Powdered Sugar Really Works

This summer has been so hot I haven't been able to use the Formic Acid I wanted to use when I first saw mites on my girls.

I got a whole new colony this spring because the one from last year froze during a really brutally cold winter; and this one is far more gentle. Not quite as productive, but really friendly to work with, and they calm down very quickly.

But I saw mites in July, and I started dusting them all with powdered sugar every time I went in, and I even went into the hive a couple of extra times just to dust them and make sure they got a good coating with the stuff, and my mite counts have actually gone down.  Right when they were rocketing up on the colony that died of them.

So I'm convinced it's an effective treatment, never mind the study and the hundreds of hives they did in the study that said the same thing... *laughs* I'm actually seeing it work with my own two eyes and it's amazing to not find deformed young bees in the deeps, to not see any mites on the field workers throughout the supers, and to find the mite drops on my sticky board at the bottom of the hive go *down* significantly over the summer.

So simple and so harmless.  Not that easy to do, as it requires going in a lot more often, and that's actually been good for my beekeeping skills, just doing it more makes it easier to do.

I also pulled two medium supers of capped frames today.  All full up and ready to go for when my brother-in-law and his wife get here to help with spinning the honey.

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.

Saying Goodbye to the Bee Girls

As posted on ursulav's livejournal:

“Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt – marvelous error!–
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures.”

—  Antonio Machado

I went out last weekend, in the sunshine, to find a cloud of active, healthy bees around my hive. John and I were happy for a moment, thinking that they were actually orienting bees, and the mite treatment had worked, but it turned out that it was a healthy colony robbing out the last dregs of my poor hive...

They killed off the very last bees in my hive, and were taking all the honey that they could take, which is actually kind of good for them, as it'll help them survive this fall, and the winter. The poor last spots of brood were dead or dying from lack of care, and it was just all pretty much gone.

A failure, truly, and I think I have a little more of an idea as to what went on. The mites were taking over badly, and the cold weather after I'd taken off the last super really didn't allow for there to be much nectar around. There was honey in the brood chambers, so they shouldn't have just starved, but the cold probably made it hard for them to get around, and there was no pollen to be had. Maybe if I'd put pollen patties on? I dunno, as some people really advise against it because it seems to signal spring to some brood, but it would have been what they needed when they needed it. Plus, I'd seen pesticide die off on the front step, so some of the girls had gotten into something they really shouldn't have.

It would have been better if I'd been able to treat them with mite treatment when I actually had ordered the stuff, 2-day postage, but they were unable to fulfill the order for nearly three weeks. So I was stuck and then the weather went freezing for another three days before I could go in. Better yet was if I'd gotten the Mite Away and actually applied it in July when I saw mite drop. Next time. Next time...

Honey from my failures...

Anyway... John and I pulled all the boxes that night, except for the lowest brood box that had half a dozen tiny native bees who were living on the honey and wax that night. They left in the morning, and I got everything into the garage. We just dumped all the foundation with pollen and the spotty dead brood, in case there was pesticide in the pollen, and cleaned off all the frames, and the remaining eight drawn comb full height foundation frames I've been rotating through our deep freeze to kill of wax moths, and then store, sealed in bags, in the garage for the next time I actually get bees.

Tim Brod is a local bee breeder, and he supplies queens, not so much workers, but it might be fun to buy from him next time, instead of from California.  Someone kept saying that I should find a wild hive and claim it for my own, but I'm not going to bother native bees that are comfortable in their own habitat. A swarm? Maybe. But not an established colony.

In any case, I now have the winter off as a beekeeper, and the surprising thing is that while I have mourned the girls, and burned offerings in their memory. I loved having them a lot, but it's also something of a relief not to have to worry about them anymore... when there's a cold snap, I don't have to wonder how it's affecting them, and when it gets hot, I don't have to worry about how much ventilation they're getting.

Anyway... I was very glad I had them while I had them, and grateful to them for all they did for me and taught me. And I promise that if/when I get another colony, I'll start posting here again. Thanks for reading...

Drat...

Went in today to put the MiteAway strips on the top bars of the bottom of the two brood boxes. I also took the feeder off and wanted to put the super back on with the emptied frames so that the the bees could take the leftover honey off of them.

And when I opened it up, I found very very few bees in the box. The top box was practically empty. The honey in the feeder was about half gone, and while there were a few bees up there, there weren't that many. It was a shock given how many bees there were earlier this month.

