Expectations

I'll admit that I'm as guilty as the next person with respect to building up a model of the world and having a hard time changing it when I find out that things are different than I believed. I really, truly believed that my bees couldn't make enough honey for another harvest, and that during the early September examination, that they'd only have partially filled the emptied super I'd put on and would need some help filling their brood box for the winter. Having lost my last colony to a bad mite infestation and very slow shipping on mite control substances, I was also convinced that I'd have to treat for mites.

I was entirely wrong on all points, and had to take half a day to process what I really found when I went into the hive.

I also kind of resisted going in, as I'd really wanted the bees to just keep all their honey for the winter and not have to deal with them again until they'd started to pack up for the cold; but it all kept nagging at me, as they'd been so quick to fill the supers the first time around. So to be responsible to them, I had to go in.

So I did.

On Monday, the 4th, I went in to see what there was to see. Despite all the smoke from the local forest fires, I decided to use smoke to calm the bees 'cause it's more effective than the sugar syrup spray; and by late summer, they're having to defend their hive from other bees and wasps constantly.  So they get really defensive and feisty when I go in, so it's better all around that I just use smoke and get them to go feed while I get things opened up to where I want to get.

I like applying the smoke and then letting them feed for a while before I go in and start opening things up. It gives me a chance to get everything ready and it gives them a chance to have some honey and fill their bellies so that they don't sting me. John and I actually sat and talked for a good hour over exactly what it was I was going to do, what it was that I needed to figure out, and what the further actions would be given what data I got.

And the first thing I find is that they've build honeycomb all the way onto the lid. It's a good way of keeping down drafts and robbers through the main body of the hive, keeping all incoming to the outside frames; however, when they stick the whole thing to the top, it's kind of a pain to get the lid off.

Sure enough, the girls had filled all the frames completely full, which was why they'd built above it all as well. All the way to the edge frames, too, which they normally leave only half filled, but with the spacing and everything, they'd filled all of them completely with capped honeycomb, which meant that the honey was completely finished and dried enough to store for nearly ever.

I moved both supers so that I could take a look into the brood chamber, too, as I needed to assess if they had varroa mites, which has been one of the leading causes of colony deaths. And the local Beekeepers' Association had a full out educational thing going on about how everyone could test for the mites by rolling the bees in powdered sugar. The powdered sugar dislodges the mites from the bees, and it has very little impact on the bees themselves, and with in 24 hours, the mites drop off and can be pulled out of the hive with a removable bottom board, which I have.

But that only happens when the bees have mites, and the idea is to put a cup of bees into a glass quart jar, pour powdered sugar on them, and then roll them in it.  Then shake all the sugar out with the mites and then release the bees, ghost white from sugar but still entirely alive and unharmed.  The mites fall off quickly, so you can get a count of them; and I could test how many were in there.


When I got down into the brood boxes and the frames down there, I found that the frames were completely filled with honey and pollen.  They had huge stores in there, and they were all full, too.  So that answered the question of if they'd already put away good stores for the winter...

And when I pulled the brood frame out, I shook bees into a glass jar and tested them for mites.  There wasn't a single dead mite.  And on the bottom board, I had only seen one mite all summer.  The usual level where you want to control the mites is if there's more than 2 mites per hundred bees.  To have absolutely none of them in the hive at all meant that the girls were doing great at avoiding infestation.

It was an unexpectedly good result to the test.  I was really expecting there to be some, and there just weren't any. And the chemical treatments that are commonly used are detrimental to the hive, if you think about it, it makes sense, as you're basically trying to kill a smaller bug riding on a bigger bug without harming the bigger bug too much, and it's a tricky thing to kill one without killing the other.

However... since the powdered sugar serves to a) loosen mites if there are any, b) have the girls clean the mites off each other if there are any with the powdered sugar coating, c) powdered sugar is something they can just eat and has no adverse affects on the bees themselves, and d) it's cheap and easy to apply: I decided to just go ahead an apply the stuff.

Then I put the supers back on, closed it all up and went and sat in the kitchen trying to figure out what to do next.  Most beekeepers at this time of year just have three responsibilities, get the supers off the hive and collect the honey, treat for mites if that's necessary, and make sure that the bees will have enough stores for the winter.

I had been assuming that I'd just leave all the honey for the girls for the winter, and that they'd need that.  But they obviously didn't. They'd filled everything to the brim already, and if anything, they had nothing to really do for the remaining month and a half before the first frost and the flowers went away. There were still plenty of flowers around, and these are domesticated bees, bred and made to create honey and wax that needs to be taken away for them to fulfill their commercial duties.

