Survived First Sub-Zero Spell

We had about a week of really cold weather here, down in the sub-zeros at night, with single digit highs during the day.  Of course, it being Colorado, yesterday, today, and tomorrow we have 60 degree days with snow still on the ground in the shadows of all the buildings. I'd bought a bunch of Bee-Pro patties from Mann Lake when they were having a sale on the ten pound package. I'd been thinking of either buying the protein powder and making my own bee candy or just buying the patties, when they had the sale, I decided on the patties. The second and third ingredients are sugar and high fructose corn syrup, so I figured they really were about the same thing.

They arrived in plenty of time for our warm spell, and I went out today to check on them in the morning, just to see if they were alive. It was really the first time I'd gone out to see them since the really cold spell, and they were busy flying, getting water from the neighbor's pond, and cleaning out the dozen or so dead bees that were inside the hive. There were dead, but it wasn't bad given just how cold it had gotten.

Then, when John came home for lunch, I went in to put the patties into the top bars. One of the local beekeepers said that he always put a sheet of bee candy onto his hives, just at the top, around Christmas time, and it's close enough for me to do it now.

I'd had my shots yesterday. I've been doing them every week for two months, and I'm finally at the point where I'm taking two stings' worth of venom a week. One in each arm. Next week, we'll be trying all of that in one arm, and gradually getting to a maintenance level of two stings' worth once a month. If I get stung, I'm supposed to skip a month, so that'll be nice.

When I started, my body was reacting pretty badly to them. They swelled, itched, and hardened, and non-intuitively, with greater amounts my body started to react less instead of more. Today's shots itched last night, but today they've actually been pretty good, and after my massage and some icing, they haven't bothered me at all.

The interesting thing was that after seeing significant improvement in my reactions to the venom in this time, I was far more confident and less angry and afraid about going out and working on the hive. I was actually pretty happy to get out into the sunshine, get all my gear on, get the smoker out, and go in and see how the girls were doing. They were doing fine! I was so happy to pop the lid and see all these bees at the top of the top bars. They were moving around like normal and doing their usual thing. So I smoked them down into the hive, so that I would have a clear base to put the patties on.

I

I'd peeled one side of the paper off already, and when I put the first patty on, I had trouble, with my gloves, getting the other paper off. With the confidence of the shot response, I took my gloves off and peeled the paper off while some of the bees were checking the patties out.

It felt amazing to be able to do that and not fear three days of swelling, itching, and real pain if one of the girls had gotten me. And it was really nice to see the girls reacting positively to the brewer's yeast smelling patties, and know that they would definitely have something extra to nibble on if their stores ran out. I know that they box says that if I have a two-tier setup I should be putting the patties between the boxes, but this seemed to work for the other beekeeper, and I don't think they'll mind too much. I got things closed up pretty quickly and easily and put the usual rock on the lid. There was no sign of dampness or mildew. One of the things a lot of the older keepers around here keep saying is that it isn't the cold that'll kill bees it's the condensation on the inside of the lid.

Bees breathe, and the respiration has liquid in it from the water they drink and the honey they eat, and the condensation on the inside of the hive, when it gets cold, is what can drown bees. Also, the bees don't actually heat up the hive to keep warm, they ball up together, and generate near heat that keeps the whole ball warm. The more experienced keeps seem to feel that it doesn't matter if you give the bees two or three boxes, even, it's not the space that matters, it's the amount of stores that the bees have that'll keep them alive. So adding the patties made me feel better. I'll have plenty more of them for the later winter/early spring when the flowers aren't out yet, but for now, it seems a nice bit of insurance.

Last Time In For A While

We've been having streaks of 60+ degree days, and with the Colorado Front Range mostly devoid of flowers at this time, I've been feeding the girls pounds and pounds of sugar syrup. They've been sucking it down like crazy, too, much faster than they did in the early spring, last year. Their stores are still good, but I've just been putting quarts and quarts and quarts of 1:1 sugar:water syrup into the internal feeder. No reason to encourage, even more, the robbers that keep trying to get into the hive.

I've been seeing wasps, flies, wild bees, and all kinds of creatures trying to get into the front entrance. I've been seeing the girls throwing out the intruders, too, literally grabbing them and taking them away or balling them up, heating them to kill them and then dumping all the bodies out the front door. There's a huge spider living under the hive, that gathers up all the bodies and eats them, leaving all only the wings. The spider's been a kind of amazing clean up crew.

I've smashed a few wasps just because they're so easy to spot and they move slowly in 50+ or even low 60 degree weather.

Tonight it's supposed to rain down freezing sleet, so I've finally reduced the entrance to the smallest setting, and took the feeder out, simply to give the girls less space they have to heat. I'm also putting the feeder in a place away from the hive so it'll lure the robbers there instead of to the hive, and the girls can still pick up sweets when they are energetic enough to be out flying. The last two brood boxes are heavy still with stores (or even the syrup, I imagine), and when I opened them to take out the feeder, there were still a lot of bees.

So I'm pretty hopeful about them lasting the winter. We'll see. I'll probably still put patties on around Christmas, in case they want them, but I've now zipped their boxes closed for the winter.

Feeding

I've been getting a lot of conflicting advice about feeding the bees at this time in the fall. It's late fall, frost has killed off most of the flowering, so the bees don't really have that much nectar to go after.... so feeding them sugar syrup seems to be what a lot of people do, and a lot of people vehemently say not to do it, as it'll encourage robbing from other hives, wasps, bees, and the like. I was expecting that an internal feeder wouldn't have so much trouble.

So I put it on yesterday, and put in a quart of 2:1 sugar syrup, and today, I saw tiny little wild bees trying to get into the entrance, and a bunch of bees just hanging out on the back of the hive, where there was a small crack between the bottom of the feeder and the top brood box. Bah. They were buzzing around, and there was some wrestling, as I think some wasps might have been trying to get in there, but... I'm not sure. It seemed like there were bees grabbing and hurtling smaller bees out of the front entrance, but I'm not sure if they were small wasps or bees.

Still, the hive seems to be defending itself vigorously.... but I do wonder if the syrup was an unnecessary attraction, still... the bees were covering the syrup and seemed to be using it to good effect. So, it seems to be coming out all right. We'll see.

Getting Immune to Bee Venom

I had my skin tests yesterday, and they covered white faced hornets, yellow jackets, yellow hornets, wasps, and honey bees. The only one I reacted to was the honey bee. Drat....

So I'm going to be starting a series of shots next week, a bit more involved than my usual ones, but it seems that by spring, I should be able to take two sting's worth of bee poison without a problem. With the way the shots work, I should be building antibody blockers with gradually greater amounts of venom.

If only the test site where they did the 0.1 concentration of venom wasn't itching so much today... *sigh* But the good thing is actually finding out that there is a treatment to just insure that the systemic thing Will Never Happen.

Starting to Freeze and I Prove Allergic

The weather is going cold in Colorado, and we're starting to have freezing nights. I've closed up the front entrance, taken out the screened bottom board, and the girls seem very content inside their boxes. I left one super on top, as that seemed to give them enough room, and I that that I'm supposed to start feeding them sometime. I'm wondering if any of the more experienced keepers have a good idea on when. I have a top feeder, and I think I'll wait until a warm and sunny day to open up and put that in.

The girls seem to still be bringing in pollen! That kind of surprised me, as I would have thought they'd have slowed or even stopped rearing brood, but even just three weeks ago there were some brilliantly warm days, so maybe the Queen laid and they're just getting them through these last few weeks.

They seem to be doing well. I also added two popsicle sticks as shims between the inner cover and the top edge of the top box, just to let humidity out of the hive. Here in Colorado, a bunch of keepers have said that it's not the cold that kills them so long as they have stores, it's the wet and whenever there's condensation inside, it's bad.