Nearly all the bees in the bottom box were between three frames on the southwest side of the bottom brood box. There weren't that many of them, but they all looked healthy, and while some had mites on them, there weren't any of the crippled wingless ones. There were bees going in and coming out of the hive, at a pretty good rate, which is partially why I was so surprised to find so few bees in the box.

When I removed the sticky board on the bottom, there was a lot of wax flakes, a lot of bee heads, and a couple of hive beetles (sighs). That isn't good, either. I suspect that the really strong wasp and hornet nests nearby took their toll on the girls, as the wasps pretty much bite their heads off.

I'd been seeing some sign of pesticide die off, as nearly every morning there were a handful of the girls on their backs, feebly waving their legs in the air on the entrance board. On cold mornings there were a lot more dead than on relatively warm mornings. I wonder if they'd brought back some poisoned pollen? I don't know.

The boxes were also pretty heavy, still, so there was honey in the frames the bees had.  A number of the local keepers have experienced starving because August and September were far colder and rainier than the local flora is used to having, so they haven't been producing as much nectar. So they've been feeding at a pretty good clip. So they weren't dying off simply because I wasn't good about feeding them... there's just something else going on, and I'm kind of sad to see it.

I left the open mesh bottom board on because of the mites, to get rid of them, but maybe the ventilation is too much and it was too cold for them? Anyway, there seem to be a myriad of possible reasons, and no real way of sorting them all out.  So I just put the strips on for the ladies that were left, and if I get their mite problem taken care of, and reduce them to a single, well-honeyed brood box, it might give them a little more of a chance. But this winter really looks like it's going to be a harsh one, so I don't give them much of a chance with such small numbers before even getting into winter.

It's kind of a shock, but it's also kind of to be expected, as the local keepers have been writing, lately on our email list, about what a horrible end to the season it's been. The losses are huge already, and the mite loads have been crazy. Plus, the feeding/lack of flow problem, and a lot of keepers are already losing a lot of colonies. One lady even found an abandoned apiary that she was asking for help to clean out... so it's kind of sad all around.

Record Keeping

Mostly to say that today I treated the hive again with powdered sugar, as I'm still waiting on the beekeeping supply place to ship my mite control strips. *sighs*

I also put all the uncapped honey into the sugar syrup feeder I usually put on near this time of the year, and fed it back to the colony. I don't make mead, I don't really use honey quickly enough to use all the uncapped stuff I got out of the super, but I had to take the super off in order for the colony to fill its brood box. This way the girls will still get the benefit of their labor. It was actually pretty close to the density of honey, so I don't feel like it's feeding them something watered down that will bring on dysentery. And it was nearly five pounds of the stuff, so it'll just help them that much more for the winter.

Also pulling and replacing the sticky board which has a pretty large number of mites, so any treatment won't hurt.

Oh! And I got another half a gallon from the very last harvest. I wasn't expecting much, so it was nice to just see what I could get.

Final Harvest

On Saturday I went in and took the last eight super frames, I think the theory is that if the beekeeper takes all the supers off by the end of summer, the bees will still have the time, through the fall, to put in honey supplies in all the brood chambers. Two frames weren't built at all, four were half-built and half-filled and uncapped, and then the last two were completely full and capped. So the last two are the only ones I can jar to sell, the others might not be dehydrated enough for common consumption.

The local keepers say to use it for mead, and I may well do that as my husband's a brewer.

I also saw my first mite-damaged bee that had been in larval stage with the mite larva, i.e. her wings were stunted and she couldn't fly. I did another powdered sugar treatment, and changed out the sticky board. There's a LOT of mites on the board, so I've invested in some of the Mite Away formic acid strips for when the weather finally goes under 70 for a week at a time. It's time to bring out the chemical means to deal with the mites. They're just so thick on the poor girls now it was making me a little unhappy.

Still... about 60 pounds of honey from one hive for a year is really good. I've now given my yearly gifts to the neighbors that directly deal with the girls, and I'm starting to sell the honey to the rest of the neighborhood and my church. Mostly just through personal connections, since I don't process in a commercial kitchen. I think that's one reason why I'll never go beyond just the one hive, as I really don't want to get a license and have to do all the things a business would have to do. Honey for my friends and family is plenty.

