of the swarm.
We've actually found four dead queens now. There are the two I just mentioned as well as two that we found on the flight deck of the old hive. The first one I found had a torn wing, which Alan suggested might have resulted from the fight that cost her her life. The others have seemed completely intact. Tell tale signs of fighting are missing antenae and torn wings.
From the beginning, I have thought of the bees as teachers. They teach the obvious lessons about honey bees and social insects, but they also teach lessons about impermanence, reality, flexibility and diligence--lessons that we all (and I especially) need to learn over and over again.
We did everything we could to stop those bees from swarming. We split the colony, we put two swarm lures in the yard, and we did a lot of hoping that they wouldn't swarm. And then I started to believe that they wouldn't swarm. Of course, I had read that colonies could swarm even if they didn't have a mated queen--they would just take a whole bunch of virgin queens with them and then sort out the situation when they had settled into a new home. Now, if our hive, with 15 virgin queens, wasn't a prime candidate for just such a scenario, I'm not sure such a hive exists. Yet I, purely out of wishful thinking, convinced myself that they wouldn't--just because I didn't want them to. In fact, before this past week, I had convinced myself that it was easy to keep a colony from swarming and that we would never have to take bees out of our neighbor's trees. We would just split the hives long before swarming was even a possibility.
Lesson One: Hoping does not make something so, and things rarely turn out the way you think they will.
Around 11:30 this morning Tim called me at work and calmly told me that the bees were swarming. His voice was so calm that I didn't believe him. But soon I could tell he was serious. Jamie (wonderful Jamie) agreed to do my one urgent work item for the day, and I was out the door like lightning.
Once home, I found Tim in the backyard watching a loosely defined cloud of bees move toward a post in the neighbor's backyard, where they were regrouping. At the entrance to the parent hive, small clusters of bees hung above the entrance and under the flight deck. About ten bees were fanning at the entrance. We wondered if they were trying to help lost bees find their way home by wafting the hive scent.
Having never met our neighbor, and assuming he was unaware of our bee habit, we were pretty nervous about telling him that our little friends were trying to make his backyard their new home. Our fear vanished as soon as we met Chad. He was just about as kind, welcoming and not-freaked-out as we can imagine anyone being.
At this point I have to tell you that not every swarm you come across is going to be hanging like low fruit on a branch just waiting to drop into an open box with a quick shake. Our bees, for instance, had chosen to congregate on the front left post of an arbor, which was covered in vines. It made the situation a little tricky. We were fortunate that it was only about five feet off the ground.
We set to work immediately trying to tempt the bees away from the post with some drawn out comb that Alan lent us. They didn't take the bait. Next we tried shaking them into the nuc box with some success. Finally we tried brushing them. In the end, it was a combination of brushing and shaking that gave us the best results.
Once we got a good number of bees in the nuc, we set it on the ground, thinking that the remaining bees would follow their sisters in, which they slowly did. The bees that had entered the nuc box were fanning like crazy. At this point, we began wondering where the queen was--in or out of the box. And then we spotted her right next to the entrance. We tried catching her, but she flew off. I was worried that she had gone forever, but then I saw another queen and then another!! One of them went into the box. The other one we caught in a jam jar. We put the nuc box up higher, closer to where the remaining bees were, and over the course of about twenty minutes, they all went in.
Later in the afternoon, Tim brought the nuc box home and shook the bees into our waiting top bar. He added the queen from the jam jar too. May the best woman win.
The bees were incredibly gentle through the whole process. We were each stung twice, but that was due to our being under-dressed.
Lesson Two: Persevere.
You must persevere when catching a swarm. About half-way through the procedure, I lost heart. I couldn't tell if the bees were moving into the box or not, I thought we'd lost the queen and I'd been stung. I knew we had to get the bees out of Chad's yard, but I was afraid I wouldn't be able to do it. This is where it becomes incredibly important to have a partner--Tim never gave up and he kept me trying. It was so worth it!
We are now the proud parents of three hives, and we are keeping an open mind about what may come next.
A side note: At complete odds with the previously cited anecdotal evidence that bees are swarming early this year, Alan hasn't seen any swarm potential in his Brentwood or Tracy apiaries. And last month, we heard sad stories from fellow beekeepers about hives dying over the winter. From these reports, it seems that our colony is an anomaly. Alan suggested that we might have a warm little microclimate in our backyard, created by the gravel (no plants) absorbing solar and radiating it back into the air.
I've just transfered the bees from the nuc box they were collected in and transfered them to Jessica's new top bar hive. I just tipped them in and it seems like they are settling in OK.
I was lucky enough to be around when the bees decided to swarm out of the hive and I caught it on video. The whole event took maybe 20 minutes and was pretty unbelievable. The bees were pouring out of the hive and it almost seemed like the sky darkened.... OK maybe that's a little bit of an exaggeration, but there were a lot of bees flying.
Here's some of the video.....
We have also just collected the bees from our neighbor's yard!!! I'll let Jessica tell you about that later.
Alan is the local beekeeper that taught Jessica and I everything that we know about Beekeeping. He has a great website and he also teaches beekeeping classes at the Green Gulch Farm and Zen Center. Alan told us that when he sees queen cells it feels like Christmas.... he has been gifted queens with which to split his hives and expand his apiary. Alan likes bees. It would seem that Jessica and I are having an extended Christmas this year with our bees...... we just keep finding more and more swarm cells. First we discovered seven in the top box, which later got revised upwards to twelve or so. We were pretty confident that we didn't have any swarm cells in the bottom box when we split the hive.......but lately we've began to realize that we really haven't got a clue what's going on (or perhaps what we are doing). It would now seem that we have new queens everywhere. You've heard the piping from the new hive, but we also have lots of piping happening in the old hive as well, so there must be multiple virgin queens there too. We checked back at the video of the last hive inspection and found a further three swarm cells partially hidden under a carpet of bees (you can just see some of them on the photos I posted - check out frames 5 and 6). That makes fifteen swarm cells in total and a bumper Christmas all round. The question now with all these queens is whether the bees will swarm despite our efforts to persuade them otherwise?