On my side of things, after my ankle swelled up so thoroughly, I talked with my allergist about the possibility of me developing a bad bee allergy, and he got me to give a blood sample. It turns out that my blood has the large number of antibodies against bee venom that's an indicator that I may well be developing systemic reactions. So I now have an Epi-pen. I know how to use it and how to call 911 after. I'm also going in for a skin test in a week, and will do the long-term shots for bee venom along with any other insects I happen to react to. *laughs quietly*

Normally, from everything I hear on the local mailing lists, the keepers who form a bee allergy just give up their hives. But with a whole winter for me to get immune to them, I think I'm going to just keep them. I'm getting allergy shots for the ten thousand other things I'm allergic to anyway, so it's not much more of an expense for me, but I could see if it were someone without that overhead anyway how they'd probably prefer to give up the bees to going through a several thousand dollar therapy to keep them.

Worth It...

It was worth it.

The bees are now inside, and not hanging out in curtains on the outside of the box. I'm grateful, especially since Colorado seems to be having more rain this one week than it has had nearly all year. There's been flash flooding up and down the Front Range, but we're high enough up and our neighborhood has plenty of planned drainage. The hive is on high ground in our yard, too, and as you can see from this, it was high and dry and seems to be doing just fine at the moment.

My ankle is really swollen, though, and hurting enough to make me testy. *shakes head at self* It'll get better. I had the same pain and swelling reaction with my right index finger, but the pinky that got pinged yesterday is stiff and itchy, but not swelling quite as badly. I think that bee just didn't get to pump quite as much toxin into me. I think it'll be better tomorrow, after sleep, but I've taken Benedryl, iced like mad, and it's still swollen and hot to the touch. Not sure it's bad enough to go to the doctor, as it's not swelling of a whole limb, nor is it affecting my breathing. Still... it's all the more incentive to use smoke and my super thick socks (or even a couple layers of them) next time.

Out of the Rain

Immediately after the harvest, we had a good week of 90 degree plus heat. I left the shims between the inner cover and the top bars of the top box, and was grateful for the screened bottom to let there be air flow.

They were pretty crowded, though, as you can see in this picture, and they were still doing orienting flights, which meant that even more bees were being born. Then, yesterday, it started just pouring, and with the way the weather looked, there was a monsoon pattern coming up from the Gulf. Last night, when I checked on the girls they had all bearded under the overhang of the lid! This was in rain and by morning it was in the high 50's and they were still outside.

This probably indicated that they were too crowded to find shelter from the rain in the ball of bees. So I decided to do what the field guys were doing, which was just have another super on top just to give them enough room to move around in. This morning, between rain storms, I attempted to open things up and get a super placed on top of the hive. Of course, all the bearded girls were not just in the way, but in every available crack, and getting my hands in places where they wouldn't sting the hell out of even my gloved hands proved to be really challenging. And I was stupid and didn't put on my thick wool socks, and one girl got inside my boot and went to town on my ankle.

I swore. A lot. It helped long enough for me to get to the side, and let John shoo the poor girl off and get the stinger, and most of her insides off my foot. I was also trying not to use smoke because they simply didn't have anywhere to go, and that may have been my mistake, so I was actually brushing bees off the lids instead of smoking them off, and I got another sting on my pinky, and she stuck her stinger right into the leather, so that it stabbed me a few times when I was trying to grip things. John got THAT one out, and I kept going, and got all the girls shaken into the super and got the lid back on without crushing any more.

My pay off came this afternoon when a huge downpour came down, and when I went out to check on the girls they were all INSIDE instead of hanging on outside. I'm much happier knowing they're in shelter with enough room for all their numbers. I also went to the allergy clinic this afternoon, and got everything checked out, and the ankle's much worse than the pinky. But the good news is that I don't really have systemic reactions to the stings, "just" local ones. *laughs* The interesting thing is that the pinky sting really hasn't reacted that much, and maybe it's 'cause she wasn't able to pump much into me, but the ankle one is a huge hole and puffy all around. Bah.

Next year, I'll remember to just keep a medium super on just until their numbers drop when it gets cold outside. Next time...

Refractometers and Making Good

I got to use a honey refractometer last night to measure the actual water content of all my honey. It was pretty impressive to find that everything's between 16% and 17.2% water, all well below the 18% to keep the honey from fermenting.

The Northern Colorado Beekeeper's Association has two of them for any member to borrow, which I thought was a wonderful thing, as they're fairly expensive and no one really needs them for a long time. I just put a few drops of honey on the sample slide, squished it, let it come to temperature, and did the reading and it was as clear as anything. Though, because it was nearly 80 degrees in the house, we had to add one percentage point of water to the readings, which are calibrated for 68 degrees.

The other very cool thing was that Corky from Ballard Bees came through with my last two long boards. I was very grateful and he was very glad I was pretty patient about the whole thing. All in all, I'm glad it worked out so that my bees never even built in the first super, but now I'll have both for next year. After the experience of harvesting from a deep, I'm sure to use the medium supers next year instead of an old deep. The frames just really don't hold up well to being moved with all that weight in them. I'm going to have to be very careful with the brood chamber while it's full of honey when I go in for inspections before the fall.

I've also sold a good deal of honey already! Lots of people, once they heard it was available, were very happy to buy what they could, especially the local people with allergies. I loved hearing about how they use it for facial masks, wound treatment, and all kinds of things. So all in all, it's been pretty good.

Harvesting

Ever since I worked the Boulder County Fair at the beginning of August, I'd realized I was going to have to harvest all the supers at the end of August or the beginning of September. It was pretty clear that if the supers were taken, then the bees would start filling the brood box with honey instead of the extra space I was giving them.

I'd been thinking of just leaving the honey for the bees, and not dealing with extraction and all the extra equipment that implied, since I hadn't really been going into it for the honey so much as for the simple fact that the bees were alive and pollinating. But the display kind of convinced me, and I talked with a man who sells honey at our local farmer's market. He said that now was the time to take the supers off, so that the bees would have the time to fill the brood chambers while it was still warm. My mentor from the 911 center said that he found that the winter bee cluster rarely ever made it as far up as the supers, so they would never reach the honey if we left if for them. So he always takes away all the supers around now.

On Monday it had been in the 80's and low 90's lately, and the weatherman said that it was going to stay in that range for the next week, but then the temperatures were likely to drop for a while. John was leaving on Tuesday to pick up the van, and I needed him along in case something happened. So it seemed the right thing to do. Besides, I wasn't going to say no to a little honey.

What I didn't really know was how MUCH I'd get.

The first thing I had to do was pull out the sticky board and see how the girls had done with respect to their mite load. I was pretty impressed, since I'd left it there since the last time I went in, and it's been about two weeks. There were mites! But not very many of them.

The bees had also managed to find their way into the space between the bottom of the sticky board and the screen, somehow, along with that enormous spider from last time. But the cool thing was finding that while there were mites, there weren't that many of them given the amount of time the board had been in the hive.

So I just cut and Vaselined another piece of cardboard, and got that back into the bottom of the hive before I started anything else. And I wrote myself a plan. *laughs* I decided that I was going to take off the supers, reducing their room to just the two brood deep boxes, and then I was going to do the powdered sugar treatment since there *were* mites, but not huge number of them.

Suiting up and going in was less of an adrenaline rush for me, this time through. It is now routine, to the point where I decided I really didn't have to have the thick wool socks that I usually use to protect my ankles. The suit I have actually covers my ankles pretty well if I pull the elastic cuffs over my boots.

I had ordered a "Bee Escape" at the beginning of last week, but it still hadn't shown up, so I figured I'd just pull the frames by hand, one at a time, get all the bees off between the window cleaning brush, the smoke, and just blowing them off with a puff of breath, it worked out just fine. It was a lot of work, as there were a lot of bees in the deep super I'd put on top of the brood supers.

