The Bee Barn

pollen packing

Those bees are not bees.

Turns out it's not a bee at all, but a hoverfly. Many types of insects were all over the Asters, also called the Michaelmas Daisy.

Our bees and those bees.

Late Summer, Hives Doing Fantastic!

Good news from yesterday's hive inspections: there is lots and LOTS of new BROOD in the new hive! That means our new queen hatched as predicted last week, got knocked up by some lucky now dead drone (or a few) and HUZZAH, baby bees are ON THEIR WAY! The mature bees are still holding up pretty well, they've busily cleaned up all those yucky dusty frames (kinda dark old wax) but they're working away on filling them in with honey and pollen stores, and of course, now brood! They wouldn't touch those plastic bases, so I replaced them with some wired real wax bases from Bob's Bee Supplies, and am going to swap out the feeder for a frame too. (Forgot to bring one from the old hive, need to get on that next week!) Heather had fed them several more times, so they've been getting the sugar water supplement for about a month, and they've got LOTS of capped honey that came over with them, so I think no more need for feed.

And the original hive (with the two-year-old queen) seems to be doing well too! Still isn't much honey in the super, very light to non-existent actually, but we only put the super on in July (I think) and they've had a lot of work to draw out all those new frames (and a few are even plastic but they're working on them anyway!) so I doubt we'll see much honey in there until late next summer. Will probably just take it off and pack it up in September if it's still fairly empty. There were also dozens and dozens of drones that were just sitting in the bottom of the super, it seemed like they were all too big to get through the queen excluder, and they were getting chased out by the workers if they tried going in the front door, so they were just hanging about. I guess it is getting to be that time of year when they're going to get the boot. But, anyway, queen is still laying, there is lots of new brood, and they've also cleaned up all the new frames that went in last month. Cleaned up a bit of burr comb and switched out the old plastic base in frame #2 of top brood box. Also, there are several frames of capped honey, in that top brood box, so I think we could safely take out two or three, depending on how well stocked the bottom box. Will discuss with everyone end of September, esp. if this great weather keeps up!

Hope Buzz had a great trip... See y'all soon! -=pj=-

New Queen Cells in Formation

Had to open up the new hive today, and lo and behold, at least 3 peanut shapes well into formation, they're growing their new queen! No longer is it the 'Sunshine' Hive, since unfortunately, the yellow box & base was part of a mix-up and needed to be returned to the Surrey Beekeeping Assoc.... so we moved them into yet another new box, with a spiffy side sliding base. Hopefully didn't disturb too much, I moved veeerrrrry slowly and used the new frame grabber tool to just ease them up and down. Hope also they're not confused by the color change. So far good traffic in sunshine reported, and on observation, not too many lost drifting back to the old hive. They completely finished off the first batch of syrup we gave them, so we fed another couple of cups of sugar water today. Counting the feeder as frame one, the queens are lined up along the 'front' bottom of frame 3. They've cleaned out most of the mess in the old (dark) comb of frames 7 & 8, while they're not touching the white plastic crap base in frames 9 & 10. I picked up some wire wax bases from the Bee Supply the other day, and would like to swap out that plastic in both the hives. May feed them one more time next week, but don't want to disturb them much now for about 3 weeks while we wait for the virgin queen to be born! New hive needs a name... any suggestions?

Making Increase

So, we attempted a split, hopefully this will make increase, and not threaten both hives. Took 3 frames of mixed capped/uncapped brood (w/honey on the outside edges) and LOTS of bees (incl. LOTS of drones :( also added into the new hive two frames of capped honey.

There were only a couple more frames of fully drawn out capped honey in the brood chambers of the orig. and none of the single super's frames are filled and capped yet, they're still working on drawing out most of those wireframed bases. (Not sure what happened to the emptied, drawn out supers from last summer... did the wee beasties get into those?) Anyway, left the bottom brood box as is (looked thru every frame and *still* couldn't find the queen, but I triple checked the 5 frames that went to the new hive and didn't see her there.) On the upper brood box, I swapped in 5 new frames, at locations 1, 4, 5, 6, & 7 (one or two plastic un-drawn (1&4, i believe), one nicely drawn out, fairly new comb(5 i think), and two were ugly dark older drawnout comb that needed cleaning -- all these new dadant frames were part of the package of 6 boxes, 3 lids & base I picked up from a Langley beekeeper last week.)

The new hive (thanks Buzz for the quick construction of a bottom board!) was installed in the backyard of Heather & Ian over by the school. There was a lot of angry buzzing, but they settled down fairly quickly and most all marched in. Fed them a 1:1 sugar syrup in the inside feeder (w/a couple of twigs tossed in for them to climb on to drink so hopefully no drownings.)