I also narrowed the front entrance so that the robber bees and wasps would have a harder time making it in, and I removed the shims from the top of the hive, so that there wouldn't be as easy an access to the insides.  It was a good thing, too, as the temps fell into the 40's that night, and closing it up made it easier for them to keep things warm inside.

So... it took me a few days, but on Thursday, we pulled the entire top super and two of the frames in the lower super, and we extracted all of them, and I put the two empty frames back into the lower super so that the girls would have something to do. The whole lower super was completely full of honey, too, so I was leaving them six full frames there along with the completely full deep.


We got a lot of honey.  We extracted everything and then put the empty super back onto the hive to let the girls clean up all the drips and the last bits in the emptied comb. I'll probably collect the emptied super on Saturday so that they have a day to clean it out.

So we had 2 1/2 gallons in the first harvest and probably another 3.25 gallons in the second.  And there's likely 3 left in the remaining super and another five to seven in the two deep brood boxes from the heft of those things.  So the bees will have plenty for the winter, and they have time, still, to refill the remaining two super frames in the super that I left them. I'm definitely going to leave them that for the winter and only collect that honey in the spring if it's still there.

That should allow me to not feed them over the winter and early spring; and should let them have plenty of the good enzymes and stuff in their honey that they can get.  And, worst case, I can probably just pour a quart or two of their honey into a feeder for them if they do need it by then.

One of the girls managed to get into the pants of my beekeeper suit when I was putting the super back onto the hive, and she stung me solidly. It hurt, but it didn't swell at all, so I have to say that the bee venom therapy I had through my allergy clinic worked really well.

But all in all, it was kind of weird to realize that these domesticated bugs really were created to make honey that needed to be taken from them for them to function correctly. That I had to go in and get all that and it was how they're made.  In order for me to shorten their hive enough so that they can keep it good and warm, I have to take at least one of the supers off before winter; but it felt weird when I really had initially decided that I was just going to leave them the honey they'd worked so hard to get.

Still, now, if I sell a lot of this, I will make up all the extra money I had to pay for the colony during the bee shortage; and with the extra money, I should be able to buy another super and frames for them and maybe also make sure I have solid mite treatments for next year. They've mostly already paid for the extractor and their own costs. That's been pretty amazing.

Making Room

The previous Wednesday I went to a little spin-in with four ladies and we dyed wool from the setup that the lady there had. But one of the other ladies was thinking about keeping bees as she’d inherited a top bar hive from a family that had simply neglected it, thinking that it was kinder to not bother the bees.

The bees had filled the hive, getting past a stopper that was supposed to keep them from the rest of the hive, and building on all the bars past that. And when they’d run out of space, they’d left. So I really wanted to make sure that my colony had plenty of space to build and store honey.

Opening Up for Summer

The weather has been finally getting really hot, in the mid to high 90's for a few days, and I knew that I had to get better ventilation into the hive for those weeks when it would be close to 100.  The hard part of it all is that I have to replace the bottom board to do so.

There might have been other ways? But I've did this both years when I had my last hive, and I liked having the bottom board be sealed when the colony was small and needed fewer entrances to defend.  It was obvious, from watching the bees coming in and out each day, that they had good numbers to defend themselves, now.  Plus, the girls might need more room, so I prepared a super with another eight frames for them to build on and fill that would fit above the deeps that I was leaving for them to keep full of honey, pollen, and brood.

Moving House

When we first set up the hive, it had to be away from the house because we were replacing the roof and the solar panels on the south side of the house had to come down before the roof could be put on.  So we put the hive on the North side of the yard, facing South to catch the sun in the entrance on most days.

But the entrance also faced the biggest part of our backyard lawn, and the flight path for the bees was right over the grassy area where all the kids would play if we had a party again in our backyard.  So we had to move the hive.

There is and old beekeeper's adage that says, "You can move a hive ten feet or ten miles."

 If the whole thing is moved ten miles from the start point, the bees have to just start over again. All the landmarks and landscape has completely changed, so the bees start out by reorienting themselves.  If the hive only moves ten feet, it's still within sight of the original site, so the bees can find it, no problem.

The real problem with not moving it a great distance but moving it out of direct sight of the old location is that the bees have in their little neural bundles all the memories of the neighborhood all pointing toward where their home used to be.  So they almost always go back to where the hive used to be instead of where the hive now is.  They just leave the hive in the morning and go directly to where it was when they come back.