I've also been using the diluted honey for brewing ginger ale, just soda pop, no alcoholic content. I simmer the ginger with a lemon and its juice as well as honey and sugar. Then I take the resultant tisane and water it down to make a gallon and add an 1/8 tsp of plain old bakers' yeast (actually instant yeast so I don't have to be careful rehydrating it). Then I give it a little time to dissolve the yeast, shake it up, bottle it, cap the bottles and wait a day or two and then I have highly carbonated ginger ale that isn't all that sweet, as the yeast has eaten most of the sugars, but it had the flowery hint from the honey over the bite of real ginger.

We've been bottling our own root beer too, with the same yeast, and there's something about the brew that slows down the yeast, so it takes three or four days before the root beer's ready, and only a day or two for the ginger ale. But hey, cheap, all-natural soda pop is fun. *grins*

In case anyone's interested in the recipe: 2 1/2 ounces coarsely grated ginger, 2/3 cup honey, 2 cups sugar, one lemon squeezed of its juice, and about 2 quarts of water. Put all that together in a pot (including the two lemon peel halves), and bring to a boil. Turn down the heat, let simmer for about 25 minutes, and then turn off the heat, cover and let cool for at least an hour. Pour through a sieve and a funnel into a gallon jug, add water to fill to a gallon and alternate cold and hot tap water to make the resultant liquid 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Add 1/8 tsp instant yeast (not regular dried yeast or live cake yeast, if you use the regular dried yeast, give it 10 minutes in a cup of warm sugared water first before tossing it in), cap the jug, shake a few times. Then bottle it and cap it, and put it out in the garage in the summer/in a warm area for a day or two and then test to see if the carbonation suits you. Makes 10 12 oz bottles and 1 8 ounce bottle.

Another Two Gallons

The girls have been very productive, indeed... and I've been kind of remiss about actually recording everything.

In July, on the 25th, I actually pulled four frames, or one and a quarter gallons of honey, from the bottom of the two supers I had on the hive, and I swapped the positions of the supers, so that they'd work on the "lower" and half-full super before they worked on the upper one. John and I scraped clean the four frames, and the next morning I put them all back in to let the bees clean them off.

Then, this month, on August 12th, I pulled the other four frames from the upper super, and found out that they'd half built and filled one of the empties I'd put in in July. The super that was now on the bottom was about three-quarters full. So I pulled three full frames out of that, and left the five half-filled ones, putting the half-built frame from the upper into the lower, and added the two frames that were still empty from the upper super.

Then I took the upper super completely off the hive, to help the colony compact a little before fall. I'm going to have to have all the supers off before winter and before I do my mite treatment, so it's better to get them used to a little smaller space. But I also wanted to shuffle through the frames as we emptied them to allow the bees to clean all the honey off of them.

It took us two days to get the first three frames cleaned off, and by then, the girls had actually built comb up on one of the 'empty' frames. They'd also completely filled the top super with bees, who were busily building and filling! Agh. I pulled that frame out, put it by the entrance to let the bees empty it of the uncapped honey, and I managed to shuffle in the three empty frames, and then after taking a night off to Estes Park, we came back and I shuffled in two more of the empty frames. Tonight we're finally emptying the last two, and I hope to get those in tomorrow, along with the wax built one, hopefully for the other one that was in there from yesterday, but it's been a little crazy going in every day. They don't seem to mind that much so long as I don't leave the hive open too long.

And it looks like two more gallons of honey.

I also saw some hornets and wasps stealing honey and trying to rob the hive, but the girls were having none of that. I've left a lot of things open for ventilation for the summer, but with the nights getting longer and cooler, I'm probably going to remove the summer shims from the inner cover and put in my usual winter popsicle sticks that just allow ventilation and no actual insects through. The girls have taken to lining the inside of the outer cover and completely covering the bottom of the inside cover with bees just to defend those slots. So I'm going to close those up tomorrow. I think that, also, the two brood boxes aren't quite meeting, but I also have a single knothole in the back of the hive that the girls have been using as a second entrance for the last two years.

I had a lot of fun just squashing wasps and hornets when they touched down on the honey in my empties tray and as soon as I could ID 'em, I'd squash 'em.

Anyway... that's more than four gallons of honey this year, or something like 50 pounds already. That's a LOT of honey. I got 40 all together last year. So the "common knowledge" that a colony usually does better its second year is already true for this one.