The smaller, medium super, which I'd bought from Corky in Seattle, wasn't even really touched. They hadn't built comb in it and while there were a few bees crawling around in it, they'd really concentrated on the deep super. That surprised me, a little, but given that I'd put it on before the bees had capped off the deep super, it actually followed more professional procedure, since the experienced keepers talk about NOT putting another super on until the one below it is filled and capped. This is, of course, counter to those that say, no no, put two supers on a once, it'll encourage them to produce more.... two beekeepers, three opinons...

Really, truly concentrated on it. They filled every frame and completely capped off four of the eight frames. Of the other four, one was three-quarters capped, two were half-capped, and the last was one quarter capped. Usually the bees let the honey dry until it's dense "enough" and then cap it to keep it, so the uncapped frames had mildly more water than the capped ones. This one, as you can see, was one of the fully capped ones.

These were also old frames from previously used equipment, and when I used my hive tool to lever at the top bar of a few of the frames, the whole top bar came off! The nails that were driven down into the frame bars below just came clean out of the wood. The bottom of the frame had been glued into the sides of the box by the bees, using propolis (a sticky blend of beeswax and tree sap). I was not happy about *that*! But I knew that it might be a problem because the honey-filled frames were *heavy*, and with the extra gluing by the bees, it just felt inevitable.

I pulled one frame, the second one lost its top bar. I then got two more frames out, and the next one lost its top bar, too! I got mildly frustrated at that point, and since I had enough room in the box for my arm to fit between the two broken frames, I put my gloved hand down in there, and tried to wiggle my fingers so that the bees could get away from my hand. Then I started to lift the frame with the bottom bar.

I got stung through my protective glove, twice. So much for those gloves doing what I thought they were doing. The girls got me right through a two-layer of leather, too, which just bemused me. I shouted in pain, and the whole pitch of the hive went up. Going with the better part of valor, I walked away from the whole hive, and brought my smoker with me.

We relit the smoke, got a compress of baking soda onto the stings, and then I wrapped the compress with a tissue and stuck my whole hand back into the glove. Then I went right back to the box, smoked everyone to heck and back, and then reached in again and slowly, gently, pulled the broken frame out of there, blew the remaining bees off gently, and then handed the whole thing to John.

And then I went back in for the other one, and it was a little easier, because I could see under that particular frame. I got the rest of them out of there with relatively little trouble, and the empty box was filled with bees clinging to the sides. I banged it, once, over the brood box, and covered all the top bars with bees.

With all the bees piled up on there, I got the one-third cup of sifted powdered sugar out, and started sprinkling it between the top bars. As you can see here, the pile of bees quickly worked their way into the box and out the various openings they were given.

There were ghost bees everywhere.

John walked the empty frames into the garage, and I closed up shop, using the brush to just get the bees off the top rim all around the box. I used to worry so much about crushing them when I put the inner lid on, now I just use the brush and it works wonders. The inner and outer lids went on, and I got to walk away, put away all my tools, and find some iced tea and the neighborhood pool to cool off. It was mid-90's, and the sun was shining, so I was dripping with sweat when I finished.

That evening John and I tried to figure out how to harvest the honey. I'd learned a little from the small piece I'd taken a month ago, and I wasn't going to invest in an extractor or in borrowing equipment from either club I belong to. With only eight frames setting them up and cleaning them afterward seemed like a lot of work to do for what was relatively little honey.

So instead of doing all that, we just got out a sheet pan, a knife and an offset spatula, and pulled the foundation with all its honeycomb out of one of the broken frames. With the tools we just scraped the honeycomb off the foundation, onto the sheet pan. The caps came off each of the cells when we pushed the honey along. I was amazed how much of what came off was just pure liquid honey. The wax holding everything together was relatively light and small in volume. The plastic foundation also had the cells pressed into the plastic, so they couldn't be scraped off! I was very grateful for that.

Once the honeycomb was off the foundation, it looked something like this... and once it wasn't on its support, it collapsed beautifully, and the honey flowed from it. It was clear and beautiful and all the wax bits were relatively large.

One of those cool things is that the bees themselves kept all of these honey combs completely separate from the brood chamber, where the queen lays eggs, which hatch into larva, which spin tiny cocoons in their cells, and then are born as newly hatched bees. When the baby bees are born, they clean out their own cell, and then go on to take care of the larva and feed them the bee bread they make from pollen and honey.

But none of that procreation action happens up in the supers! I didn't even put a queen excluder in this year, because it looked like they weren't going to lay up in the honey levels, and sure enough, they didn't! That amazes me, still, how the whole system really takes full advantage of honeybee nature.

So all there was in the half-sheet pan, after we scraped off all the comb, was big pieces of wax and clear honey....

So we just poured it all into a fine sieve, and let the honey just flow through and down into the jars. And as you can see, it worked just fine! John had the filters for his beer making, and he has to filter out grain husks, hops, and other plant material, and it worked out great for what we were doing here, and the plastic mesh was fine enough to keep just about everything other than the honey out of the jars. Still, this is raw, unfiltered honey, as we don't put it through a super-fine mesh that would take out all the pollen and everything.

This is most of the take. There were three more quarts and a single pint that came off the foundations, the wax mound, and the half-sheet pan when I got them into warmer temperatures. I was amazed at how much came off the wax! One and a half of those quarts were just from letting it sit overnight and being patient with it.

I then spent the next day cleaning off all the equipment, because the beeswax really liked sticking to the plastics we used. Oops. I ended up melting a lot of it off the equipment, using a big pot of water in a clean pot. The pot picked up a lot of wax, too, but I was able to skim the majority of it off the top of the water and scrape it off the sides before using a Wax Off solution on the steel. It cleaned up nice, but I'm going to be looking for a coffee can to actually melt what wax I end up with when the bees are done picking the last of the honey from the mass.

One bee girl came in with all the equipment when I went to wash the sieves, and she crawled up out of the kitchen sink onto the lip of the sink. She stretched like a cat, head, torso, and a flip of a sting-tipped tail section. All her tiny legs and wings stretched, too, and then she kind of looked at me expectantly. I proffered a bottle brush I'd been using on the jars, and she stepped lightly onto it, and started strolling toward me. I got the brush and her outside onto the back porch and set her down gently. She then took off for her hive.

The girls have been cleaning off the empty frames, the foundation after I got one last honey flow off it, and the ball of comb wax sitting in a bowl. And they're very very enthusiastic about their work. I was really impressed by how utterly clean they made the foundation pieces, and they got every drop of honey off the deck. And there was a huge cloud of them working their way across all available surfaces. There were also a large number of wasps moving in among them, and I'd find the occasional beheaded bee here or there, when a wasp had had enough of someone. The odd thing was that the wasps weren't taking them off to eat them, too.

I'll admit that I did kill a few wasps when the opportunity presented itself, and it was interesting to note that the bees didn't react to that at all, but the few wasps among them reacted quite aggressively. I did have my suit on while I was moving equipment around, so no more stings, but... wow. There was quite the cloud of all the insects on the porch while I was making our dinner on the grill outside. So last night I moved everything over closer to the hive, and by mid-day today, the bees and wasps had all cleared out.

I've ended up with nearly 30 pounds of honey! And there are a large number of neighbors and people who want to buy it from me, so I may make back some of the money I spent on equipment! That would be amazingly nice, to be able to almost break even on my expenditures for the year.

Moving House and Ghost Bees

On August 4th, I actually did a full inspection of the hive, because it had been a while, and I wanted to just see what was going on. I'd been on vacation to Seattle, so hadn't really had a chance until then to get at the girls. I also waited for the boards from Corky so that I could build the supers I needed.

I found a very happy, full, busy hive, with lots of larvae in the bottom two brood boxes, three or four full frames of honey down there, too, and nearly half the deep super already filled wtih new white comb and honey.

I put another super on, then, just in case the girls wanted to be ambitious, and I left the hive bodies staggered, because the weather had been wicked hot for the the last several weeks. They'd been bearding on every available surface, so I thought I'd let them do that as much as they could from every front and back of the boxes.

