Spring: A Time of New Beginnings

On Thursday, April 5 with butterflies in my tummy, I drove to Madison County to pick up the new bees. The nucs were available to take home the previous Saturday but I was out of town. They had overwintered in southern Ohio and had been brought to my mentor in Plain City along with I don't know how many other nucs. The cardboard nucs are too confining to keep the girls inside for several days, so they had spent a few days flying about their very temporary home in suburban Plain City. Because I was coming for them Thursday, late Wednesday night they had been barricaded inside the nuc.

On this beautiful, clear spring day, I moved the nucs from the driveway into the trunk of my car. The nucs were surprisingly heavy, perhaps 10 pounds. They were full of bees or full of honey, or maybe full of bees and honey. There were a few hitchhikers on the outside of the vents so I was happy to have the nucs in my trunk and not inside my car. In addition to the circular vents there were medallions of small holes in both end panels. Bees create a lot of heat and enclosed in a box they could easily overheat. Back home in Worthington, when I opened the trunk I found the nuc on the right had more bees outside than the hitchhikers that were there when I closed the trunk in Madison County. I watched as the bees squeezed out of the holes in the cardboard. I could see that the holes were too small for the bees to escape but apparently the bees thought otherwise and I was amazed to see bee after bee emerge from the box. I decided to deal with that nuc last.

Now that my husband's office is five minutes from home, I talked him into coming home to help me with the logistics. I needed to move three nucs, each containing 5 deep frames, thousands of worker bees and a queen into my waiting 8-frame medium hives. Working through the logistics reminded me of one of those brain teasers about moving foxes, hens and corn across a river in a canoe in such a way that the foxes wouldn't each the hens and the hens wouldn't eat the corn.

A little background. When I bought my hives last year I decided to use all 8-frame medium hive boxes. Hive boxes come as shallows, mediums or deeps and hold eight or 10 frames. A deep hive box filled with bees and honey can weigh more than 50 pounds. Show me even one beekeeper who doesn't have a bad back! Schlepping 35 pound hive boxes seemed like a much better idea. BUT, the nucs' frames are deep so I knew they wouldn't fit in my medium boxes. My mentor made me wooden spacers to lift the bottom brood boxes so the deep frames would fit. I would fill out the box with my medium frames. I know that bees don't like empty spaces, so I expected they would fill the gaps with drone comb or other weird wax configurations. The beauty of having all mediums or all deeps is that all the equipment, including frames, is interchangeable. So much for that idea. At the last minute, I ordered deep hive boxes for my brood boxes, but they hadn't yet arrived. I needed to go with what I had.

My three hives were still as I had left them last fall. Two colonies were four boxes tall and one was three boxes tall. At the end of the installation, I would need each hive to be comprised of (starting from the bottom) a bottom screen, a wooden spacer, two hive boxes, an inner cover and a telescoping cover. I had to make room in the bottom boxes for the fully loaded frames from the nucs. I had more frames than I had boxes to put them and more boxes than I needed, for now. And I had three nucs full of bees that had been on lockdown for 15 hours. Let's call them potentially unhappy bees.

We staged everything, I was already suited up and I stoked my new electric smoker (thank you Harvey for a beekeeper's best present). I carried the first nuc of bees to Hive 3, former home of the cranky girls. The frames were all drawn out and full of brood and honey. And there were bees everywhere. I didn't take the time to look for eggs nor to try to find the queen. I just wanted to get those frames safely transferred! After moving the nuc frames there were plenty of bees still in the box so I shook it over the frames and prayed that the queen was in the hive box and that I hadn't accidentally crushed her. I stacked the next hive body, put on the two covers, left the open nuc in front of the hive for the lingerers and headed back across the meadow to my garage for the next nuc.

More escapees from the nuc on the right! I selected the nuc from the middle. The transfer went much the same. Harvey was watching from a distance since he was in banker's clothes and headed back to the office. He mentioned that I had a lot of bees on my suit.

Back in the garage, I studied the nuc with bees inside and out and tried to figure out how to lift it out of my trunk without crushing any bees and without holding any bees close to my body. The protective clothing is heavy twill, not kevlar. Now on my own, I opened the last nuc. These girls were making it very clear that they were mad as, well, hornets, that they had been closed up in that box for so long. I paid close attention to what I was doing and moved the last of the frames into Hive 1.

Back in the garage, a good number of bees (100+) had decided that my trunk felt like home. Every time I tried to sweep them out they flew back in. I left the trunk open and the garage doors open and hoped they'd figure out where their queen went.

I love my bees and am fascinated with them but I still find working with them to be stressful. If I didn't get those nasty reactions to the stings, I would probably be more relaxed. By the time I am finished doing whatever I need to do with all those flying stingers, I'm sweaty and pretty wiped out. Still in my bee suit, I tromped into the kitchen. That's when I heard the buzzing sound that meant I had a bee on my hood.