A Surprise Harvest

I pulled my sticky board from the screened bottom board and found that there were a pretty good number of mites stuck to it, so I knew I wanted to treat the girls with more of the powdered sugar. (You can see them in the close up of the corners, they're pretty thick). I'll probably stick to that for most of the summer, and after all the honey supers come off, I'll probably treat with a miticide in the late fall.

Still, the girls were going strong, and I wanted to see where they were. Also, the top of my two deep brood boxes was filled with old frames that had wood that was starting to come apart. So I wanted to swap out some of the old frames for new ones and move the frames with brood still in them more to the edge so that I could, eventually, take them out, too. A long, slow process, but I figured I'd start by pulling one of the honey-filled frames in that box and substitute in a new frame.

I also wanted to see how they were doing with the new super, how far they'd gotten. The last time I'd looked, they'd only started building comb in the box. I had had a queen excluder between the brood box and the supers, but I pulled it out in impatience during the last inspection, as last year the queen hadn't left the established brood chamber at all, so I hoped that she wouldn't this year either.

I was well rewarded with my hope.

This is the top of the super, right as I went in. If you look closely, you can see that the tops of five of the eight central frames are *capped* honeycomb, i.e. the bees had filled them, dried them enough so that they can't spoil, and then capped them. Capped honey is always dense enough to last on its own. The surprising thing, for me, was that this whole box was empty at the end of May, so in just a little over three weeks, they've more than half filled this box!!

I was pretty amazed. Last year, when the bees first came and were establishing themselves, they had managed to fill three-quarters of one brood box by this time, and there wasn't even the thought of supers or honey that I could harvest at the this point, but it was pretty clear that they were doing really well right now. One of the keepers on the local email lists had said that the local yellow clover was going crazy with the unusually damp spring, so that we should all expect a lot of nectar flow. I still hadn't quite expected *this*.

I still took off the top box, and found that even a medium, eight-frame super is pretty heavy when it's nearly full. The deep box, when full, was impossible for me to move, but I found that this was actually quite doable! I was happy with my choice to go to medium supers instead of using the old deeps. I then went into the brood box to take one of the old frames out, so that I could replace it with a new one. I should probably have moved the damaged one to the edge. Usually the queen doesn't lay in the edge frames, but the baby bees would have the time and support needed to hatch out. Then I could have removed *that* one.

I'll probably do the shift the next time I go into the brood box, but it's good to just get the frame in. A local keeper had just done a study where he found that the keepers that just left all the old brood comb and frames in the box were less likely to have a die off than those that regularly circulated out old frames. It was a correlation, not causation, so he doesn't know why the die offs were less with old comb. Just that those with those tendencies had those results. So I'm unlikely to switch out a lot. And thinking it through some more I probably should have just worked to swap out the broken frame. Next time...

Still... this time I stole a bit more honey, and hopefully made a bit more room for the bees to fill in the brood box. They don't seem in any more of a situation where they will swarm, so this should just help that.

Next, to treat for the mites, I sprinkled sifted powdered sugar on top of the brood box's top bars. I aimed for between the bars, but of course missed some. There was a pretty good study that when the brood box bees are sprinkled with powdered sugar that they'll clean each other off. And when they clean each other off, they'll pick the mites off each other, and the fall of mites through a screened bottom board onto a sticky board is much much higher than when the hive isn't powdered.

It's also kind of fun to see all the powdered "ghost" bees zooming around, though it does kind of perturb the poor girls. I do see a much higher mite count on the bottom board when I do this than when I don't, which probably just means that they're pulling more mites off each other and themselves when I do this. I'm supposed to do it on a weekly basis to really do a good job of it, but I just don't manage to get into the hive that often. Things are so busy during the summer. But I am happy that I remembered to do it while I did have the brood box open. There have been times when I've had the sugar all ready for it and I just totally forget in the midst of the adrenaline rush of having the hive open.

I will admit that with practice the adrenaline rush is getting easier to handle. I'm now able to observe while I have the hive open, when at the beginning, it was just so overwhelming. Now I know better what to do, what to expect, how to do it, and how to keep the girls from getting crushed or not worrying too much when two or three of them do get damaged. So I'm not quite as exhausted by the time I'm done doing the work that I outlined for myself. I'm still impressed by the super experienced keeps who can go through eight hives at a shot when they're in a beeyard. Practice really does make perfect.