But in the last week, it's gotten both wet and colder, especially at night. It's been in the 50's at night, though still in the high 70's and low 80's during the day. There's still lots of flowers out all around the neighborhood, and in the wild field just across the street. So it's not like it's totally fall, yet, but it's certainly not the dog days of August I'm used to having.

For that inspection, though, the hive was full of bees, they'd probably doubled their numbers again, since I'd last seen them, and the sheer number of bees amazed me. I even saw a bunch of them doing an orienting flight, just as I was approaching the boxes to open them all up. The girls had also created huge amounts of propolis, glueing the front board to the entrance and cementing all the boxes together. That amazed me.

When we'd come home from Seattle, one of the boards blocking the skunks from entering our backyard was shifted, and there was a trench dug in front of the hive! They'd evidently come in and tried to dig their way under the hive to get at things. They hadn't gotten far in the hard-packed clay, so it wasn't really a viable plan. Still, it surprised me that they'd tried.

Anyway... I did take one chunk of honeycomb they'd probably built on one of the top bars, off the foundation. It had dropped in the 104 degree weather they'd had while we were away, and they'd glued it to the bottom of one of the foundations. It was so thick it was mashing bees when I tried to pull out that frame, so I shoo'ed all the girls off it, and then just used my hive tool to scrape it off the plastic foundation, onto a cookie sheet. I mashed it later, ran it through a steel mesh filter, and it's been really tasty in my tea.

But a few days later I noticed tiny, tiny black specks that were running around and jumping between the girls on the their front porch! The girls were scraping them off each other, but the tiny things were running around. One of the bee girls looked like she was chasing them around, shooing them off the porch. Not the red of Varroa or tracheal mites, but someone was still trying to hitch a ride and food from my girls.

Between that and the weather, I decided to get a screened bottom board with a drawer for sticky board, and then straighten up the boxes but still leave ventilation from the top super. So, today, I wanted to get all that in. Of course, it clouded up and started raining. John was amazing, and because I was going to have to take off all the boxes in order to get to the bottom board, he volunteered to build a new stand for it all so that I could move the whole thing two yards forward, off the basement window well, and make it a lot easier for me to lift and carry the full deeps.

Here you can see the old setup, and it's getting tall enough and heavy enough that I couldn't lift much while standing on the edge of the cover for the well. It's actually held up by two 2x4's stretched across the very strong metal well walls, so there was no danger of it falling it. The only danger was for me to fall in if I got close enough to spare my back.

John's back had been acting up, lately, too, so I did all the lifting this time, and basically put all the boxes on the lid a little ways out of the way. It got a little crazy, this time, since I was taking away the entire hive, and the girls got pretty agitated while I moved and stacked boxes, trying not to crush anyone. And then, of course, it started to rain, and all the field workers started to come back to the hive. Poor girls, they were hovering like crazy in exactly the same spot they used to hover in, in order to make a landing at the hive, but there was no where to land!

I had to clear out the old equipment and clean off the old bottom board. An enormous spider had taken up residence under the bottom board, and had a huge accumulation of wings, all stuck together, down there. The spider had run away onto one of the supporting 2x4's, and I figure she was probably who had eaten all the dead bees that the girls had thrown out of the hive, because I never found bodies in front of the hive or under it in the window well. Given how thoroughly she was cleaning up, I didn't really mind her there.

I had to put the new stand in place. John suggested testing it, so I did, and jumped up and down in a cloud of bees to make sure it was set solidly. Then I put the cleaned bottom board on it, and on top of that, the screened bottom board with a drawer in the back for sticky board. The sticky board we had was just covered in Vaseline, but it's sticky enough that if the mites fall on it, they aren't going to be able to get out or jump back on the bees.

And then I was finally able to put the bottom brood box back into place.

Whew.

In this picture, you can even see where I'd stacked all the boxes in reverse order, on the lid.

With the entrance board out front, but two inches down, all the incoming workers landed on the board, but then had a two-inch climb that confused the heck out of them. John went off to get an extra piece of 2x4, while I made sure that the box was in place, and the workers smoked down so that I could place the next box, which was another heavy one. But it made all the difference in the world that I could keep the box next to my body while I carried it. I had to work quickly to get the front board back into place, too, as every girl in the air kept trying to land on it, as it was familiar, so I kept one hand waving in front, while I got the board in. I've never been so glad of my protective gear.

I was swearing at the girls when they boiled up over the top bars, and it was only after I got both brood boxes and the nearly full deep when I remembered that I was going to treat them with powdered sugar. When you dump powdered sugar on bees, they start to clean each other off, and they do such a thorough job of it that they often clean the mites off each other, too. It's a great way to get mites to drop off, and onto the sticky board. It doesn't really harm them, it basically feeds them, and it's cheap and can be very easy to do. They recommend treating once a week, but just the brood boxes. *laughs*

I don't think that the powdered sugar affects the honey, but really the brood workers are the ones most at risk of the mites, which I think is why you just do the brood boxes. Half a cup of sifted powdered sugar went between the frames.

And ghost bees came zooming out. Poor girls. They were completely covered with the stuff. I saw one girl practically blinded by the stuff, trying to throw herself out of a small area between two frames. I gently helped her out of that into the body of the hive itself.

This one flew out, climbed onto Jet, and then tried to go into his pants. John got her out of there, but she left a trail of powdered sugar all over Jet. *laughs*

But all the girls that came out were frantically being cleaned by all the other bees. It was fun to see how cooperative they were about doing that for each other, and I'll see, tomorrow, how many mites were caught by the sticky board. Or if the sugar even made it to the bottom. The drawer means that I can look and check without bothering the girls.

It all went together beautifully. The top super had a lot of bees in it, but no comb, yet, or honey. It seem to just be living space for them, and there were a lot of them up there when I first opened things up.

Stacking everything up felt good, and I got most of the bees out of the way with practice. I just need to do this more often to be more comfortable with the doing. Still, not bad for having a whole cloud of bees flying all around me while I got the stand and the bottom back into place, just two feet in front of where it used to be. The girls were doing orienting flights, afterward, circling around as if they were figuring out where everything was again. It still amazes me that moving them such a short distance still confuses them so much. Nearly none of the field workers, coming back, seemed even able to see the boxes that were piled on the lid just a right-corner away. But once the box was back in the orientation it used to have, in nearly the same place, they homed in and landed as if nothing were wrong.

Now they'll have fewer entrances to guard, and I'll get a better handle on the mites, I think, and help them manage what they're already doing. If they clean the mites off each other in the hive, the mites can drop through the mesh, and can't get back out, unlike when they were cleaning each other on the front porch, and the mites were just jumping right back onto them.

I'll have to put it back on the solid bottom board again before winter, but now I'll have a portal into how they're actually doing.

Honor and Laziness

On Thursday, John, Jet, and I went hiking just west of Boulder, and I came across this girl in the wild flowers.

I suspect that she's actually someone's Italian worker bee. The body shape, size, and coloring match my girls to a T, Russians I know are darker, and she's much bigger than the wild bees that are in the area. But it was really neat to find her and get a good picture of her while she was sipping from a flower. I like that her pollen sacs have a few grains in them.

Sadly, when I came home from our trip to Seattle, I found out that the long boards for the supers, were actually the front and back boards for a 10-frame box. I emailed Corky, and he promised to send me the long boards. He did, but he only sent two instead of four, for both my supers.

So I have sent another email to him about that, and I know that he was in a hurry when he sent them. I also know that he's been great about correcting the problem, so far. He just said that he'd send the boards and not to worry about returning the ones I have. I have, however, been able to build one super, and I'm painting it right now. I'm hoping to get into the hive tomorrow or the day after and see how my girls are doing since I left for Seattle, and see if they need another super.

The keepers here are having a sort of mixed year. Our spring started late because of the late snow, but a lot of things have been blooming and are still blooming. The linden trees were late, the Russian sage is early, and the alfalfa is blooming everywhere. Hay's doing well this year, and when they let it bloom before they mow it, the bees can get a lot of honey from them.