Beekeeping with a partner has its advantages. The advantage of the moment would have been for me to do a slow pirouette while someone else tells me if I have any bees on my suit BEFORE I go into the house. A really good partner would help brush the bees away. I decided to take off my hood and jacket outside on the deck. Here's what had come into the house with me!

I figure that's a little cluster of about 50 bees. I did remove three bees from the kitchen.

The deep hive boxes arrived Friday, one damaged. I'm still working on that and have not gotten motivated to tear down the current configuration to put the girls into the deeps. Since Thursday, I have been out to the hives several times a day. The bees are flying happily about. I have seen them in the meadow, hanging out with the dandelions. They are coming back to the hives laden with white and pale yellow pollen. This is all a good four to six weeks ahead of what we had last spring.

STING COUNT:

2012 0

2011 13

The Mystery of the Vanishing Honey or Who Stole the Sweets?

Today was supposed to be honey harvest day. The last time I opened the hives (3 weeks ago), the frames were loaded with capped honey. I signed up to borrow the extractor from my bee club (COBA) and begged for help from someone to please be here when I attempted my first harvest. Master beekeeper Dana agreed to help me if I promised to help someone else in the future. That was an easy promise to make.

The plan was for Dana to come this morning at 10AM. Good news: the temperature was cool. Bad news: the sky was very gray and had low ceilings. I didn't think it would rain, but I knew that this is not the kind of weather we want when we open the hives. Bees get downright cranky with we open their hives on days that are cloudy, windy or rainy. They like sunshine.

I secured the extractor to the pole that holds up the house in the garage, prepared the smoker to fire it up, schlepped my tools out to the hives and staged the equipment just so. And Dana declared a delay due to the weather. We postponed and decided to make a decision at 12:30. By then, the ceilings had lifted. The sun was nowhere to be found but we decided to go for it. Dana arrived and I suited up.

Notice that Dana and I do not appear to be dressed for the same party. I was covered from head to toe (boots this time!) and Dana was wearing well-loved pants and a sweatshirt. No veil. No gloves. No jacket. In this picture, we are looking at a frame from Hive 3. We saw bees. We saw larvae. We saw capped larvae. We did not see capped honey.

Dana pulled out more frames. I bent over for a closer look. No capped honey.

We closed up the hive and moved on to Hive 1, my poster child.

About this time, Harvey, who had been playing the role of photographer, got stung on the back of the neck, so he retreated to the safety of the kitchen.

Dana and I looked in Hive 2, just because. I knew I would not be taking honey from this hive as those girls just weren't as far along. Three weeks ago, Hive 1, currently 5 boxes tall, had one super completely filled with capped honey. Today, plenty of bees and larvae, but empty comb where the honey had been.

I fed a pollen substitute patty to each colony to help them maintain their vigor. We removed one super from Hive 1, gathered our stuff and headed back to the garage, sans honey. Being a master beekeeper, Dana was not surprised that we had not found honey. Being a newbie, I was perplexed. I knew those hives were loaded with capped honey. I saw it myself and that's why I added the supers. Dana had asked me more than once how long it had been since I had examined the hives. He knew, based on the variety of bees (Italian), the very hot, dry weather and the fact that there isn't much nectar available in August, that my girls would have been dedicating themselves to raising brood which requires them to use lots of honey to feed themselves. Since there was no nectar to convert to honey, they ate what they had been storing for months.

What I should have done was to harvest honey when I saw that it was plentiful 3 weeks ago. Then I could have been feeding them sugar water like I did when the hives were first established in April and May. The bees would have used that "honey" for nourishment and the last flowers of the summer, Autumn Joy sedum and goldenrod, would have provided nectar for late honey.

This has been a tough year for the bees. Our May was drenched with rain which kept the bees from foraging and knocked the pollen out of the trees and blooming flowers. Our July and August were hot and dry and the plants did not have much nectar.

We have little expectation for honey yields from newly established hives. We hope for a vigorous, vibrant population of bees and if we get a little honey, sweet! I know my hive in Madison County had some honey harvested from it in June. I wonder if there will be a late summer harvest.

Today, I beat the reaper. Sting count remains at 11.

What's Going On In There?

What parent has not uttered the question, "What's going on in there?" I opened up my hives today and in two out of three cases, I know the answer.

The first hive I examined today was the middle one, Hive 2. When I looked last week, things in Hives 1 and 2 seemed to be pretty much the same, except there were many bees in Hive 2 that had drowned in the feeder. Hive 2 has been noticeably less active than the other two all week. There were many drowned bees again this week; some were left over from last week. I dumped out the remaining syrup and the hundreds of dead bees and continued my inspection. I found the queen, I found lots of drawn out comb and very little capped brood. I found a few queen cells.