I did take two of the full frames from the super. I put two empty frames in from my second super, and left a gap in the brand new box. I did put the second super on top of the first, to give them even more room, and I left a gap of the two frames because, as John said, we were going to harvest them anyway and it would be relatively easy to pop them back in. John was great and took the lead in actually getting the honey out of the wax. We just do the scrape, smash, and filter process, and he did the work of it. We have a relatively wide mesh metal screen basket that works well enough to keep most of the wax out and he just mashed and mashed until there wasn't much left in the wax.

When he was done scraping the two frames, I put my equipment on and popped the two frames, still coated in honey, back into the top super. It should make it more attractive to the bees, and they may get going on building those up quickly with the incentive. The old empty frame I put next to the hive, and that night some creature dragged it away from the hive to try and eat it. But the plastic foundation foiled it and I let the girls clean it off the next day. Also the next day John put the pan of mashed wax out by the hive, so that the bees could eat some of the honey, but it was so hot out there that the whole pan just melted. One bee got caught, but that was it, and it cooled with the evening, so when I found it, the wax had solidified into a cake on top of a pool of pure honey. We poured that honey into another jar, and it's great. There are two jars from John's mashing that are pretty cloudy and I'm afraid he got more wax into them than I usually like having. We'll see how it settles, as the wax should come to the top. Eventually. *laughs*

For a beginning of the summer harvest, we got three quarts and another two-thirds of a pint, so about ten pounds of honey. Given than I'd gotten 40 pounds from this colony last year, I wouldn't be surprised if I got a lot more honey this year than last. But they also started a lot faster and were at great numbers even in March, so I'm just watching them very closely to make sure they have no reason to swarm.

Inspecting for a Queen

During the inspection I'd done on the 19th, I had half a dozen BIG larvae out of their comb in the middle of the area between the two deep brood boxes. I was worried that I'd just killed a bunch of queen larvae, but they were all together. It turns out that if the hive is making queens, they usually spread them around the box, half a dozen of them. And the only way I could tell if they were really doing that was by doing in and looking through the whole top box, which is where most of the new eggs and larvae now are.

I had one objective on the 19th, which was to get the screened bottom board in and give the hive the ventilation it needed. On the 20th, I wanted to do a complete inspection of the top box, and get some powdered sugar into the hive for the mites. Plus, on the 19th, one of the frames in the top box had the bottom bar break free of the frame, so I needed to wire it together so that it wouldn't fall apart.

When I finally got around to getting the frame out, balance on the edge of the box, and a wire around it, I found that I couldn't manipulate the wire except by taking a glove off. It was just too thin a wire, and there were too many manipulations I had to do very carefully for me to be able to do it any way but barehanded.

I was shaking pretty badly with that, but none of the girls bothered my hand at all. There were four of them bumping constantly at my veil and buzzing me continuously, but none of them bothered my hand at all. I was pretty impressed. I did get the wire around the frame and twisted together to hold. I was amazed at how hard that actually turned out to be, but I think it'll be all right. The bees can't get rid of the wire the way they can bite and chew and remove rubber bands (it still amazes me how quick they are to do that).

But the old deep frame are definitely coming apart.

The entire hive was just dripping with bees. So many bees that I couldn't even see everything that the comb was holding, but this particular blanket of bees was pretty smooth. Queen cells are bumps that are on the edges, usually, and by themselves, whereas the regular worker brood is more like this, just covered with nurse bees and the foragers who are bringing in pollen and nectar to feed all the babies.

I was amazed. The upper box had been much lighter than the lower box, but then again the lower box was more full of honey. If the upper was nearly entirely full of brood, it would be lighter than the liquid content of the honey boxes and frames.

There were some lumps and bumps, and sections that the girls had built when and where the neighboring frame was bare.

It allowed them to build the drone comb, where the cells are MUCH bigger than the worker comb, and they fill them with the male drones. The drones are very large, and they grow in packs like the big lump there in the middle. One of the strange things was realizing that there were no queen cells but a whole lot of drone clumps in all the edges and nooks and crannies that I hadn't really been able to see that much of. One of the really big chunks was right where those other poor larvae had fallen out when I'd pulled apart the boxes.