Ballard Bee Company

I'd heard a lot of good things about Corky and the Ballard Bee Company, an urban beekeeper who was doing a lot of education as well as maintaining some 150 hives through Seattle. They allow people to "host" a hive, as well as sell most anything you'll need to create your own. Corky even talked about driving down to California in April to get the queen and worker boxes this spring.

We went there. Obviously. *laughs* I needed some supers that weren't just the deeps because I don't think I could lift a deep if it were completely filled with honey, like those frames from the last inspection were like. And Mann Lake sells the unassembled boxes and frames for an eight-frame medium super, and after a flurry of exchanged phone calls, I found out that the Ballard Bee Company stocked those and could sell them to me! Since we were driving, it would be no shipping for me, even with the Washington sales tax, I'd save a good deal of money.

So we made it over there yesterday, and it's just out in a neighborhood, and when we were close, I saw the enclosed truck with bee boxes inside and said, "That's it!"

And it was. He was in the garage putting together 150 deeps for an order, and running around while it was still sunny working his hives. The weather's been phenomenal while we've been here, clear, sunny, and in the mid-80's, unusually good weather without a cloud in the sky. Corky was in the garage on a phone call, so we looked around in the front yard, and there was a handcrank extractor that he lends out to people.

When he was done, he was great, friendly and really informative. He got all my pieces together, lamented having broken down all his boxes the day before or else he'd be able to give me one. He gave Jet a honey stick, and showed Isabel a capped frame of honey that they were going to extract later. There was a tall stack of supers that they'd taken off hives already in preparation for extraction. He asked some about how the Colorado keepers had been doing, and was happy to hear that both the Southern Colorado Association and the Boulder County one was doing quite well with lots of members, though he was interested in the fact that both associations seem to be picking up a lot of people like me, just hobbiests trying their hand at it for the first time.

He said that the beekeeping there is very different than here, as in Washington a lot of the problems just come from the constant rain and damp. That the wood just rots away if it's not painted, and Nosema is a much much bigger problem around the Pacific Northwest. I'd have to suspect a fungus would be far more of a problem in the constant damp.

This year's been good so far, but they're just out of their swarm season, so things have slowed a little, but that stack of supers was good news so far for the summer. It was great to get to just talk with him for a bit, and I'd highly recommend him for mentoring, his classes, and his equipment to anyone in the Seattle area looking to start with this beekeeping thing. He seems super experienced, and really cares about his hives, which was really cool to talk with him about. I never knew what 50 pounds of sugar went for before.

We now have a nice cardboard box that John found in the recycle here and all my parts are neatly packed to come home. They're beautiful, fragrant cut pine, with handles on all four sides, and look like they'll do just fine on my eight-frame setups. Jet, John, and I will have a fun puzzle to put together when we get back.

Bottom to Top Inspection on June 25th

The fires have been fierce, and we were seeing the smoke from the two fires that were right after we got back. The weather has gotten even hotter and dryer, and on the 22nd of June I saw a bunch of the girls hanging out on the front entrance board instead of inside the hive.

I hadn't seen that behavior before, and I kind of panicked as there was something about the bees hanging out like that because they were thinking of swarming, but usually it's a huge beard of bees, not just a few wandering aimlessly outside...



So that night, I just went and put another box on top, just in case. I knew that I was going to have to do an inspection soon, but I wanted to wait until it was mid-day and I had enough time and patience to do it right. So I planned to go in on Tuesday, when I would have John at home and I knew the weather would be clear.

I also went to the Internets, and they said no worries, if the ladies are hanging when it's hot, it's likely just a way to cool off and to help keep the hive from overheating. That I should look to give them better ventilation and or more cooling options. I also read up on more ways to do a bottom-up inspection when I had multiple boxes stacked on.

The top box that I'd put on was completely empty of anything but a few curious bees. It was easy to lift, and I just stacked it on an upside down doormat I'd put out of the flight path. The top brood box was a lot harder to lift. *laughs* I've been doing dead lifts with the weightlifting system that got me started on, and I was soooo glad of having done a lot of those with up to seventy pounds of weight on the bar.

The real problem was that John had built a little platform for the hive over the window well of our basement. The well has a mesh over it that was solid enough for careless two, three, or even five-year-olds, but it can't hold the weight of an adult human being, not to mention such a human being with another thirty pounds of beehive. I had to stand on the rim of the well, reach, and lift the hive body and carefully bring it to me so that I didn't shake any of the girls out of the completely open bottom.

As you can see from this picture, the girls started to build linking comb from the bottom box to the top one, so it was kind of important that I take all that apart.

The bottom of both boxes has to be open to allow passage between the two levels and to let air circulation happen. The bees are very good at clinging to their frames, but... it was still kind of hairy doing it. Both my boys watched very carefully to see that nothing but a bit of honey dropped from the top box before I had it on top of the topmost level that was resting on the mat.

Very busy girls. There was one entire frame that was utterly empty, one that they'd started one, but then the next six were chock-a-block with bees, brood and honey. This was one of the brood frames, and they'd just kept building. This is just comb on the bottom, but I needed John to take a picture so that I could be sure that it wasn't a queen cell.

Yes, that's Jet in the background. He'd donned my extra veil and hat and was watching me do all this from very very close up. He wasn't bothered by any of the girls at all, and was fascinated with the whole procedure! I loved his interest and it was really nice to have him there as yet another pair of hands while John was handling the camera, the smoker, and other things.

This made me very happy, as it's a frame that's almost completely covered, edge to edge, with capped brood. The eggs develop into larve, which then get fed until they're fat enough to be covered. They spin their coccon after that, and under go metamorphsis over the last two weeks of development. So all of these were laid within a week of each other, for nearly all of them to still be under caps. So the Queen's been very very busy, and doing a very good solid job of laying in nearly every cell.

It was interesting to me, though, to see the wax over the top bar, and that they just kept going with the cells.

This was beautiful and brand new to me. This is a frame with nothing but honey. There was one of these on each level, where it was nothing but honey. Both boxes also had one frame where the outside of them was all honey and the brood side of them had about half a side of brood and all the outside was honey. Those were pretty heavy as well.

I was astonished at just how heavy these were!! But front and back, this frame was nothing but honey. This side was all capped, as it had dehydrated enough to be thick enough for them. The other side, though, was open and still drying out. That might have been another reason for the bees that were outside the hive during the night. The extra humidity in the hive was only added to with more bees in the hive, so in order to allow the drying action to happen, they stayed outside.

Once this is capped, there might be less humidity in the hive. I'm kind of hoping.

Then I ran into an interesting problem.

I had had one frame in the bottom box that the girls had doubled the comb up on me on the frame. They'd hung another sheet of comb from the top bar, simply because there was too much space in that box. I am trying to fix it by spacing the frames in there closer together and leaving that extra space on the sides, but... at the beginning I didn't know there was even a problem, until they'd already built the comb.

This time, when I went in, I found that second sheet already fallen from the bar, and lying in the bottom of the box. It had been supported by the frame it had been hanging with, but had clearly broken free a while ago and was just slumped. Luckily, it had probably fallen a while ago, so the Queen hadn't laid anything more in it. Unluckily, there were still a few bees just barely fully developed still in the cells, struggling to get out. I ended up rubberbanding what was left of this into an empty frame, and inserting it into upper box, replacing one of the completely empty frames, and moving all the full frames over one slot to cover the empty areas.

I know, it was a lot of manipulation, but I really wanted to get an empty foundation and frame where they were doing the most honey making, and I wanted this slab of a mistake out of there. In the picture there's actually a dozen bees trying to help the baby bees out and feeding them.

John, in the meantime, got some amazing shots from the boxes I wasn't paying attention to. *laughs* I didn't have any problems with any other hives trying to rob this one, so I just left all the boxes open while I worked.

The top box was 3/4 full, too, and, as I said, I moved all the full ones over to give room for another empty frame. Then two days later, on Thursday, I suited up and went back in to pull out the 'empty' frame and found it covered with bees trying to fill it with honey!