Queen cells are brood chambers where larvae are being fed royal jelly, the special food that turns an ordinary larva into a queen instead of a worker. They look like peanuts in the shell. Workers create new queens when they sense something is wrong with their queen or if the queen is dead/missing/gone, or if they are crowded and want to split the colony by swarming. These bees are not crowded and should not be wanting to swarm. Her majesty is there; I saw her. She is laying fertile eggs or they wouldn't be able to make a queen cell. I could see larvae. I have more questions than answers for now.

In the middle of the inspection it started raining. All the literature says not to open hives when it is windy or raining. And bright sunshine helps make it easier to see the tiny eggs, at least that's what I hear as I have yet to see an egg. When I finished inspecting Hive 2 I was soaked and ready to quit for the day. The rain stopped.

On to Hive 3, the newbees. This has been the most active hive this week. The workers are drawing out the comb, storing pollen and doing everything they are supposed to do. They are not very far behind Hive 2. I found the queen which is all the more to cheer about as she is unmarked.

Hive 1 was a real treat to inspect. There is frame after frame of capped brood, wall to wall. I did not see the queen but she is certainly in there. I saw larvae. The frames in this hive are mostly drawn out into comb and these girls are getting crowded. They had built some beautiful burr comb in the lid. Harvey, dressed in his hooded NAPA coveralls, started scraping off the burr comb. We noticed there were larvae in the burr comb. The bees were NOT happy with him and a couple took off after him resulting in two stings on his hand and a bee in his hood. When I peeled off the hood, the bee was sitting on his cheek right in front of his ear. She did not sting him and I brushed her off.

Harvey was not feeling the love towards the bees and noticed that they were all lined up at the tops of the frames. I remember reading about this in Beekeeping for Dummies (for real) and when they do that they are sentries guarding the hive. This would be the time to use the smoker, except that it had gone out. I just kept working, hoping that the ladies would humor me and not sting me. I hastily admired all the capped brood, did not find the queen, gave the hive a second story (I gave all the hives second stories), poured the syrup, finished scraping the burr comb and buttoned it up until next week.

Sting count remains at six.

One last story. The burr comb, like all the other comb in the hive, is full of "honey." Actually, for now it is the syrup from the feeder which they are storing for food for later. Scraping the fragile comb makes it ooze and it is very sticky. I left the scraped burr comb near the front doors of the respective hives knowing the bees would take the syrup out of the comb and put it back in the hive. A couple hours after the inspections, the sun was shining as if it had been a pretty day all along so I went back out to see if all the workers had left the burr comb, in which case I would collect it. They had, but at the back of Hive 3 there was one worker on the ground that was drenched in syrup to the extent that her wings were stuck to her body and she couldn't move. I picked her up and put her on top of the hive but I could see that she didn't have much of a future. I moved her to the landing pad at the front door of Hive 3, as I knew that bees will clean syrup off of each other, and immediately, she was surrounded by several sisters who got right to work. Within 10 minutes, she was cleaned up, her wings were functional and I was no longer able to tell which bee was the one that was surely doomed.

How nice to see that they care for each other as much as I care for them.

Picture Time: Say "BEEEZZZ!"

I have been taking photographs but have not taken the time to learn how to post them. Until now.

This is a picture of the inside of beekeeper Barry's barn where he builds hives and stores stuff other beekeepers want to buy. In the middle are many packages of bees which he drove to Georgia to fetch. Four packages are tacked together with thin strips of wood. Each 3 lb. package contains 10,000-12,000 bees, a queen in a cage and a can of corn syrup to give the girls something to eat until they move into their new digs.

This is what it looks like when you shake 10,000 bees into their new hive box. After I took this picture I got too busy to take more shots. Installing bees would make a terrific photo essay were it not for the distraction of 10-12,000 buzzers.

I have a short video that I will post in my next entry. Stay tuned...

Easy Peasy, Got More Beesies

A while back Harvey sent me a YouTube clip of a beekeeper installing a package of bees. His demonstration looked nothing like what Susan and I encountered when we installed her bees but today's installation of a package into my third hive was a lot more like it. In the video, the beekeeper wore no gloves, no veil, no protective clothing of any kind while today I was wearing my hat and veil, gloves and velcro pants cuff cinchers, but the actual installation was by the book.

The day was rainy (do we have ANY other kind of weather?) but the rain stopped long enough to shake the bees into their new home. Later, Harvey and I went back out to coax the lingerers out of the package box. Mission accomplished. I'll check on the queen Saturday or Sunday, whenever it stops raining.

Hives one and two showed no signs of activity these last two rainy days. No doubt the girls made popcorn and gathered in their media room to watch The Swarm.