So there were drones, but all good, healthy hives are going to throw off a lot of drones this time of year. It's a way of sharing the hive's genetics, and it's a natural part of the bounty of the nectar flow. The good news was that I didn't see any queen cells at all. And I was able to drop a lot more powdered sugar on everyone. *laughs*

One of the strangest "growths" was this one, which was at the bottom corner of one of the frames. The facing frame was completely bare. This was made even more strange with the powdered sugar which I put on before I took the picture, by accident. But the fall of sugar makes it even odder yet.

Still, it really look like drone comb to me, just big cells all together instead of single Queen cells. So it looks like the hive isn't going to be swarming soon, and I'm trying to stay ahead of it by adding supers and making the hive bigger all the time.

Just a bit of summer ventilation

I went in today to add the screened bottom board with sticky paper to see what the mite count is like. I wanted to get some powdered sugar in there as I could see that the girls were cleaning themselves off on the entrance board, and I also wanted to see how they were doing with the super. AND I didn't have my husband's usual help as he was busy all day.

So I got everything ready, suited up, got my weather cover off by hand, lit the smoker, and went in. It was relatively simple to just get the boxes off, moved onto surfaces that could catch a queen if she happened to drop, and I found drones everywhere. Tis the seasons for the boys to get out, I suppose, but they were so big and I haven't been good at spotting the queen and I was just wondering if any of them were her, especially once I got down to the bottom board, had all the workers who were trying to come in backed up and buzzing me, and one of the drones took off from the bottom board and dropped into one of my basement window wells. Agh.

Anyway... I also had problems remembering how everything went with the bottom board and the screened board. One of those utterly newbie mistakes where I just forgot how the damned thing went together, and spent five minutes trying to keep bees off all the pieces and puzzle-solve it while all the bees were gathering in a bigger and bigger cloud.

Of course I also found three huge larva, naked, between the bottom brood box and the top brood box. At first, I panicked, thinking that they were exposed queen larvae... and that the hive is thinking about swarming! Eeek... but they were all in a bunch and there wasn't protective walls around them. I suspect that they were actually just more drones.

They were also going through the queen excluder to the supers and building comb in the super I'd placed a month ago. The top brood chamber isn't completely full, either, and I started to do a frame by frame inspection of the top box, but one of the old frames fell apart on me, the bottom bar just pulled free, with the nail right through it. I'm probably going to have to wire that one back together again eventually.

I think I was a little unnerved by just how MANY bees there are this spring compared even to last summer. There are just so many more of them!

I finally just decided to put everything back together, with the extra ventilation shims at the top of the hive, and the extra height bars for the front entrance, so that they have a bigger landing pad. It's hard to balance those things with gloved hands, but it was pretty clear that they were trying pretty hard to sting me when I found one of the girls hanging by her stinger in my deerskin glove. She didn't get through, though, so I'm going to have to go get my bee venom shot in a week or two. *laughs*

My goals were to just give the whole hive more ventilation and put the screened board in, and do a powdered sugar sprinkle. I got the powdered sugar into the brood boxes and we'll see how that goes in a few days. They clean the sugar off themselves and in the process clean off the Varroa mites. I haven't seen evidence of any other problems, yet, and I'm hoping that that'll be enough for this summer at least.

I did what I intended, but the possibility of the colony actually swarming really threw me. I wasn't expecting that, and I know that a second year queen is always stronger than the first year she starts to lay. I had added the super to make sure they had room, and they haven't actually filled all of the top brood box yet, either, so... there may actually be plenty of space. It's all such a puzzle, and I need to keep ahead of them to accommodate their needs. I'd rather not split them unless I have to... which probably means I need to really go in and do another frame-by-frame check to see if there are queen cells anywhere.

Probably in the next day or two. Sadly, since John wasn't here, I wasn't able to get any pictures of anything, and it would have been really useful to have pictures of the broken open larvae for ID purposes from experienced keepers.

First Full Inspection of the Spring

Had a really truly full day today, and I absolutely decided that I had to fit an inspection in today.

It started with breakfast with my son, then grocery shopping for an Easter party tomorrow that will have about six families who all decided to accept the invitation today. Then I had to get a bee block for a research project for individual wasps and bees by the University of Colorado, luckily the professor lives here in Longmont, so I didn't have to go into Boulder to get it. Then my husband, son, and I helped move furniture for the owner of one of the flooded houses. The house is mostly together, and a neighbor had been storing her furniture and needed to get rid of it. So we were there to put it all into place. Luckily, one other member of the church came to help us as there was some significantly heavy lifting.  Then I had an hour and a half saber lesson with the Denver Fencing Club, and my son and I both go to that, and I was exhausted by the end of it.