And it's a lot more than ten feet across our yard... so I went to the internets to look things up and to see what other beekeepers had done.  The interesting thing was that I'd been going to a number of the Boulder County Beekeepers meetings back when I was first learning all of this, and I remembered a lady talking about putting branches across the entrance to simulate the idea that, perhaps, the hive had fallen with its tree to the ground and, therefore, had changed its location.

So that's what I did.  When all the girls were in the hive (but for a few that were hanging out on the front porch, which immediately went into the hive when John applied smoke to the entrance) after dark, John and I just stuck a board over the front entrance and we hefted the whole thing between us and walked the two boxes over the yard to where I wanted to put it.

None of the girls got mad, none of them popped out of the crack between the boxes. Nothing much happened other than getting it into its new location.  Then we put a bunch of Blue Spruce branches in front of the entrance (you can kind of see them in the picture) to block it so that the girls would have a harder time getting out and would take a look around when they did to see how things had changed.

I was kind of anxious about them.  And when a whole cloud of bees hung around the old site the whole next morning, I really had to fight down my disappointment and dread.  It was a sunny day, warm and without wind, so the lost girls would be all right.  The theory is that when they figure out that the hive isn't where they expect it to be, they start to circle further and further out until they find a hive, and then they'll do their best to join that one.  Given that my hive was probably the closest one from the old site, they should, theoretically, end up back where they were supposed to be.

I distracted myself for most of the day, and finally in the evening, I went back out to see how many had lost their way... and there were very few left at the old site.  Maybe a dozen or two... so I built a super full with frames, a cardboard top, and the summer screen bottom board, and I put it down where the old hive used to be.  All the bees immediately landed and marched inside.  When it was full dark, John and I went out, picked up the super and put it on top of the hive where it now sits.

This morning, there was a cloud of orienting bees in front of the hive where it now is.  They were all doing the orienting flight thing outside, and there were far fewer bees hovering by the old site.  It was working...

There was another beekeepers' site that said that it would take them three days to figure it out, but that they would figure it out.  It seems to be working.  I'm so glad. I'll probably put the rescue box back in the old spot again, tonight, just so that the ones that haven't found their way before dark have a safe place to be until tomorrow, when we'll try it again and move them back.  The site suggested that three days would be enough, and it seems like it's working.

So we should, eventually, be able to have parties in our backyard again.  Yay!!

First Inspection

We're leaving tomorrow for vacation, and for the last week, it's been on and off again rain.

I don't really like to go into the hive when it's raining, since the bees get grumpy about getting exposed to bad weather.  So I just held off for four days. I'd been hoping to do the inspection on Wednesday, but it wasn't good and sunny until Sunday morning.

So I skipped church, and went into the hive in mid-morning, when the sun was full on, and a lot of the field workers were out. I prepped with a sugar water spray bottle, my suit, and head gear, and just went right in.

They were all over the bottom box. Building all the way out into the outer frames. It was good to see.  I carefully lifted a center frame, and there wasn't that much weight to it. Not a lot of honey, but when I got it out and looked, more than half of both sides of it were capped brood. So the queen was busy and the workers were all over it, feeding the young. I could see larvae in the backs of the dark cells, pretty easily, and they looked like they were doing fine. The queen wasn't on that frame, so I put it in a box in the shade, and then started going through the other frames.

There was a ton of brood, not a lot of honey, but then they were probably using it quickly to get the newly hatched to grow and develop.  The pollen patties I had put into the box were getting used really quickly. That is all to the good, as the sooner there are more workers getting born, the sooner they will be able to get more nectar and get the hive to grow.

The interesting thing for me was that they'd built all the way to the outside frames already... and she was laying eggs all the way out to the outside frames. The workers were storing nectar and pollen throughout, and getting all the way to the outside frames.  So it was time to put on a second deep, already.  It makes sure that they feel like they have plenty of room, and the weather lately has been wet enough that the local flowers and grasses are going crazy.

So I put the box back together, went with John into the garage and the two of us put together another eight frames with foundation and put them into one of the boxes.  Then I opened things back up, rescued a worker that had gotten squished into the pollen patties, and she was fine. That was good.  I then put the second deep box on top of the first, and then added top back on and the telescoping lid.  The weather for the next ten days is going to be a mix of rain and sun. Not too hot and not too cold, so I left the medium opening in, and didn't worry too much about venting the top, yet. Time enough for that then the temps get up into the 90's.

One of the really encouraging things was finding that in the bottom box that the bees hadn't built any crazy wax structures.  I'd actually spaced the frames well enough that they hadn't found it necessary to bridge any gaps.  So after I placed the top box on the bottom one, I took my gloves off in order to re-gap them so that they were as even as I really wanted them.

I can only hope that they keep that up.