I smoked most of them off, and just tapped the rest of them off back into the hive, after making sure the queen wasn't with them. Most of the bees that were in cells on that piece had already been born. I freed one more, right there, and put her back into the hive so she'd have a chance, and then we threw the piece of comb away, and tucked a clean, new frame in there with just fresh foundation for them to draw out and fill.

They'd already drawn out one new leaf of comb, but it was small, and I didn't feel badly about taking it. The interesting thing is that the comb cells were much, much bigger than the ones that the workers built in traveling box! I wasn't sure why that was so.

They've been pretty enthusiastic builders. I cleaned off all this protruding comb. But both top and bottom boxes have empty frames, still, and there's nothing like a queen cell anywhere. So no real threat of swarming. I added a spacer between the lid and the boxes so that there could be more air flow. I'm not sure it's enough. I might want to remove the inner lid and just have the telescoping lid on top of the spacers, but it's not as easy to clean as the inner lid.

So the usual schedule of adding a super in July is about right for these girls, and I'll be doing that sometime next week. I don't want to be bugging them so much.

The good news is that night, when it was pretty cool, all the girls were in the hive. There's plenty of room for them, I think, still, and so long as it's cool enough, they're happy to stay within where it's safe.

The other interesting thing was that when I tasted the honey I'd gotten from scraping off the cross-frame comb, it was sweet and floral and smoky. I wonder if some of that forest fire smoke got into their honey?

The Internets is Smart...

... and it looks as if it's not a terrible thing, just a lack of ventilation and/or room, as I suspected when I saw the top bars were completely lined with bees. So adding the super and going in to look around and make sure it's full up will be enough to deal with the rest of it.

I may also move the doubled-up frame closer to the edge of the bottom box and see if there's a way to get it out of circulation completely.

Too Many Girls?

This evening before dinner, I noticed that there were an unusual number of bees just hanging out outside the entrance on the left side of the hive. I didn't think too much about it, but tomorrow there's supposed to be the possibility of severe thunderstorms and gusty winds, so I wanted to put the cover back on straight. I thought that would be a simple enough task, but then I went out there and saw all the girls hanging out outside still!

It's been a full brood cycle since I did my last inspection, and I've been seeing orienting flights. So I suddenly started to wonder if there were just so many workers now that they didn't fit?

So after a quick tactic session with my husband, I pulled out my last deep box that I have frames for, and we  took off the outer cover, pried off the off-set inner cover to lots of buzzing. I got my suit on after that chorus, just so that I could work more calmly. I got the lid off completely, gently set it by the entrance, and then saw that nearly all the frames in the top box were full.

So I gently put a queen excluder on top, added the box, and shook all the workers from the bottom of the lid onto the the top box. They rapidly descended into the slots and made it very simple to put the lid on and get the outer cover back onto the box. I didn't see all that well, but there were bees coming up between ALL the  frames of the second box, and they were doing it front to back, so I suspect that it is far more full than I expected. I'll do a full inspection after the weather calms down, but I hopefully made enough room for the girls for when the rain comes down.

Summer Days

The days were pretty hot a few weeks back, and it's going to be in the mid-90's again next week. When I wandered out into the garden on the 100 degree day last week, I saw a whole bunch of the girls just sitting in, around, and in front of the entrance all fanning like mad. When I also saw a candle completely liquified on my picnic table out front, I figured I'd better do something.

First, John built a small structure out of scrapwood over the hive, just to shade it. Then I offset the telescoping cover, and offset the cover itself underneath that, so that there was more air flow.  The telescoping cover keeps the rain off. The funny thing was that I did it bareheaded and barehanded, and I loved seeing all the workers come out through the 'roof' to take a look at the sunlight they weren't used to seeing through the top of the hive. It was just an inquisitive thing, and there was no rise in the buzzing at all and none of the ladies tried to check me out. In fact, ten minutes later, when I went to look at the entrance, a good number of the fanning crew had gone on to other duties.

I'm thinking of just leaving it like that for the summer, maybe checking on whether or not they're gluing things down when I do the usual checks. They seem to be very content on the most part and workers are tumbling out of the hive at a really good rate as soon as it's warm. I've seen them in the cherry trees that are blooming nearby, and their back legs are just stuffed with bright pollen. The girls that are entering the hive have the same color pollen, too! So I suspect it's them, as the trees are just a block away.

Inspection After a Month...

... since I did the last inspection, and I figured it was time. So a total of 42 days since installment.

This time I practiced with the smoker beforehand, I went over a game plan with John before I even opened it up, and then we went strictly by the guidelines and boundaries I set down for the whole thing, and it was really good.

I'm realizing, the more I do this, the better it is to have an end in mind before I go in. There's no point in disturbing the girls unless I have a decision point to make, and I need to figure out what it is I'm going to do. There are some books that say that in order to manage a hive properly, you need to go in every week. On the other side, there's several that say that every time you go in, you set them back by a week, and others that say that during good nectar flow in the summer you should never go in or you'll interrupt them badly.

I don't think I did much interrupting today, and it was good to see how far the ladies have gotten in just the month I was away.

Before we left for China, I'd put a second deep box on top of the first, because the bees had already filled five of the eight frames, and I wanted to give them plenty of room while we were away. Unfortunately, I also knew that they have a tendency to want to go straight up from where they've already established brood or comb, so I needed to know if they'd spread out a little or had simply gone up.

I think another reason I needed the very clear plan before I went in was because I'm still jet-lagged and kind of woozy during the day. Mental processes haven't been as clear or as clean since the trip, between the cold and the drastic time shift. I keep wanting to sleep during the day and waking up at night, even more so than usual, so I've been fighting all that, too.

One of the things was just to get rid of the feeder, because while the sugar water was really good for getting the colony to build up its numbers, the bees were likely to take and store the sugar syrup instead of honey, and it just doesn't hold as well as actual nectar from flowers of all kinds. So I just took the whole top off, put the feeder out on the grass, and trusted that the two workers that were left in it would find their way home.

It's kind of fun to see the brand-new clean top edges of the new frames that I'd bought from the bee equipment place. Already loaded with foundation, I didn't have to worry about the evenness of how the foundations were built or set.

The first three frames were empty of everything but bees exploring their surfaces. The fourth was partially built on the right side, and the left was facing this particular frame, which is almost entirely built out! I was very happy to see this nearly filled with bees drawing out the wax. It's a clean side, with the wax nearly the same color as the foundation, and you can see through it, so no buildups from brood or anything, yet.

It was interesting to see this frame in contrast to the center one and the ones on either side of that, which were filled with nearly complete brood. Since it's been about a month since I put this box on, if the Queen had gone directly for the first frame when I put it on, there was time enough for a whole round of baby bees to grow up (takes them 21 days to hatch, develop, morph, and break free to fly.

It was also fun to look down between the slats when I had the empty ones out to see how they were doing on the first box. They'd built out a little more, with two empty frames to the same side as on the top, so they were starting to fill it all up as well as they could, too. I love this picture as it's like a whole carpet of bees...

They seem to be doing quite well, as there are so many of them, but one thing I really did notice was that they were becoming more and more the same. That the all-yellow or all-black workers that I'd started with just weren't there anymore. All the ladies are looking more like sisters, now, with the same pattern of stripes and the same brown fuzzy thoraxes.

The dying workers are being tossed out the front door, too, and I'm seeing more and more of them piled up just off the edge of the entrance. They dry out into these abstract shapes of just the carapace and look almost like dried flower buds.

The next frame was solid brood. Capped and ready to fly in a week or two. On both sides. There were just a few holes, and I wasn't exactly sure if these were cells that the Queen had missed or if she'd laid in them and these were the first bees to fly. Either way, they were pretty scattered and few, which meant that the mass of the cells had eggs laid in them.