So, knowing I was tired, I sat down with my bee journal and a pen and wrote down exactly what it was I wanted to do with the inspection and what my decision points were. I needed to do the following:

1. Figure out if there were queen cells and/or drone cells to see if my very busy hive was preparing to swarm.
2. See what the honey situation in the hive was to figure out if I needed to supplement with sugar syrup.
3. To see what the population in the hive really was after wintering-over. And see if it was big enough to warrant a super already.
4. To remove the entrance restriction. Our neighborhood's fruit trees are blossoming now, all the dandelions are out, and so our flow is On and there was going to rain tonight and tomorrow. Plus, there was going to be a week of 60+ degree day weather and no freezes at night. So it seemed time to at least do that. But I know that here we can still have a snow or two before Mother's Day, so I didn't want to put the screened bottom board in, yet.
5. To remove a few frames of really badly formed comb so that I could do inspections without rolling so many bees. I knew, from last summer that two frames on the bottom box were badly deformed, and I'd deliberately moved that box to the bottom so that they'd eat it out first.
6. To see how the brood was doing and what the queen's laying pattern looked like just to assess how she was doing this spring. There have been at least half a dozen orienting flights since early March that I've seen, so I knew she was laying pretty well, but I still wanted to see how it was going.

I don't do a lot of inspections. I do them only when I have a reason to, unlike some beeks who say that they go in every week, no matter what, just to keep the bees used to them. But I also don't let them just do their own thing, I'm their beekeeper, and they do rely on me to manage things, especially things like space, mite control, and the size of their entrance. And I really, truly needed to know if they were going to need to be split. I wasn't prepared to do the split today, but I needed to know if I had to prepare for it.

And knowing I was tired meant that I had to plan all my moves and contingencies. Especially since I was kind of nervous about it as I haven't done a frame-by-frame inspection of the brood box since last fall. And if I had most of my decisions points plotted out beforehand, I could just do things and follow the decision points.

First good surprise was finding that the lower box was nearly completely full of bees. Last spring, I installed the package, and they mostly stayed in a tight ball in the center of the box together, and built out from there. Most of the wax, of course, is still from last year, but I hadn't expected nearly all of it to be full of either brood or honey!

I did the usual thing, for me at least, of taking the top box and putting it on the lid and then going into all of the bottom box, as that was the one that I was most concerned about with regards to the misshapen comb and the amount of honey that was left.

It was really full, though, so I had to be really careful about making sure that I could get one frame out and then start sliding the other frames over so that I could remove them without crushing anyone. Luckily, nearly every frame in this particular box was new, factory assembled, and solid enough that even when they were full of honey, they lifted out quite easily and the top staple held just fine.


You can see the sheer density of bees. They were up and down most of the frames. I was using smoke so I tried to keep them away from the edges so that I could get good hand holds on the frames and not drop them.

I was surprised to see not quite as many bridging comb as I thought there was going to be. I remembered the last time I went into this box that they had comb going from frame to frame in all kinds of crazy places. I think it was one way to get drone comb in when I hadn't put any drone foundation into it. But the three pieces of bridging comb I did see was all honey comb!!

I took a few of those pieces by smoking the bees off the protrusions, and then scraping them off with my hive tool. I learned from last year, when I scraped a piece off with the bees still on it. All the bees that were on it drowned in the honey. So I decided not to do that ever again.

Another cool surprise was seeing the sheer amount of brood comb now in this box. The last time I'd done a complete inspection of this particular box, the center frames had been half filled with brood and half filled with honey. They hadn't built all the way to the top.

As you can see in this picture, the brood is pretty solid where the bees haven't hatched out, yet, and when I looked into the cells with larva in them, they were all tightly packed together. So the queen is still doing her thing and doing it really well. There were at least two solid frames of brood already, and I was pretty amazed.

The top box had the last, dried remains of the bee patties. I cleaned them all off and tossed them into our compost. The bees were pretty solid through this box as well, though it was a much lighter box than the bottom one. I think they'd eaten out all the honey and brood's pretty light.

