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.

A Warm Break

It was warm today, nearly 60, and the side yard was sunny and bright. When I went out at 2pm I heard the hum that Jet calls 'the vacuum sound'. It's the usual sound of new bees orienting themselves!

After the other article about the fact that the bees are still rearing young in the winter, it wasn't as unexpected as it would have been before. But I was still pleasantly surprised to see the cloud of bees hovering in front of the hive. It made me put on my suit and veil and have John light up my smoker, because I was going to approach a living, active hive instead of the one that was very quiet and didn't have that many bees in December.

This is the box of patties that I was mailed. It's probably more than a single hive can use in a winter, given how slowly they're actually eating it. It's about 10 pounds of pollen substitute, sugar, and corn syrup cooked into slabs that can fit under the lid of the hive. The mix of proteins smells like brewer's yeast when I open up the bag, and it's supposed to be refrigerated, so I keep it in our 30 degree garage on the most part. When the weather warms and I start putting supers onto the boxes I can't have this stuff on the bars because the bees will try to pack some of it away.

So it'll probably go into the freezer at that point, and there's plenty for at least another year, even if I split the hive into two hives and have two in the spring. We'll see how it works out.

It's interesting thinking about what a bee probiotic really is, *laughs* I do love the advertising, though.

Here's what we saw when I pulled the top off the boxes. There's a lot more bees than there were in December. I was pretty impressed at how many were on the patties themselves and getting chunks off of it to feed on. There's a huge chunk out of the front patty and they're both pretty nibbled.

So I figured that they were definitely using the things. The only problem was that I couldn't move the original remains, as they were too soft from the warmth of the day! So I had to cut a new patty into strips to try and fit it into the spaces between.

I am glad that they're using them, so it means that they really needed the extras. The bees do keep a little pollen in what they call beebread, and they stuff some cells with the stuff, but here there's no flowers through the winter, so pollen's hard to come by. Therefore, these patties are supplementing the food needed to raise larvae.

When I raised the lid in December none of the bees were on the lid, and nearly none of them were in the upper chamber of the two boxes. So seeing this many bees on the lid was very cool. They were active, buzzing, and two or three were coming at me to defend the hive. The rest were just busy going about their business in the box and on the lid.

There were just a few bees using the front entrance at this point. The others had already oriented, and were gone back inside. The sun had gone to the west enough to leave the hive in shadow, so it was getting gradually chillier.

I had some problems putting the new patty on until I realized that the inner lid actually had a lip of about an inch and a half, not just the width of the rim of the boxes. I had to pull the new stuff back far enough so that the lid could go back on. It was pretty clear, though, that the bees were doing well, and that their numbers have already increased.

There were about a dozen bodies out the front entrance, and one lady was dead on the front edge of the landing board. That was interesting to see, she looked as if she were about to take off, but was so utterly still.

Here's a clearer look of the two eaten away patties. There's holes in the one to the left and the one on the right is carved away quite neatly. There's poke marks everywhere, so they're definitely taking away from them both. The new patty that I put half of on here was all shiny and smooth.

The girls were all pretty active, so I have good hopes for the coming year. It's definitely not looking like they're going to die out this winter, even if it gets cold again. After they survived two cold spells, they're now increasing their numbers, so it's looking good. The more of them there are, the more area they'll be able to incubate, and the more they'll increase. I just hope that I manage to figure out if I should split the hive in March before they decide to swarm.

What I Didn't Know About Winter Bees

Donald Studinski is one of the more outspoken beekeepers in the Colorado beekeeping associations. He's knowledgable, experienced, and very very opinionated about how he sees the world of beekeeping. I often enjoy his missives, and recently he came up with a really nice article about what really happens with bees during the winter: Deep Freeze, Honeybees, and You. The title is kind of funny, but it has some really intriguing details about what bees really do all winter and how they actually are raising young through the cold months.

We had a good eight inches of snow during the cold blast that froze most of the rest of the country, and in the following days it started to all melt and slide off the roof.

When I had the beehive on the window-wells of the basement, it was out of the arc of the fall of snow from the 2nd story roof on that side of the house (also the solar panels are up there, which is another story all together); but now that I moved it off the window wells, the hive is right in the path of the falling snow. So I had John put the cover up. It's just a huge sheet of particle board that's screwed to a couple of supporting posts.

The problem was that the bottom edge of the particle board, once the board was covered in snow, was right where the run off from the warping board fell onto the entrance of the hive!! Half a dozen of the girls drowned trying to get out of the hive while the melt was happening. Agh. When I discovered this, John and I went out, pulled the hive back the few inches it needed to keep the entrance out from under that edge, and I propped the back of the hive up a couple of inches (the width of a 2x4). Water ran out the front. Gah.

But it all dried within six hours of that, and the next day I saw dozens of the girls flying again. They'd dragged the bodies out of the hive. I saw one of the girls bodily picking up a carcass and flying away with it. About half a dozen are dumped just below the entrance, but most have been tidily cleaned up and taken away. So they're doing quite well, it seems, and I am supposed to have a 60 degree day in the next few days. I should be able to go in and see if they're eating the patties and using the proteins for their winter brood. I'll definitely take pictures then.

Survived First Sub-Zero Spell

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

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

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

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

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

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

I

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

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

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

Last Time In For A While

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

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

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

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

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