I managed to get a clearer recording today from inside the new hive.....
So what is piping?? According to wikipedia, piping collectively describes the noises made by virgin queens (and sometimes mated queen bees). When the virgin queen is still in her swarm cell she make a sound that is called "quacking". After she emerges the sound she makes changes and it is called "tooting". Apparently a virgin queen may frequently pipe before she emerges from her cell and for a brief time afterwards, and piping is most common when there is more than one queen in a hive. It is thought that the piping is a form of battle cry announcing to competing queens and the workers their willingness to fight. It may also be a signal to the worker bees which queen is the most worthwhile to support.
So, queens make a sound that's called piping. When they pipe they are either tooting or quacking, depending on whether they are inside their swarm cells or not . I'm presuming these are the two sounds you can hear in the video. An emerged queen signals her presence by tooting and then queens still in their cells reply with a quacking sound. The reply really does sound like quacking to me. Not so sure about the tooting. I think I can definitely hear two queens quacking in the reply..... but we know there are at least a dozen swarm cells in the new hive, so who knows what's really happening in there.
I was standing in the yard beside the new hive today and I could hear queen bees piping from inside! It was quite distinct and especially so when I pressed my ear to the side of the hive. It definitely sounded like there was at least two queens inside talking to each other. One would first call and that would trigger the other to start. I managed to use my camera to record the sounds they were making, using a pair of headphones as a microphone and dangling them into the hole in the inner cover. You might need to turn you speakers up to high to really hear them. The gentle rustle you can hear in the background is the hum from the worker bees and not the wind blowing through the blossom tree.
People often describe honey bee colonies as 'super organisms.' While they reproduce on an individual scale--a queen lays individual eggs that hatch into individual bees--they also reproduce on a large and collective scale, which is called swarming. In a swarm situation, the old queen and about half of the bees in the colony take off looking for a new home and leave behind a newly emerged queen with the other half of the workers.
Several factors contribute to when a colony swarms, including the time of year (usually spring), the amount of food and brood in the hive, the space available to expand, and the health of the queen. Beekeepers often try to preempt a swarm by putting half of the bees into a separate hive box, where they can start a new colony rather than establishing themselves in a tree or a neighbor's wall. This is called splitting the hive.
Before a swarm departs, the bees do a lot of preparation, building special cells where the incumbent queen lays eggs destined to become queens. These are called swarm cells and are located on the bottom edge of the frames. This wikipedia page explains the process beautifully, and you can see two of our swarm cells in our last blog post.
Yesterday, we did our first inspection in a couple of weeks and were shocked to find seven swarm cells! We felt a little like I imagine expectant parents feel on first learning about a pregnancy. I thought 'cool but scary!' We both kind of freaked.
Well, if you follow the expectant parent/ super organism analogy, you might say that the colony's water broke this morning! One of the new queens emerged from her cell! (More about that in a moment.) As soon as we saw the swarm cells yesterday, we knew we needed to act fast. So this morning, we took a two-pronged approach to swarm prevention: 1) we split the hive, and 2) we set up the top bar hive with a lure (bee pheromone) inside in hopes of preventing a swarm by attracting the bees to make their new home in our top bar.
We did a 'half and half' or 'even' split, removing the top box from our two-box Langstroth and placing it on a bottom board of its own. Then we took a look inside of each box to check the lay of the land. Our hope was that the old queen, or at least some eggs, would end up in the 'old' hive (bottom box) and that all of the swarm cells and no old queen would end up in the 'new' hive (top box). The idea being that the old queen could continue her reign of the old hive or, if she had died, new eggs could be made into an emergency queen. And the virgin queens in the swarm cells in the new hive could fight it out amongst themselves to be the reigning monarch of the new colony.
But boy did we get a surprise! It all went as hoped except that the old hive actually had an emerged virgin queen (see photo below), who was running around calling for any other emergent queens to come out and fight to the death like...well, like a queen bee, I suppose. She was 'tooting,' which sounds like a kazoo being sounded at short intervals. You can hear it in the video below.
The new queen:
The new queen calling to the other queens. She's in the upper-left hand corner, moving fast!
I thought I'd heard the same sound yesterday and suspected it might be one of the queens, but it was really incredible to actually locate her by following the sound and to see her running around on the frame. She isn't mated yet so she doesn't have much queen pheromone or the distinctive distended abdomen, so the other bees don't pay her much attention, let alone homage. She actually looks a lot like one of the other bees right now, but her body is a little longer and she doesn't have as distinctive stripes as the workers and drones. Instead, she's kind of a honey color, which gradually becomes dark brown toward the end of her abdomen.
We don't know what's going to happen next because we never found the old queen. I suspect that she has died. If she has, then her daughter queens will continue her lineage in two new colonies. If she is still around in either hive, there might yet be a swarm!
Another interesting thing to think about is what temperament the new colonies will exhibit. Each bee in a colony is the daughter or son of its queen, so she largely determines the characteristics of her offspring. However, there is a wild card thrown in--the drone. Each mated queen mates with several drones (10 to 45--13 on average), and his genes will be expressed in the colony as well. Helen (our first queen) gave us gentle, relatively hardy bees. We'll have to wait to see what the next generation of royalty brings.
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