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...