It was pretty intense to see a whole frame that was nothing but brood when it had felt so haphazard the last time I went in for an inspection, but the girls are doing their best to multiply and do it as quickly as their nectar flow and pollen finds allow. They're carrying in legloads of pollen all the time, and it's amazing seeing how much pollen they're finding and using to rear their young.

On the left, here, is one of the corners of the really crowded frames. It definitely reassured me that she was laying in nearly every cell she could reach, and just missed a few by mistake. It's just chock-full of pupae, who are about ready to be capped and let go to cocoon themselves and grow wings. So many of the workers were head-first into the cells they looked black. I had to study them pretty closely to see that they weren't a problem at all, and had a very good sense of what needed maintaining.

I really loved seeing the open cells again, and being able to distinguish, so easily, which cells were honey and which were brood. I was impressed to see how little they're storing, yet, and how much they're just pumping up the numbers within the colony. It fits the cycle, I think.... where they just up their numbers for a while and then try to store honey away so that they can survive the winter. Luckily, there's a number of fields of weeds nearby that are completely chock-a-block with dandelions. I saw them ALL blooming just a week ago, and the girls have plenty to eat.

The interesting thing was seeing that these frames were duller, more solid than the open, airy, uncapped frame where the light could just shine through. These were solid with developing bees.

Then I saw this frame. Both sides were like this, where the center was empty, dark, and being cleaned out by the workers. The cell darkens after having held a pupae through larval stage and into adult. I hadn't seen any of this during the first inspection, of course, as they hadn't had the time to get that far.

It was really cool to see it up close, and then I realized that the queen is on this side of this frame! She's surrounded by attendants, and she's laying and she has a black thorax instead of the fuzzy brown one that the workers have. She's the only bee that isn't head-first into a cell... and if you click on the picture, it'll take you to flickr, where I've got her marked. *laughs*

The amazing thing was knowing now that she's re-laying the frames, and putting eggs into used, cleaned cells the way she's supposed to, and that it's going quite well. None of the bees seemed particular disturbed by my moving things around, and no one was attacking me and none of them were particularly agitated by my observations. I hadn't crushed anyone, for all that there were a lot more bees in there. Counting the full frames, the estimates are about half a pound of workers per completely covered frame, so I have approximately six pounds of bees now, about doubling what I started with, even with the loss of all the old workers.

As a parting shot... *laughs* This bee was fanning furiously, as it was a pretty hot day, and they simply can stand at the top of a frame to fan out the heat. There's a few ventilation holes in the boxes, now, and I'm offsetting them a little to improve air flow. There's also a steady supply of water outside and the top box has a few holes drilled into it.

Given that the workers were starting to explore the frames to the side, and that they'd only really half-filled the boxes I'd given to them, I decided not to add a new super, yet, and let them just do what they were doing.

Over the weekend, one of our neighbors was having a garage sale, and her flowering tree in the front yard was just covered with bees. She's near enough that she was happily saying that she was feeding my girls... *laughs* I loved that. They weren't bothering her or anyone that was going to the sale, staying strictly on the blossoms. And I actually found a flowering cherry tree nearby that was also covered with the girls, so they're doing quite well in our neighborhood. Next up will be the Russian sage, the butterfly bushes, and plenty of summer roses. It's funny how aware I now am of the local flora...

Seeing Orienting Flights

Yesterday, while I was stringing up the sugar snap peas (which had tripled their length in just three days of sunshine and plenty of water), I suddenly saw a cloud of bees in front of the entrance.

I asked my boss at the 911 dispatch center (I just volunteer as a transcript person there once a week), Ken Nichols, keeps bees and is very experienced his opinion on when to inspect bees, and he dragged out the lovely old adage of "if you want a dozen opinions, ask ten beekeepers." But he gave a very reasoned argument against going in every week, and for doing a bit more management at the end of the winter, and into the fall.

I told him about seeing larvae forming the last time I went in, and he smiled and said that I'd probably be seeing orienting flights soon, huge clouds of bees right in front of the entrance. They are newborns that are figuring out how to fly and how to find the hive and how and where it is, and every once in a while, after they start to get born, they'll just come out and hover. Knowing what it was made me run inside to tell the boys and grab the camera.

They're all oriented toward the front of the hive, and they were all hovering just in a cloud all in front of the entrance. It was fascinating to watch.

The really fun part was that after the boys were gone and had taken their videos and done everything, I was just standing there, trying strings to a support and to my pea plants and watching all these shiny new baby bees learning how to fly. None of them bothered me, there was one old lady that buzzed me a couple of times, inquiringly, but she left me alone after not that long.

And it was amazingly peaceful to just watch them going out and in, out and in, and then, not that much longer later, they were all back in the hive and the usual traffic was going in and out.

Another thing Ken said was that you can tell a lot by just watching the traffic in and out of a hive. That if the workers are bringing in a lot of pollen, it means that they have plenty of brood to feed, because only the larva eat pollen. The bees only eat sugar water and honey.  I'm realizing now that butterflies only eat nectar when their caterpillar stages eat everything around them. And watching the girls there were lots of gold and yellow leg burdens on their back legs.

It was amazing fun to watch them. Mimi came by today just to see the girls, and she stood happily right in front of the entrance, with the bees whizzing about her on their flight path, and watched them going in and out and being quite happily busy with the summer-like day. I'll admit to just sitting outside the hive and watching them work. It's peaceful stuff. I seem to be in need for a little orientation myself, so it's been nice to get it from these working girls.

The 12-Day Inspection

In which I learned a great deal about the fact that planning really does help the inspection of a hive, and I actually FIND evidence that the queen is amazing and doing really really well. My husband was wonderful and helped keep me on track and focused for the whole thing, and did an amazing job as cameraman. 

I really love that you can see John's shadow in this picture, too.

But one of the main things I started with was deciding to use smoke for the first time. I had only used sugar water to spray the girls so that they would clean each other off before this. The feeding mechanism makes them full and the belly distension seems to make it impossible for them to sting.

The same mechanism is why smoke works, or so they say. *laughs* There is more lore about bees than I even really want to think about; but smoke makes the girls gorge on honey in case they have to fly away, and when they're full they can't sting. Usually the last thing bees have to worry about when the forest is on fire is a bear intent on eating them.

When I bought my bee suit, I got the smoker, too, and while the discussions on the Boulder beekeeper's list indicated that I might not have to use it, that sugar syrup was better, I decided to do it anyway. During the windy, cold day I was scared that I was going to draw too much heat out of the girls by spraying them with liquid, this way I didn't have to worry about them being wet. The nights are still going down into the 40's, so I thought I'd play it safe.

The smoke worked like a charm, too. When I got the feeder and empty box off the top, they were all well within the slats of the frames, and hovering over their stores. Also, since this time I did it in the middle of the day, on a sunny, calm day, a lot of the workers were out, and the hive itself wasn't quite so full. Still, as you'll see, there were plenty of the girls inside, still, to make it very interesting. You can also see here that the frames were pretty close together, and that there's a much bigger cap between the third and fourth frame from the left. Yes, that's where the doubled comb ended up.

The difference seems minuscule to my eye, too...

Two of the frames on the right were completely empty, and this time I took them out and just stood them upright to the side. That gave me enough room to move the other frames around before taking them out so that I could move slowly and get all the way into the box.

This is the next frame over, and you can see that they're building already. A small network of bees drawing comb, and they were drawing equal comb on the matching side of the frame next to it. So they were getting good and busy and building out a pretty good deal. It was interesting that it looked like they'd begun to build where the queen was first caged, and then started spreading from there, eventhough it was off of center by a frame. I guess she really is irresistible to them.

This is pretty typical, with the honey on the outside cells, and capped cells more to the middle with the brood and pollen and the like. You can see that they're all over the faces of this, and each tending to their own thing all at the same time.