After they fill the second deep, I'll be able to add a queen excluder and the supers; but I'll give them the time and the space to do all the building that they want. It's been nearly four weeks since I put them in, and six weeks is when the first wave of the new bees should be coming out of the box. That will be soon after we're back from our trip, and I'm half hoping that I can move them away from the part of the yard with the play structure.

John had originally figured that we'd put the hive here because our roof had to get redone, and the solar panels that were living just above the old location for my hive.  So to keep the bees out of the workers' way, we'd put it where it is.  Moving them is going to be interesting as there's a saying that you can move a hive two feet or ten miles, because the bees orient around the location of their hive, and if it's moved just two feet, they can easily find it again, but if it's more than that, these tiny creature of utmost habit seem to have a really hard time.  They just go out and try to come back to where the hive used to be.

There are tricks to it.  So we'll be trying them when we get back and it's warm enough for the workers to survive even if they don't find the hive immediately.  I am going to have to get them to reorient when they go out of the hive, and do a little management of the ones that go back to the old site anyway for a day or two, I think.

In the meantime, though, they'll get to just stay in peace while we go off on our trip.

Queen Release

It paid off.

Putting the mini-marshmallow in instead of having to dig the cork out later. I did like I did last time, and waited three days to make sure they'd all settled in before I went into the hive in order to figure out if the Queen had made it out and if there were things I had to do in order to get the missing frame back in.

There were things I had to do, the girls were really busy.

The Girls are Back in Town

Murdoch's called last week to say that the bees would be in town on May 1st, and that I'd have 24 hours to pick them up. Then yesterday, Sunday, they called to say that people could pick them up Sunday afternoon/evening as well as Monday; but since I wasn't actually expecting them, I didn't get the message until today. And they said that we could pick them up until 5pm today.

So we went there a little before 2pm, as I had 911 all morning. It was kind of a rough set of incidents, including one with a suicidal father whom the dispatchers called directly to get him out of the house without weapons... that worked out; but it was odd to listen through.

But it was good to be with John and getting the girls.

They came in the standard wire box. When we went into the store to pick them up, the customer care guy told us that we had to go around back, as they didn't want people bringing their bees through the store itself. I kind of blinked at that, and I guess I understood, but at a gut level I was just laughing. Homeless bees are harmless, but people react badly to stinging insects, I guess.

So we went round back, and they had a few dozen of the wired cages in the back, with the lovely buzzing of warm bees. The weather had been freezing over the weekend, with snow and ice and all that, so yesterday they'd been a lot more quiescent, and the lady back there was saying that they were a lot more active with the warm weather. I got to pick my box, and I tried for the one where they were clumped up most closely to the queen. They'd definitely accepted her and were hanging near her to keep her warm, and there were fewer dead bodies at the bottom.

So I picked them up, took them to the back of our car, and we put them in a crate that would hold any droppings that happened, and we went and got Jet from school. *laughs*

As always, there were always a few bees hanging out on the outside of the cage, but they stayed there while we were in transet, as they had the last time I'd gotten them, so there was no worry about that. Jet got in at school and was cheerful enough about sitting in the back seat. They were back in the hatchback of the car, and there were no worries. He asked if he could help, but there really wasn't much for him to do.

John mostly kept me focussed on the checklist, what it was I had to do, and I knew the steps were pretty straightforward, i.e. take out the can, get the queen out, put a marshmallow in for the plug, and then get her into the hive. Pour all the workers on top, and then try and get a feeder onto it so that they would have something to eat. I also put the can into the hive, so that they would have that as a source of food as well. The hive was full of old comb, so I figured they'd have plenty to walk around on, there would be ready-made insulation, and old comb is attractive to bees.

It was easier the second time. A lot easier. I knew what to expect, and knew how docile the girls really would be. So when the can came out and they zoomed out of the box, it was easy for me to ignore the sounds and the little insect brushing and bouncing against my hands and all my gear. The can came out easily with the hive tool, and only a few of them clung to it, and they moved readily when I set the can down on the tops of the frames in the box.

I think they could smell the comb, so they dropped down into the rows quickly.

For some reason, the whole things was a lot more tightly secured than it had been the previous box I'd had. And the band holding the queen's cage into the box was more deeply inset into the wood. I had to really pry to get the tab to come up, but it was double folded and I had no problems holding onto it in order to work it free from the slot it had been put into. Having all the bees crawling all over my hands was really kind of cool. *laughs*

I know most people wouldn't say that, but I really loved it; and loved knowing that I wasn't going to react badly to it. I was very carefully suppressing any urge to swat or wave at the girls; and it was kind of fun knowing that I didn't have to in a way. I trusted them, and they rewarded the trust by not ever stinging me or making the move that was a prelude to a sting.