In the initial hunt for the queen, I didn't want to smoke them, and I got tagged twice on the hand. I should have taken out the first stinger much quicker, but waited 'till I got out and found scissors and scrapped it. Now a day later, am still severely swollen in the hand and have next to no muscle strength in my right hand. I see from the interwebs that quick is more important than neat in getting out the stinger, so we shall know for next time... don't drop the hive tool, use it to scrape out the stinger RIGHT AWAY. extreme pain! Hope Buzz' swelling has gone down, I think we sufficiently pissed them off, that he got tagged a couple of times too!

Now we shall wait and see what happens... hopefully the new yellow 'sunshine' hive will start to grow it's own queen this week... and the weather'll be great right into the late fall!

best,
-=pj=-

A Late Summer Split?!

Last week when we went in to check the hive was overflowing with bees! The weather has finally really warmed up and the blackberry flowers have been going full tilt for weeks, and now almost all turned to little green berries. Only one super has been on (for about 3 or 4 weeks now) and it is filling up, but not full by any means. It was a late spring, and all the berries were a few weeks later than last year, but still not nearly as much honey as last year. Could have been because of the preponderance of drones we noted last month. That situation seems to have stabilized, and the drone population, tho still high, seems to again be (happily) far outnumbered by the workin' girls.

Now, it might prove to be too late in the season to attempt a split but we are concerned about a swarm from an egg-bound queen, so we are going to attempt a "takeaway split" tomorrow, and hopefully we will find a nice queen cell already begun being drawn out for the new hive.

More notes (and pictures) to follow after the move!

-=pj=-

Bee News

In the last couple weeks the weather has warmed up to give us some remarkably hot sunny days.
On june 25 there was so much activity at the hive, I decided to put a super on just in case they needed some storage room. I had previously gotten all the burr/wax off of the excluder  so I put it on under the super. The top deep box wasn't totally full, but I thought it would be ok to put a little more room on top anyway.

Today I just took the lid off and peeked into the top, because I was dying to know if they had put  any honey in there. There was only one frame (track side #1, the white plastic one) about half full of honey. Otherwise, not much going on in the super, except for one frame w/ foundation had been drawn out a little in the middle.
Looking down through to the deep box beneath, it was wall to wall bees, I mean really full -and they seem to have managed to put back a lot of the wax/burr I had labored to remove from the excluder.

About the drones: I am wondering if there are a lot of drones because I put starter strips intosome of the frames in the blue brood box. There wasnt enough foundation to go around so I cut a sheet into 2 -3 inch strips and put them in the last couple frames when I realized I was running out. I have read mention of  people using starter strips having an issue with bees making bigger sized cells resulting in drones - but im pretty sure I put those starter strip frames in the outsides of the box. I foolishly didnt note anything down about that at the time.

I tried to be as unobtrusive as possible today so that it wouldn't be a problem to do a more thorough inspection in a couple days. If there is still a frame with a lot of drone cells maybe it could be removed and replaced with some fresh foundation? Anyway, im sure the queen is still laying just fine because the worker population has dramatically increased in the last little bit.

More later

Drones overtaking workers

Read this on another blog:

"[The hive] had far too many drones, and some spotty drone babies still hatching out. That’s a good sign that there is no queen in the hive, as the Queen is the only bee in the hive that has the ability to lay worker-bee -or Fertilized- eggs. The worker bees can lay unfertilized eggs that turn into drones. There are many reasons why a Queen could have died. She could have been squished by a clumsy beekeeper (gasp! Never!) or munched by a wasp, or she could have swarmed late in the year and the bees didn’t have enough time to raise another Queen before the cold wet weather comes."

I know we saw the queen a month ago, but missed her the last few times, and I wonder at the crazy high number of drones we saw today, it's really outta control, far too many.

will seek more info,
-=pj=-

A New Hive!!!

On friday june 10 we installed a nuc into our new top bar hive.

Glyphosate, Monsanto, and Bees

It will probably be glyphosate they spray on the train tracks, which is RoundUp.  Most things I read said that it probably was OK for the bees.  But even if it doesn't hurt the bees, Monsanto is evil.
http://forum.beemaster.com/index.php?topic=14353.0;wap2

On a happier note, here's one of our bees enjoying the cotone-aster.

 I saw at least 5 kinds of insects on this plant. Not sure what kind of bee this is.

Two kinds of bumblebees

Not sure what these last two are.

Brief Inspection

After some cloudy days and showers, yesterday and today are warm and sunny like summer is finally here. I was eager to see how much the bees had progressed since the last time we looked, when there were still only about 3 frames of bees. As soon as I opened the top I saw burr comb, partly filled with honey, and something else? I wasnt sure.

Comb on the tops of the frames

Comb on the inner cover.