It was surprising and really cool to hold these frames up and look at them in sunlight and not really bother the bees at all! I was surprised at how easy it was and how little notice they took when all I was doing was looking at them. They just kept working at all the things they were doing. Another cool thing was seeing how they all varied so much. Some were really dark and others really bright yellow, and I loved seeing the contrast across them all. It made it much harder to actually spot the queen, though! And I found out from Ken that when the Northern Colorado Beekeepers did their buy, they decided to not ask the breeders to mark the queens. It's something that stresses them, so I'm okay with having to be a better beekeeper to find her! *laughs*

I really loved being able to study each and every frame and with John's urgings actually take my time doing it. There were so many bees, and they were festooning all over the frames, building comb as fast as they could.

It turns out that they need a lot of sugar to be able to build wax, and these girls seemed really well supplied as they were building like mad. There were three completely full frames, and three partial ones like the first one that I looked more closely at. And the bees stuck to them all like they were glued in place. Nearly none of the girls took off or fell off, which was a relief for me as I always hated the idea of the queen just falling and getting crushed or something.

I added more smoke in the middle of the inspection because John said that the note of the hive was going up a little, but also because the next frame was the Big One that I'd felt like I'd failed at really looking at the time before. 

So I added some more smoke, let the girls settle, and then got my courage together. I moved the frame over a few centimeters, grabbed both sides and removed it from the box, slowly and gently and didn't shake anyone off. One of two of the girls just took of into the air, now and again, but none of them were really bumping into me, or buzzing at that hum that really alerted ALL the "get ready to dodge or duck" instincts. They were pretty content, and doing all right. I also wasn't breaking any comb the way I had last time...

This is the infamous doubled up comb. It is pretty organic, and the weight of it is actually stretching the wax at the top of the comb, which was intriguing to me.

The bright orange cells are filled with pollen! Which is what they need to feed brood, which meant that they were raising brood, so that was my Really Good Sign.

I still couldn't see under the wax to see if the queen was there or laying, and I was mildly frustrated by that, until I got to take a very close look at the lower corner of the other side of this frame...

If you go to this picture and look into the uncapped cells around and under the bees, you'll see little white rings of larvae!!!

I was so happy to see them. I was just so relieved to actually see them, big, fat, glossy and happy. And the texture of the caps next to them meant that there were probably hundreds, if not thousands, of workers all laid, growing, and sealed off to cocoon and develop into bees! But it was amazing to see that the laying pattern was such that the queen was probably hitting every single cell, and putting eggs into all of them. The swarms of workers here were feeding, capping, cleaning, and otherwise caring for the babies.  I also love that you can see one of the nearly transparent all-yellow workers in this shot too, a little above the center.

Putting the frame back in was a lot easier with the extra space.

No pushed around bees. No angry bee, nothing that seemed to make any of them any unhappier than they were.

I was even able to give the broken off piece of comb to a kid that was fascinated by them, and he loved seeing how it fit together and how it broke. *grins*

The amazing thing to me was seeing it all go back together without any problems at all. And it gave me the courage to just go through the rest of the box!

So this is the last of the built frames, and it's about two-thirds full, which I was really happy to see. The workers on this one are "festooning"... where they're all kind of linked together, and connected up in order to build comb in a synchronized fashion. For some reason it seems to make it easier for them to build the stuff when they're all doing it at once.

And, of course, they were completely ignoring me and John, who had the camera and no protective clothing but a veil. We got the veils from a couple of friends of ours who had bought them for a Halloween costume party. They had no use for them, so when they heard that I was going to actually keep bees, they sent me the veils!

Buttoning up was pretty easy, though I was kind of squimish about closing the gap between the Fat Frame and the others, but the bees are really used to very very tight quarters. The bee space is practically exactly the amount of space a bee needs to get through, so they just build to the point where they have to just squeeze through. It makes for good insulation.

But I basically scootched (that's a technical term!) the frames over until they were as close as they could get with the workers still between them, and finally fit all the frames into the box.  Since they'd built out six of the eight frames to some extent, I decided to add another box of frames on top. It would just give them more room. I also set up more sugar syrup and a watering station for them, with a tray filled with sand and rocks that could get water from our automated drip irrigation! So they'll have water and everything else, too!

So this second inspection was much, much, much more successful than the first, and I was so relieved about being able to see real evidence of the queen being just fine that I just collapsed for a while. Adrenalin and relief are a potent dose. *laughs* It's been twelve days since the queen was released, so I guess this is as good a time as any to see that she's been doing well.

Fail on Trying to Check on the Queen

I had a pretty thorough failure today, and with some thought and research, I am realizing why I failed to really find any evidence that the queen was in residence or laying, and there are multiple reasons.

Let's go through exactly what I did, first, and then what it was that really went wrong and where I lost heart and what I want to do about it the next time I go into the hive.

First off, I didn't get any pictures because I did it on my own while John was at some meeting that evening. So I didn't have my usual backup; however, I'd also gotten the mistaken impression that I should go in five days after the queen was released. I don't know where I got that number, and one Gabriel Petrut commented much later on one of my latter posts that one should wait until plenty of comb has been built, at least a week, if not more to give the queen time to go.  I also read, later, that one shouldn't disturb the hive too much in the first ten days (after installation? After queen release? I'm not sure) or else the workers might ball the queen.  Gah!

So I went in today. I put on all my equipment, went out to the box fairly late in the day, as my son was busy inside. The weather was windy, cloudy, and just a bit rainy, sprinkling even on an on again and off again basis.  And the girls seemed crankier with the weather. I did use sugar syrup in a spray to calm them down now and again, but it was rougher going than the installation or the queen release.

I wasn't sure, at the time, if it was just because I was more nervous without my husband along, or if it was just me... and not the bees...

But I only had the one box. I had an empty box above, to keep a zip-loc bag of sugar syrup with holes in it. The feeder box had been leaking, so we'd taken it off, cleaned it out, dried it, and resealed it. but it was still drying, and I thought I needed to see what was going on.

I didn't really think things through, and just lifted one of the middle frames first.  Something gave and then broke, and I was holding a frame with a lot of bees on it. I looked at both sides, and definitely saw honey and deep gold pockets all through the comb, a lot of the center was capped, but the edges were open, and when I looked closely, I couldn't see anything in the cups that I could recognize.

Then I was horrified to find that the next frame over was doubled up on comb! They'd actually attached a whole extra sheet of comb to one side of the frame, so I had absolutely no means of looking under it to see the bees that were hidden in the pocket between!  I was so flummoxed by this that I had to stop and breathe for a bit. I broke off one of the pieces experimentally, and the bees got pretty angry with that, no duh, because I was breaking their home.

So I put it back, very slowly, as the bigger mass of comb meant that the frame was too big to fit into its usual slot, and a whole cascade of workers was pushed onto the top of the next frame! I was upset about that, too, and just decided to stop there and close things ups. I hadn't found specifics of her being there or not being there, and it really made me kind of obsessed for the next week, as I didn't want to bother them again. We did feed them, did fix the feeder and get plenty of straight syrup to them, but I didn't dare go in for another week plus...

Afterwards I did this research:

• Studied a number of YouTube videos showing brood cells and their difference from honey cells.
• Realized that most inspections are done on sunny, calm days, in the middle of the day.
• Figured out that I should pull out one of the completely empty side frames, first.
• Realized that I really needed to try out the smoker instead of just the sugar syrup spray.
• Realized it would be easier with my husband as moral support, because emotional support really helped with the adrenaline rush and the tunnel vision effects while I'm still very new to this.
• Looked up the development stages of the larvae and realized that I REALLY had to give the queen more time before I looked for capped brood, as it would be at least eight days until they'd be developed enough to cap. 
• Counted the days from the release to figure out what to look for when.
• Had another beginner beekeeper open a 'messed up hive' with comb being built so that it connected two frames! Eek. But learned from him that none of the experienced keeps had any specific advise to offer him, other than to make sure that the frames of any supers were spaced correctly, 3/8ths of an inch between frames.
• Sat back and realized that the doubled comb was not THAT big a deal. It was all right if I couldn't find the queen if I could find viable brood.