The tab was actually of such sharp metal that it cut into the wood, so I had to work it free at different angles.

When she came out, she came out with a lot of attendants. So many that I had to give the whole cluster a little shake to get them to drop into the hive. I always worry about damaging the queen when I do that, so I was really careful about it. And when I could finally get a good grasp on the cage and turn it around to actually look at her, she looked just fine.

She's really active, and it looked like she was really doing well in there.

Last time I'd just hung her in the hive and decided to worry about removing the plug later, and it had been kind of a pain to get it out the second time when the bees had already decided it was their home. So this time, instead, I dug the cork out to begin with, and I stuffed a mini marshmallow into the hole, like the instructions said to do. It kind of peels off the outsides and squishes into the hole really well and really stickly. *laughs*

The idea is to just keep the queen in the hive until everyone had decided that this is going to be their home. She usually sticks with the workers once they've established the hive, and they stick with her while she's stuck in the cage. And the idea is that she and her workers will eat at the candy plug until they can free her and clean her off. This way they release her eventually.

The other thing I did differently than last time was that this time I actually shook all the girls out onto thier home, rather than waiting patiently for them to figure it out by just sticking the wire box into the hive top. I thought about it, but decided not to, but I also did the second deep so that they could still keep the can of sugar syrup from the traveling case in the hive with them for the first couple of nights.

I may well remove that and the second deep if it gets too cold at night. They also have a feeder on top, with about a quart of simple syrup up there. I'll have to check it soon and probably refill it as soon as they're done with it. Though the spring here has been wet recently, so there should be plenty of bloom for them to forage off of. Still, it was snow, which can freeze off a lot of bloom. Still, the dandelions are popping everywhere, and there should be more stuff sooner rather than later.

They were everywhere, and there were one or two actually chasing me already. I'm not sure what that bodes? But they had the angry sound, which I was more used to in the deeper end of summer.

We actually have the box in a different part of the yard than where they'll end up staying; but we have people coming on Monday to put the solar panels back up on the roof. So we had to put the hive in a place that would be out of the way and keep the workers out of the flight path.

I loved being able to just stand in the cloud of bees, though, and they were doing fine with where they'd ended up. I made sure that the queen cage was facing out the right way, and the spacing looked right for what they had in there. They also all seemed to find good footing, and were happy to get into and onto all the comb that they could find and clean it all out. There had been some wax month damage on the waxed frames I'd kept from the end of the hive three years ago. There can't be mites and I'd frozen them, but then put them back out into the garage, and the wax months had found them again.

I put the feeder on top, then the top board, and finally the telescoping tin lid to keep everything else off. *laughs*

This time I had the snow brush to brush all the girls into the box before I placed anything anywhere. That was really good to have this time. *laughs* The things I learned from the mistakes of the previous time. I often think that if one is just lucky the first time, you don't get to learn what you actually did *right* the same way you get to learn what you did wrong from the mistakes of the previous time.

That seems to always be true, no matter the endeavour.

By the time I was done, they were already doing orienting flights from the front entrance. I have the restrictor on, at mid length, as the temps at night are still in the high 30's. Not super warm, but also not terribly cold. They should be able to defend this size entrance.

It was amazing how satisfying it was to just see happy, healthy bees orienting on the hive entrance.

I went and adjusted a few things, putting a deep box on the top instead of the medium one, and having to leave a crack between it and the feeder to begin with because so many of the girls were using the crack as an entrance at the start. I also put the shipping cage into the shade behind the hive.

When the sun started to go down behind some clouds, all the bees who were in the cage got into the hive, and fewer and fewer were wandering outside, and I finally just went over and closed the gap, with bare hands and no protective gear. With the gap closed, too, they were keeping more heat in the hive, which is important these first few nights.

I'm really grateful that ours didn't come two weeks ago, the way the Boulder Beekeepers' bees came. With the snow and temperatures in the 20's, I would have had a hard time worrying about them. As it is, now, while it's near freezing at night, I know they should be all right.

I Have Bought a New Colony

I have bought a new colony from, of all places, Murdoch's Ranch and Home Supply....

They had a poster right there on their shelves, with a web address that I could go to to just order them and they'd bring them to our store, which is only ten minutes from my house.  It was so darned convenient.  They're supposed to arrive at the end of this month.

I've cleaned up and setup a deep for them, with waxed frames from the old colony. I think it'll help them get setup.

I'll write more when I actually get them.