Still, there were a lot of girls up here, too, and the brood pattern was now just the lower half of the frames up here, but they were filling the rest with honey and bee bread. I was pretty impressed by all of that, and it seems that the girls feel like they have plenty of room, as I didn't see any queen cells.

That was one of my prime worries. I didn't want to lose a very strong colony to swarming when I'd done so much work to help them make it through an extremely cold winter.

One lady who sells honey at the Longmont Farmer's Market said that they lost 70% of their hives. So it's been a pretty rough year for the commercial keepers. She said that I was good and lucky to have been able to keep my hive alive. So I'll take that as having done something right with the way I do things.

Given the sheer numbers, I thought I'd put a medium super on with a queen excluder between the brood boxes and the super. It wouldn't hurt to give them more space to grow into, and just discourage the idea of swarming all the more.

I got tired of the gloves, too, as the ladies were very gentle with me, and so when I had to respace the top bars of the super to make sure they were set at the right space, I just took my gloves off and went at it.

It's interesting that in the spring, the girls seem to be more gentle, when I know that last fall, when I was taking honey, they were really upset with me and were actively attacking me and following me around the yard after I'd stolen so much. But today, even when I was scraping off the misshapen bits, they didn't seem to care at all. They were just too busy getting things going again to bother with me.

So it was a nice, successful inspection. I didn't see any signs of diseases. The brood looked all healthy, solid, and in good shape. There were a LOT of bees, and there seemed to be plenty of honey in the hive for them to eat, since they seemed to be able to make even more as there was new, uncapped honey in a good bit of the comb.

I am very grateful that they wintered well, and that they're doing so well.

Spring has Sprung

And the bees are going in and out with a bunch of pollen. They seem to be doing quite well, and eventhough they promised snow today, there wasn't any, and the girls were happily working away.

There were a lot of orienting flights every single warm day after two or three cold ones, so they're really building up quickly.

I really need to go in sometime and look at the frames that are there and replace the really misformed ones with clean bases again. There were a few frames where they'd hung two sheets of wax, and I was advised that they'd eat all the honey out of them over the winter, so that I could clean them out in the spring. I'm tempted to do it soon so that they'll also have more space in the hive and feel like they have to stay and keep building instead of swarming.

It was pretty funny today, though, as I just sat outside the entrance watching them come in with their pollen pellets. I saw some black flies at the front entrance. They were just there, and the bees were ignoring them, and finally they annoyed me enough that I started swatting them. The bee-girls didn't seem to take any more notice of me swatting the flies right on the entrance board than they had been taking notice of me without the violence I was doing to the flies. It's nice to know that my girls are quite tame.

Last Winter Feed

It was 70° today and yesterday. The girls have been tumbling over each other getting in and out of the most restrictive entry. They even shoved the bar over so that they could get in and out one side of it, and they're all carrying pollen. There's silver maple here than blooms early, and I saw the aspens blooming as well, but they're not bee-friendly.

So I went in, today, opened up the hive, put more of the feeding patties on, as I have plenty of them and the girls were gobbling them up, using them as brood food. There's enough sugar and corn syrup in them for me to know that they're not going to starve. There are a lot of bees in the box, and I'm going to have to watch to make sure that they don't swarm. I didn't take apart all the frames today, simply because it was cloudy and there was a wind blowing, and my snow cover is a pain to take off from over the hive and it's supposed to snow tomorrow.

I know. Colorado weather.

Anyway... I also decided to take out the entrance restriction and let the girls clean out the bottom of the hive, as they have a huge pile of shaved wax built up behind it. And in the process of trying to get that out, I hefted the two brood boxes, and they're heavy. That means that they still have a ton of honey left for themselves! So I'm unlikely to feed them sugar syrup this spring. Just let them take care of themselves.

They were very happy, and there are a lot of bees not just in there, but working hard to build up the colony to be ready for spring. I'm going to have to go in, some 60/70 degree day and really assess if there are drone cells and/or queen cells to really know if they're going to swarm, but I wasn't quite up to it today.

One really good thing, though, was that I had a bee venom shot last Monday, and it's two sting's worth of venom, and the area that got shot was only a little warm. No swelling, no massive itching, no long-term pain at all, especially compared to the ankle sting I'd had last summer. So the shots really are working well. I don't exactly want to test it with a live sting, but now I'm far more confident when I work the girls and there's so much less to be afraid of that it's amazing.