I lifted out frame # 1 and # 10 just to see how the edges were looking. Frame #1 had honey storage on the inside, but the track side was empty. #10 still had nothing on it.

I removed the burr Comb to a pie plate and it can easily be seen (despite the blurriness of the pic, sorry) that the queen was laying there. "She must be low on room" I thought, and so put the other deep on top. the old comb in those frames is not very nice, but I thought it would be better than a short honey super.

Cool to see the bees enjoying the plants we have in the yard.

Forget-me-nots, such a common plant, but the bees really really like it.

Lonicera nitida 'Fertilis' also sometimes known as boxleaf honeysuckle. Same family as the regular honey suckle and very very strong sweet smelling. I have this shaped as a little shrub border for a perennial border. 

Lamium galeobdolon "Yellow Archangel" - yes this is an invasive plant - don't plant it unless you can contain in by mowing around it, or have lots of time on your hands to keep it from spreading. Hard to catch the bees on this one as they tuck themselves under each little blossom. I'm torn about this plant now that I know the bees like it. It sure is pretty, but this is the one that's becoming a problem all over for taking over native plants in our parks.

Hive Inspection

I opened the hive on Sunday May 1 to see how things were going and wish the workers well on May Day.
It was a lovely warm sunny day and bee traffic was moderate. There was still only about three frames worth of bees, but frame #4 had brood on both sides, a lot more that we had seen at the last inspection. I saw larve at all different stages/sizes of development, and cells with what I was sure were freshly laid eggs. I spent a while looking but couldn't find any bee that I really thought was the queen. I also looked for capped brood but I'm not sure what capped brood looks like. There were a number of capped cells that were very orange so I thought they must be stored pollen, and 2 areas I felt sure were capped honey. I didn't see any bees emerging from cells head first. It didnt seem like the overall population was up much from the last inspection, but the amount of brood observed makes me confident that numbers are growing.

Some sad news:
The cage with the NZ queen on top of the excluder had no survivors.
I am wondering if since the hive is relatively empty, maybe the bees didnt want to go through the excluder? I dont know why they didnt feed her, but when I lifted off the lid there were no bees anywhere near the queen cage. :(

Since Sunday there has been a mix of sun and rain. Weather Network says the week ahead will be rainy.

Happy News!

It seems the queen is ok after all, since uncapped brood was observed on thurs apr 21.

Sad News

Her Majesty the Queen seems to be gone. The colony is very small, at 3 frames (frames 2, 3 and 4 from the track side have bees, and only a few on #5) and no eggs or uncapped brood can be seen. there are no queen cells in evidence.
It looks bad for the colony. Pj says it can take weeks to establish a new queen to lay.

Happy Spring!

On Sunday Mar 20, the first day of spring, it was sunny and warm and the bees were flying. We saw them on the heather and I decided to look inside the hive and see what was up. It was just like the pictures in the beekeeping books: the bottom brood box was totally empty, and all the bees were in the top. They still have a lot of honey.
There were hundreds and hundreds of dead bees clogging up the screen bottom, so I took it all apart for spring cleaning. I was surprised to see so many dead bees in the bottom of the hive, after seeing all the ones thrown onto the porch all winter long, but there seem to be plenty of bees still alive and goin strong, so im not worried.

I switched the boxes so that the empty one was on top and the full one was on the bottom just like the book says to do. I didnt pull out more than a couple frames so i didnt observe any eggs or brood, just a lot of honey.

Right now it is sunny and beautiful and the bees are flying. I see them going into the hive with different colors of pollen, and everything looks normal from the outside. Next week the hive should perhaps be more carefully inspected, to check out the brood pattern, maybe look for the queen again. I feel confident she is in there doing fine, just because there seem to be a lot of bees, and they are acting normally.

Flying Bees and Honey

Jan 14

Thanks to some warm air from the south pacific, when the sun came out this afternoon the temperature reportedly shot up to a balmy 12 degrees. It was a lovely day for flying so the bees came out.
I thought, "I've got to open up the hive and look inside!" so I did. Sorry there are no pix but I will describe what I saw inside: bees and honey -lots of it!
I didn't take apart the whole hive, just pulled a couple frames out of the top box to peer inside. What I saw was frame after frame of capped honey. I was wondering how quickly they were eating up their stores during the recent cold snowy times that the thermometer dipped below 0. Today I am confident they have plenty till the flowers start opening.


And now a note about mead: I had meant to get you (PJ) some bottles for Christmas, but due to usual holiday madness and also a dose of personal lameness I never did. So they are still waiting for you, maybe I can send some with agent D to give you at the usual afternoon rendezvous, or we can coordinate something else.

edit: i almost forgot, thanx so much for that awesome bee related stuff! the honey pot is so great! 

Happy New Year!